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Quote by Martin Amis

“Hamlet doesn't fully see that his metaphysical miseries constitute a subliminal symptom of grief; and this was exactly my case. I thought I was sick, I thought I was dying (maybe that is what bereavement actually asks of you). Literature gives us these warnings about the main events, but we don't recognize the warnings until the events have come and gone. Isabel, my senior in the loss of a sibling, told me that you just have to take it, like weather—yes, like sleet in your face.”

Quote by Martin Amis

Book:Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million
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Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million

This book delves into the lives of prisoners in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, focusing on the conditions and events surrounding the Great Terror. It examines the psychological and social impact of the regime on the inmates, as well as the role of laughter in the face of adversity. more

Author

Martin Amis
Martin Amis

Martin Amis is a British novelist known for his satirical and darkly humorous writing. His works often explore the moral dilemmas of modern society and the complexities of individual identity. Born on August 25, 1949, Amis is considered an important figure in British literature. more

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“All of our natural intuitions tell us that Jesus is with us, on our side, present and helping, when life is going well. This text says the opposite. It is in "our weaknesses" that Jesus sympathizes with us. The word for "sympathize" here is a compound word formed from the prefix meaning "with" joined with the verb to suffer. "Sympathize" here is not cool and detached pity. It is a depth of felt solidarity such as is echoed in our own lives most closely only as parents to children. Indeed, it is deeper even than that. In our pain, Jesus is pained; in our suffering, he feels the suffering as his own even though it isn't--not that his invincible divinity is threatened, but in the sense that his heart is feelingly drawn into our distress. His human nature engages our troubles comprehensively. His is a love that cannot be held back when he sees his people in pain.”

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Book:Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers
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“You probably recall the famous statement at the beginning of Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy, donning there the cloak of a calm village deity and hovering over the void full of benign toleration and loving kindness, declares from on high that all happy families resemble one another, while unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way. With all due respect to Tolstoy I’m telling you that the opposite is true: Unhappy people are mainly plunged in conventional suffering, living out in sterile routine one of five or six threadbare clichés of misery. Whereas happiness is a rare, fine vessel, a sort of Chinese vase, and the few people who have reached it have shaped and formed it line by line over the course of years, each in his own image and likeness, each in his own character, so that no two happinesses are alike. And in the molding of their happiness they have instilled their own suffering and humiliation. Like refining gold from ore. There is happiness in the world, Alec, even if it is more ephemeral than a dream. Indeed in your case it is beyond your reach. As a star is beyond the reach of a mole. Not “the satisfaction of approval,” not praise and advancement and conquest and domination, not submission and surrender, but the thrill of fusion. The merging of the I with another. As an oyster enfolds a foreign body and is wounded and turns it into its pearl while the warm water still surrounds and encompasses everything. You have never tasted this fusion, not once in your whole life. When the body is a musical instrument in the hands of the soul. When Other and I strike root in each other and become a single coral. And when the drip of the stalactite slowly feeds the stalagmite until the two of them become one.”

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Book:Black Box
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