He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting.
Tags: ritual, religion, mysticism, magic, language, jesus, christianity, catholicism

Other Quotes by "Dan Simmons"

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.
Tags: common-sense, some, writing, teacher
Men who read a lot have a more sensitive disposition, added Fowler. [...] I did not know what to say to this. Maybe reading is a sort of curse is all I mean, concluded Fowler. Maybe it's better for a man to stay inside his own mind. Amen, I felt like saying, although I do not know why.
Tags: reading, men, melancholy, inner-world, books
Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.
Tags: self-destruction, salvation, irony, books
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
Tags: time, future, choices
Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice.
Tags: religion, ethics, coexistence
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