frumiousb

The young woman has just read a novel by Rosamond Lehmann about the suffering of women in love-- it makes her feel inferior as if she isn't capable of suffering so much. Perhaps when I'm older, she thinks hopefully.
pg. 189

“We need courage, not so much as to endure as to act. All this resignation stunts us. We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable, that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We spend so much time accommodating ourselves to other people's standards, we don't even ask if our own might not be better. We're so much occupied in letting live that we haven't begun to live.” She drew a deep breath as though she had received a revelation. “That's it. That's it. We haven't even begun to learn yet how to live. We're still a blind and stumbling race of savages, crawling up out of the primeval slime, trailing behind us fears and superstitions and prejudices like jungle weeds, and not daring to get rid of them because patience and resignation are still accounted virtues. We've got to have courage, to take our future into uor hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system. 'Take what you want,' says God, 'Take it and pay for it.'”
pg. 189

oursin

I have long concluded that established religions of any kind are in general the supreme example of forms created to meet no longer existing conditions. If I were asked what the present and future world could best lose or jettison for its own good, I should have no hesitation: all established religion. But its past necessity I do not deny. Least of all do I deny (what novelist could?) that founding stage or moment in all religions, however blind, stale and hide-bound they are later become, which saw a superseded skeleton must be destroyed, or at least adapted to a new world. We grow too clever now to change; too selfish and too multiple, too dominated by the Devil's great I, in Shaker terminology; too self-tyrannized, too pledged to our own convenience, too tired, too indifferent to others, too frightened.
pg. 455