Monday's Excerpts - Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley

     Not really any spoilers this week, just characters speaking that will mean absolutely nothing  in terms of spoiling the story unless you read it.

This Week's Book: Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley

    “But I’ve had an absolutely stunning idea for an original,” Bob was saying with that optimistic enthusiasm which is the desperate man’s alternative to suicide. “My agent’s absolutely crazy about it— thinks I ought to be able to sell it for fifty or sixty thousand.” (Page 5)

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. . . Sleeping, we cease to live that we may be lived (how blessedly!) by some nameless Other who takes this opportunity to restore the mind to sanity and bring healing to the abused and self-tormented body.
    From breakfast to bedtime you may be doing everything in your power to outrage Nature and deny the fact of your Glassy Essence. But even the angriest ape at last grows weary of his tricks and has to sleep. And, while he sleeps, the indwelling Compassion preserved him, willy nilly, from the suicide which, in his waking hours, he has tried so frantically hard to commit. Then the sun rises again, and our ape wakes up once more to his own self and the freedom of his personal will—to yet another day of trick paying, or, if he chooses, to the beginnings of self-knowledge, to the first steps toward his liberation. (Pages 154-155)

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    “That’s where you’re wrong,” replies the Arch-Vicar. “There are no limits. Everybody’s capable of anything—but anything.” (Page 135)

Books read this past week...
★★☆☆☆ Nightlight: A Parody by Harvard Lampoon
★★★★☆ Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)