26 Quotes by Michael Gruber

But there’s the paradox of fiction – why do you cry when a fake character dies? It’s the basis of art. You engage with people who don’t exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

Farid, you are keeping a hawk; don’t expect her to lay eggs like a chicken.

It’s part of what we call the Shadow, all the dark parts of us we can’t face. It’s the thing that, if we don’t deal with it, eventually poisons our lives.

They talk about adrenaline, but Marder knew it was much more than adrenaline; it was a mystical cocktail that comes only from this one act, from killing men at the risk of yourself dying, a Pleistocene inheritance, disgusting and marvelous at the same time. Sports, even violent sports, were just a pale shadow of this. Why they’d never abolish war.

There are life events that can destroy the personality, which is a lot more fragile than most people imagine, constructed as it is from bits provided by others in the most haphazard way. People can be torn down to the core, “shattered,” as the expression goes, and then they seek sleep. And dreams, which provide the ground for the construction of a new and more integrated self. Providing there’s a core, and providing they’re willing to do the work.

Well, we start with this outrageous idea that the ground of being, existence itself, is a person, and that this person is intimately concerned with each of our lives and desires us to turn our hearts toward him. Once you accept that level of insanity – or faith, as we prefer to call it – then it makes perfect sense to try to discern what God’s purpose is for your life through a disciplined process of prayer and self-examination, discernment, as we say.

God really wants to talk to us. He tried Scripture, he tries the still small voice, but we’re all unbelievers now, so he mainly speaks to us through a conspiracy of accidents.

Don’t you see you are a corpse too after what was done to you and the true life is waiting for you to pick it up.