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Quote by Grégoire Courtois

“We are all children, they thought, and none of us is equipped to deal with such an adversary. We go through life under other people's protection. We listen to instructions and try to follow them. We don't know what's true and what's not. What's fair and unfair. Our world is small. Our world is narrow. We do as we are told.”

Quote by Grégoire Courtois

Work

The Laws of the Skies

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Grégoire Courtois

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“Why raise children on the promise of magic? Why create a want in them that can never be satisfied - for revelation, for transformation - and then set them adrift in a bleak, pragmatic world? In Darlington she'd seen what grief over that loss could do to someone, but maybe that same mourning lived inside her too. The terrible knowledge that there would be no secret destiny, no kindly mentor to see some hidden talent inside her, no deadly nemesis to best.”

“But I loved Joe, perhaps for no better reason in those early days than be- cause the dear fellow let me love him, and, as to him, my inner self was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe's confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker, without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I never af- terwards could see him glance, however casually, at yesterday's meat or pudding when it came on to-day's table, without thinking that he was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected tar in it, would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.”

“The child wonders at the Christmas Tree: Let him continue in the spirit of wonder At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext; [...] So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas (By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last) The accumulated memories of annual emotion May be concentrated into a great joy Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion When fear came upon every soul: Because the beginning shall remind us of the end And the first coming of the second coming.”