Mystery

Famous quotes containing the word mystery:

    There is a mystery that floats between
    The tourist and the town. Imagination
    Estranges it from her. She need not suffer
    Or die here. It is none of her affair,
    Its calm heroic vistas make no claim.
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

    So we’ll live,
    And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
    At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
    Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too—
    Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out—
    And take upon ‘s the mystery of things,
    As if we were God’s spies.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: without the sting of otherness, of—even—the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness-what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent—these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. Their hidden aspects contained and tempered.
    Doris Lessing (b. 1919)