Arms Quotes - page 52
The Void Which Binds is touched by all of us who have wept with happiness, bidden a lover good-bye, been exalted with orgasm, stood over the grave of a loved one, or watched our baby open his or her eyes for the first time.”
Aenea is looking at me as she speaks, and I feel the gooseflesh rise along my arms.
"The Void Which Binds is always under and above the surface of our thoughts and senses,” she continues, invisible but as present as the breathing of our beloved next to us in the night. Its actual but unaccessible presence in our universe is one of the prime causes for our species elaborating myth and religion, for our stubborn, blind belief in extrasensory powers, in telepathy and precognition, in demons and demigods and resurrection and reincarnation and ghosts and messiahs and so many other categories of almost-but-not-quite satisfying bullshit.
Dan Simmons
In all the Romish [Catholic] countries of Europe, France, Italy, Germany, etc., the God Christ, as well as his mother, are described in their old pictures and statues to be black. The infant God in the arms of his black mother, his eyes and drapery white, is himself perfectly black. If the reader doubts my word he may go to the Cathedral at Moulins-to the famous Chapel of the Virgin at Loretto-to the Church of the Annunciata-the Church at St. Lazaro or the Church of St. Stephen at Genoa-to St. Francisco at Pisa-to the Church at Brixen in Tyrol and to that at Padua-to the Church of St. Theodore at Munich-to a church and to the Cathedral at Augsburg, where a black virgin and child as large as life-to Rome and the Borghese chapel of Maria Maggiore-to the Pantheon-to a small chapel of St. Peters on the right hand side on entering, near the door; and in fact, to almost innumerable other churches in countries professing the Romish religion.
Godfrey Higgins