The guilt you felt when you were smiling and others were suffering, the guilt you felt when you were petty with friends and impatient with your parents, when you were rude to your teachers and didn’t stand up for strangers, that guilt is marvellous. It proves that you are human, that you want to be better. Thank this guilt for teaching you, for making you aware. And now endeavour to better yourself. It is a lifelong work to become the person we want to be.
Supernatural fiction contains its own generic borderland: a neutral territory, which Tzvetan Todorov calls 'the fantastic,' between 'the marvelous' and 'the uncanny.' According to Todorov, 'The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.' Once the event is satisfactorily explained (and sometimes it is never explained), we have left the fantastic for an adjacent genre - either 'the uncanny,' where the apparently supernatural is revealed as illusory, or 'the marvelous,' where the laws of ordinary reality must be revised to incorporate the supernatural. As long as uncertainty reigns, however, we are in the ambiguous realm of the fantastic.
In any event, whether a supernatural tale remains altogether fantastic or eventually modulates to the uncanny or the marvelous, the reader is faced with disconcerting ontological and perceptual problems.Indeed, the disorienting effect of the supernatural encounter in fiction seems to reflect some deeper disorientations in the culture at large.
I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent.
Ophelia,' said the boy. He said it very quietly. She didn't like the way he said that at all. He sounded sad and as though he expected more from her.'And how do you know my name anyways?' she said. 'I never told you it, not once.''I heard it once, a long time ago.'He was full of mysterious sentences like that.
To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes.
I think of this girl, this bright light coming from such a dark place. I know that the things she believes about God and the Bible and hope and all that are very real to her. They're not nice sayings on Twitter just to fill a box. They're the things she truly believes.I'm not sure I'm ready to rejoice, and I'm not quite ready to pray.The cool thing is that Marvel knows this. She knows this and doesn't seem to mind.
Oh no, Raphael, please don't leave me," Magnus said in a monotone. "Where would I be without the light of your sweet smile? If you go, I will throw myself upon the ground and weep." "Will you?" asked Raphael, raising one thin eyebrow. "Because if you do, I will stay and watch the show.