"I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling." (Quotent Quotables)

So you want to be a monk? ... Well, it's a good opportunity. You'll pray for us sinners; we have sinned too much here.  I've always been thinking who would pray for me, and whether there's anyone in the world to do it.  My dear boy, I'm awfully stupid about that.  You wouldn't believe it. Awfully.  You see, however stupid I am about it, I keep thinking, I keep thinking -- from time to time, of course, not all the while.  It's impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die.  Then I wonder-- hooks?  Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them ? Have they a foundry there of some sort? The monks in the monastery probably believe that there's a ceiling in hell, for instance.  Now, I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling.  It makes it more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is.  And, after all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't? But, do you know, there's a damnable question involved in it? If there's no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down,which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and if they don't drag me down what justice is there in the world? Il faudrait les inventer, it would be necessary to invent them, those hooks, on purpose for me alone.

-- The Brothers Karamazov

Great, now I'm hungry AND I need to see if Sweetie likes "bruschetta". (Quotent Quotables)

I have a date in a war zone.

That's not bad going, actually, but now I need an Italian trattoria with check tablecloths and linen napkins.  I need bruschetta (that's "broo-Sket-uh," not "brushetter," a slender piece of ciabatta toasted and brushed with garlic and oil and covered in fresh tomato and basil -- the chunks inevitably fall off the bread and the olive oil runs over your lips and down your chin.  The whole thing is delicious, deeply physical and delightfully undignified, and a woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you.  Someone who pushes the thing away because it's messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen.  You need a woman who isn't afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that)

 -- From "The Gone-Away World," by Nick Harkaway.

For instance: everything I read when I was 17 was just a book. (Quotent Quotables)

"Already, invidiously, however, I had an inkling that the books he read were somehow not the real books."

-- From Valentine, by Tessa Hadley

________________________________________________________________________________

Until I read this line in that short story at lunch today, I never knew how to put into words my secret suspicion that there are books, and then there are the real books.

But there are. And you know the difference when you read them.