Flesh is a cheap, vain thing. Grass is flesh, and flesh becomes grass; but the spirit is the thing that abides and survives.
Book 1915
The Star Rover quotes
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About the book
Darrell Standing, a former university professor serving a life sentence in San Quentin, is punished with long spells in a tight canvas straitjacket in solitary confinement. He learns to escape the pain by letting his spirit leave his body, and on these journeys he relives lives he believes he lived in earlier ages. Jack London's novel mixes a protest against prison cruelty with a meditation on the soul, memory and reincarnation.
6 quotes
It is life that is the reality and the mystery. Life is vastly different from mere chemic matter fluxing in high modes of notion. Life persists. Life is the thread of fire that persists through all the modes of matter. I know. I am life. I have lived ten…
The spirit is the reality that endures. I am spirit, and I endure. … Matter has no memory, because its forms are evanescent, and what is engraved on its forms perishes with the forms.
All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.
I have lived many lives through the long ages. Man, the individual, has made no moral progress in the past ten thousand years. I affirm this absolutely. … Under his thin skin of morality which he has had polished onto him, he is the same savage that he was…
There is no death. Life is spirit, and spirit cannot die. Only the flesh dies and passes … Spirit alone endures and continues to build upon itself through successive and endless incarnations as it works upward toward the light.