Purgatory Quotes

The very life I've built for myself…everything I've ever done now waits in purgatory, all caused by a lack of focus at a time when my most concentrated attention was needed. If I lose her because of this, it'll be nothing less than what I deserve. ~ B.J. Harvey

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory. ~ Abraham Lincoln

Oh, torture. Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade? ~ Margaret Atwood

If I have to spend time in purgatory before going to one place or the other, I guess I'll be all right as long as there's a lending library. ~ Stephen King

Many would consider Purgatory a prison and a looney bin. ~ M.F. Hopkins

People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don't necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can't accept, but still a religion, it doesn't matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn't the fear of God but the upholding of one's own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the while day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: A quiet conscience mades one strong! ~ Anne Frank

Dublin was turning into Disneyland with super-pubs, a Purgatory open till five in the morning. ~ Joseph O'Connor

The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. ~ Joseph Campbell

Die Welt ist nirgends außer diesen Mauern;
Nur Fegefeuer, Qual, die Hölle selbst.
Von hier verbannt, ist aus der Welt verbannt,
Und solcher Bann ist Tod: Drum gibst du ihm
Den falschen Namen. - Nennst du Tod Verbannung,
Enthauptest du mit goldnem Beile mich
Und lächelst zu dem Streich, der mich ermordet.


There is no world without Verona walls,
But purgatory, torture, hell itself.
Hence banishèd is banished from the world,
And world's exile is death. Then "banishèd"
Is death mistermed. Calling death "banishèd",
Thou cuttest my head off with a golden axe
And smilest upon the stroke that murders me.

Romeo: Act III, Scene 3 ~ William Shakespeare

[Jules] slides into a seat beside me with her hot lunch tray, sighing. "Four hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds till we're out of purgatory for the weekend."
"Maybe later," I murmur, still distracted by the day's previous events.
"So, let me show you how a conversation works. I say something, and then you say something back that actually relates to what I was talking about, as if you were even the least bit interested."
"Huh?" I say. ~ Jodi Picoult

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void. ~ Siri Hustvedt

- What shall I do, in a Purgatory?... where they all speak spanish? I've never been in any kind of Purgatory before, and no one(...) ~ William Gaddis

Well, this place was not purgatory, Nirvana, or any sort of rebirth, and it occurred to Nick that regardless of what people believed, the universe had its own ideas. ~ Neal Shusterman

I have held and hold souls to be immortal ... Speaking as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to paradise, purgatory or hell. But I have reasoned deeply, and, speaking as a philosopher, since the soul is not found without body and yet is not body, it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body. ~ Giordano Bruno

'Rocky' represents the optimistic side of life, and 'Rambo' represents purgatory. ~ Sylvester Stallone

A person may say I am not much concerned how long I stay in purgatory, provided I may come to eternal life. Let no one reason thus. Purgatory fire will be more dreadful than whatever torments can be seen imagined, or endured in this world. He who is afraid now to put his finger into the fire, does he not fear lest he be then all buried in torments for a long time? ~ Caesarius Of Arles

This spirit of humanity breathes in Cicero and Virgil. Hence the veneration paid to the poet of the Aeneid by the fathers and throughout the middle ages. Augustine calls him the noblest of poets, and Dante, "the glory and light of other poets," and "his master," who guided him through the regions of hell and purgatory to the very gates of Paradise. It was believed that in his fourth Eclogue he had prophesied the advent of Christ. This interpretation is erroneous; but "there is in Virgil," says an accomplished scholar,84 "a vein of thought and sentiment more devout, more humane, more akin to the Christian than is to be found in any other ancient poet, whether Greek or Roman. He was a spirit prepared and waiting, though he knew it not, for some better thing to be revealed. ~ Philip Schaff

I used to be a major people pleaser, but that way purgatory lies. ~ Tracie Bennett

What a fool. In purgatory there is really nothing else to be. I ~ Peter Heller

What is that smell? Is that a dog I smell?-Dean S8 (after coming back from purgatory)
Dog? In the car? No.-Sam ~ Jess Mariotte

The same fire" (which he decides to be material) " torments the damned in hell and the just in purgatory ... The least pain in purgatory exceeds the greatest in this life. ~ Thomas Aquinas

The rare beauty of distant places made home seem as if we had been thrown out of paradise and sent to purgatory or worse. ~ Scott Haas

That there should be some fire even after this life is not incredible, and it can be inquired into and either be discovered or left hidden whether some of the faithful may be saved, some more slowly and some more quickly in the greater or lesser degree in which they loved the good things that perish, through a certain purgatorial fire. ~ Saint Augustine

On Earth, Liz was constantly occupied with studying and finding a college and a career and all those other things that the adults in her life deemed terribly important. Since she had died, everything she was doing on Earth had seemed entirely meaningless. From Liz's point of view, the question of what her life would be was now definitively answered. The story of her life is short and pointless: There once was a girl who got hit by a car and died. The end. ~ Gabrielle Zevin

Are you a vegetarian?' I ask, based on the evidence in front of me.
She nods.
'Why?'
'Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten
well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed.'
'Really?'
She laughs. 'No. I'm just sick of the question. I mean, I'm a vegetarian because I think it's wrong to eat other sentient creatures. And it sucks for the environment. ~ David Levithan

She is the woman that contradicts Simone de Beauvoir's saying "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." She is the woman that makes your tooth pain seem like a trivial matter in comparison to the heartaches she causes as she deliberately passes by your side. She is the woman that makes your throat feel swollen and your tie to suddenly seem too tight. She is the woman that is able to take you to the seven heavens with a whisper; straight to cloud number nine.. She is the woman that erases all other women unintentionally and becomes without demanding the despot of your heart. She is the woman that sends you back and forth to purgatory and resurrects you with each unintended touch. She is the woman that will ask of you to burn Rome just to collect for her a handful of dust. ~ Malak El Halabi

Now, sitting on his bed in the grip of this numbing hangover, rainwater spilling its lazy courses down the window beside him, his grief came for him fully, like some gray matron from Ward Nine in purgatory. It came and dissolved him, unmanned him, took away whatever defenses remained, and he put his face in his hands and cried, rocking back and forth on his bed, thinking he would do anything to have a second chance, anything at all. ~ Stephen King

This was the time of the day when i most wished i were able to sleep. High school.
Or was purgatory the right word? If there were any way to atone for my
sins, this ought to count toward the tally in some measure. The tedium was
not something I grew used to; every day seemed more impossibly
monotonous than the last.
Perhaps this could even be considered my form of sleep - if sleep was
defined as the inert state between active periods. ~ Stephenie Meyer

The writer, having lost his way in a gloomy forest, and being hindered by certain wild beasts from ascending a mountain, is met by Virgil, who promises to show him the punishments of Hell, and afterwards of Purgatory; and that he shall then be conducted by Beatrice into Paradise. He follows the Roman Poet. ~ Dante Alighieri

Native peoples do not look for salvation from worlds beyond. They need no alternate reality, because the mortal world and the spirit world are the same. This Earth is heaven, hell and purgatory; but most importantly, it is home. The greatest of spiritual mysteries may be revealed just beyond the front door, in the life of a community. ~ Israel Morrow

Supernatural hasn't spent a lot of time on relationship stories, and this is a really nice mechanism to do that without imposing that on the forward momentum of these other stories that we're telling. In the writers' room we tend to say, "We're never going to be able to give a hell or Purgatory as good as people's imaginations," so the instinct is normally not to go there. But, we went the other way this year and said, "We are going to go there," because there's a really, really strong character thing going on down there. ~ Jeremy Carver

Light bursts behind my closed eyes, so intensely I nearly hear the popping sound. It's my brain melting, or my world ending, or maybe we've just been hit by a meteor and this is the rapture and I'm given one last perfect moment before I'm sent to purgatory and he;s sent somewhere much, much better.
It isn't his first kiss - I know that - but it's his first real one. ~ Christina Lauren

The self-help books and websites haven't come up with a proper title for spouses living in the purgatory that exists before the courts have officially ratified your personal tragedy. ~ Jonathan Tropper

I thought that this must be what purgatory was like. Can't go forward. Can't go back. Awaiting some official judgment. ~ Megan Miranda

But figure his thought, when Death is now clutching at his own heart-strings, unlooked for, inexorable! Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or life-guards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath, and will extinguish it. Thou, whose whole existence hitherto was a chimera and scenic show, at length becomest a reality: sumptuous Versailles bursts asunder, like a dream, into void Immensity; Time is done, and all the scaffolding of Time falls wrecked with hideous clangour round thy soul: the pale Kingdoms yawn open; there must thou enter, naked, all unking'd, and await what is appointed thee! Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, in dull agony, on thy bed of weariness, what a thought is thine! Purgatory and Hell-fire, now all-too possible, in the prospect; in the retrospect,--alas, what thing didst thou do that were not better undone; what mortal didst thou generously help; what sorrow hadst thou mercy on? Do the 'five hundred thousand' ghosts, who sank shamefully on so many battle-fields from Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge for an epigram,--crowd round thee in this hour? Thy foul Harem; the curses of mothers, the tears and infamy of daughters? Miserable man! thou 'hast done evil as thou couldst:' thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion and mistake of Nature; the use and meaning of thee not yet known. Wert thou a fabulous Griffin, devouring the works ~ Thomas Carlyle

The store was filled with hollow-eyed people standing in line: at the sandwich counter, at the soda fountain, at the register. All of them waiting, waiting, their hands full of candy, chips, cups of coffee, money. It was like purgatory, with snacks. Not just the customers; the employees, too. They worked the registers, squirted ketchup on hot dogs, piled limp lettuce onto flaccid lunch meat and waited for it to be over, waited until they could go home. ~ Kelly Braffet

Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less. ~ George Eliot

We absolutely believed in Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, and even Limbo. I mean, they were actually closer to us than Australia or Canada, that they were real places. ~ John McGahern

Heaven is purpose, principle, and people. Purgatory is paper and procedure. Hell is rules and regulations. ~ Dee Hock

It was penance, my own slow dance in purgatory. ~ Amy Harmon

Then all at once in late August's heat, tall leafless stalks crowned with iridescent pink and purple blossoms burst from the purgatory in the earth. This arcane act of nature, though perceived by us as ordinary, is a manifestation of Maya's phantom play, the great immensity expressed in every way. My garden is the universe. I am the universe. I am my garden. All things are the same. ~ Duane Michals

Angst is not the human condition, it's the purgatory between what we have and what we want but can't get. ~ Miguel Syjuco

Since you always lived inside your own head, you were much better at seeing the truth about others than you ever were at seeing yourself. So you navigated your life with the help of others who held up mirrors for you. People praised your good qualities and criticized your bad habits, and these perspectives - often surprising to you - helped you to guide your life. So poorly did you know yourself that you were always surprised at how you looked in photographs or how you sounded on voice mail. In this way, much of your existence took place in the eyes, ears, and fingertips of others. And now that you've left the Earth, you are stored in scattered heads around the globe. Here in this Purgatory, all the people with whom you've ever come in contact are gathered. The scattered bits of you are collected, pooled, and unified. The mirrors are held up in front of you. Without the benefit of filtration, you see yourself clearly for the first time. And that is what finally kills you. ~ David Eagleman

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame -to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a Hell! ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I thought about telling him the truth: 'Oh, nothing. Just having my soul exorcised so I can roam around
purgatory, looking for the ghost of the dead cowboy who used to live in my bedroom. ~ Meg Cabot

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated earth? Nay, are there not moods which shall find no expression unless there be men who dare to mix heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland together, or even to set the heads of beasts to the bodies of men, or to thrust the souls of men into the heart of rocks? Let us go forth, the tellers of tales, and seize whatever prey the heart long for, and have no fear. Everything exists, everything is true, and the earth is only a little dust under our feet.
(A Teller of Tales) ~ W.B.Yeats

What could be worse than Hell ?" he said
"Purgatory." I said. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The instability of a white neighborhood under pressure from the very possibility of integration put the neighborhood into a kind of real estate purgatory. It set off a downward cycle of anticipation, in which worried whites no longer bought homes in white neighborhoods that might one day attract colored residents even if none lived there at the time. Rents and purchase prices were dropped "in a futile attempt to attract white residents," as Hirsch put it. With prices falling and the neighborhood's future uncertain, lenders refused to grant mortgages or made them more difficult to obtain. Panicked whites sold at low prices to salvage what equity they had left, giving the homeowners who remained little incentive to invest any further to keep up or improve their properties. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Purgatory was a bit damp," said Bengt, "but heaven is more or less as I'd imagined it. ~ Thor Heyerdahl

The myth of purgatory is an allegory, a projection, from the present on to the future. This is why purgatory appeals to the imagination. It is our story. It is where we are now. If we are Christians, if we believe in the risen Jesus as Lord, if we are baptized members of his body, then we are passing right now through the sufferings which form the gateway to life. ~ N. T. Wright

Even convicts, with whom I have spent some time, are not won over in any other way. Whenever I happened to speak sharply to them, I spoiled everything; on the contrary, when I praised them for their resignation and sympathized with them in their sufferings; when I told them they were fortunate to have their purgatory in this world, when I kissed their chains, showed compassion for their distress, and expressed sorrow for their misfortune, it was then that they listened to me, gave glory to God, and opened themselves to salvation. ~ Vincent De Paul

Fitting is a luxury rarely given to immigrants, or children of immigrants. We are stuck in emotional purgatory. Home, somehow, is always the last place you left, and never the place you're in. ~ Scaachi Koul

A fair woman is a paradise to the eye, a purgatory to the purse,
and hell to the soul. ~ Elizabeth Grymeston

The Catholic Church is a thousand times better than your Protestant Church upon that question [of damnation]. The Catholic Church believes in purgatory - that is, a place where a fellow can get a chance to make a motion for a new trial. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

We must have taken a wrong turn turning somewhere."
"Where, Purgatory?" said Dozy. "We're in Hell. ~ John Connolly

The problem, she's starting to understand, is that a man will never let you fall completely into hell. He will scoop you up right before you drop the final inch so that you cannot blame him for sending you there. He keeps you in a dinerlike purgatory instead, waiting and hoping and taking orders. ~ Lisa Taddeo

I'm in emotional purgatory, the up and the down, the right and the wrong. I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying not to ... touch him ~ Tarryn Fisher

In my opinion, the difference between the crusaders and us was a matter of degree. Europe's medieval Catholics claimed their goal was to save Muslims from purgatory; we claimed that we wanted to help the Saudis modernize. ~ John Perkins

What, but the rapacity of the only men who exercised their reason, the priests, secured such vast property to the church, when a man gave his perishable substance to save himself from the dark torments of purgatory. ~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Ah yes, the dreaded one-way system ... He and Nancy had laughed later, imagining Dante redesigning Purgatory into a one-way system offering occasional glimpses of St. Peter and the pearly gates over two separate sets of dividing concrete barriers. ~ Helen Simonson

Remember, this day will never dawn again. ~ Dante Alighieri

Aye, well," Murray replied, "but think. Say a man is a coward and hasna died well. Purgatory gives him a chance to prove his courage after all, no? And once he is proved a proper man, then the bridge is open to him, and he can pass through the clouds of terrible things unhindered to paradise. ~ Diana Gabaldon

It was the closest to purgatory that I've ever experienced while I've been living. ~ Dave Thomas

She put a few drops of the liquid in the bottle on her hands and rubbed it into her skin. When she felt the familiar warmth begin to seep into her hand, indicating that it was indeed a liniment of some sort, she splattered it liberally on Kerim's back and set to work.
"Remind me to recommend you to the Stablemaster," said Kerim, his voice tight with pain. "You need to find more honest work than thievery."
"Honest?" questioned Sham, pressing deeply into his back with her thumbs. "I'm the most honest thief in Purgatory, just ask the Shark. I pay him a copper a week to say so. ~ Patricia Briggs

Purgatory fire will be more intolerable than all the torments that can be felt or conceived in this life. ~ Venerable Bede

This is a half-life, a split purgatory where her body and mind coexist but occupy separate realities. ~ Bill Clegg

History will be erased in the universal purgatory. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

It's said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you'll never learn to mark out your own space. It's double shaming - shaming to REMEMBER as well, to fee so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people's purgatory. ~ Lorna Sage

A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet. ~ Carol Zaleski

I was never going to know what Keats knew before he was twenty-five, that "any set of people is as good as any other." Now there was a Shakespearean life. Keats occupied his own experience to such a remarkable degree, he needed only the barest of human exchanges to connect with an inner clarity he himself had achieved. For that, almost anyone would do. He lived inside the heaven of a mind nourished by its own conversation. I would wander for the rest of my life in the purgatory of self-exile, always looking for the right person to talk to. This ~ Vivian Gornick

The IPO is no exit for the entrepreneur; it's the start of purgatory. ~ Vivek Wadhwa

You are afraid to suffer, but it were better to thank God for it, since the more you undergo down here, the less you will endure above. Grief is a portion of one's heritage taken in advance from Purgatory. ~ Saint Lydwine Of Schiedam

Mephistopheles: Within the bowels of these elements,
Where we are tortured and remain forever.
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is must we ever be.
And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that is not heaven. ~ Christopher Marlowe

Labour is the purgatory of the erring. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Since everyone around you agrees ever since there were people on earth that land is value, or labor is value, or learning is value, or title, degree, necklaces, murex shells, the ownership of slaves. Everyone knows bees sting and ghosts haunt and giving your robes away humiliates your rivals. That the enemies are barbarians. That wise men swim through the rock of the earth; that houses breed filth, airstrips attract airplanes, tornadoes punish, ancestors watch, and you can buy a shorter stay in purgatory. The black rock is holy, or the scroll; or the pangolin is holy, the quetzal is holy, this tree, water, rock, stone, cow, cross, or mountain--and it's all true. The Red Sox. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows. ~ Annie Dillard

Railway Stations
Train stations are a metaphor for life;
people have either just arrived or are about to leave.
If they're just waiting, they're in purgatory. ~ Beryl Dov

We need no messiah and no sterile conception of a god menacing us with hell and purgatory. ~ Federica Montseny

A prison! heav'ns, I loath the hated name,
Famine's metropolis, the sink of shame,
A nauseous sepulchre, whose craving womb
Hourly inters poor mortals in its tomb;
By ev'ry plague and ev'ry ill possess'd,
Ev'n purgatory itself to thee 's a jest. ~ Tom Brown, Jr.

You may never reach that glorious moment until you die, so live life on the edge halfway between heaven and hell ... and let's all dance in the middle in purgatory ~ Lady Gaga

Only after the words were spoken did she realize what she had said. "My sins are all your fault, Brodick, and if I have to go to purgatory, then by God, you're going with me. Ramsey, if you do not stop laughing,I swear I shall toss you over this cliff."
"Do you love him, lass?" Father asked.
"I do not," she answered emphatically.
"It isn't a requirement," Laggan pointed out.
"I should hope not," she cried.
"But it would make your life easier," he countered.
"Gillian, you will tell the truth," Brodick demanded.
He grabbed hold of her hand. She tried to pull back, but he wouldn't let go.
"I have told the truth. I don't love Ramsey, and if he doesn't stop laughing at me, the Sinclairs will soon be looking for a new laird."
"Not Ramsey," Laggan shouted so he could be heard over Ramsey's laughter. "I'm asking you if you love Brodick."
"Did you tell Father I love you? Who else did you tell? ~ Julie Garwood

THERE CAME A TIME many years ago when I decided to agree to the baptism of my firstborn. It was a question of pleasing his mother's family. Nonetheless, I had to endure some teasing from Christian friends - how could the old atheist have sold out so easily? I decided to go deadpan and say, Well, I don't want his infant soul to go to hell or purgatory for want of some holy water. And it was often value for money: The faces of several believers took on a distinct look of discomfort at the literal rendition of their own supposed view. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Tori glanced at the clock and bit back a curse. Hannah didn't need to learn any more bad words from her own mother. That's what public school was for.

Gayle, Eliza (2013-04-30). Levi's Ultimatum, Purgatory Masters Book 2 (Kindle Locations 197-198). Gypsy Ink Books. Kindle Edition. ~ Eliza Gayle

I'd rather goto Hell than be in Purgatory ~ Gerard Way

If you could do it, I suppose, it would be a good idea to live your life in a straight line - starting, say, in the Dark Wood of Error, and proceeding by logical steps through Hell and Purgatory and into Heaven. Or you could take the King's Highway past the appropriately named dangers, toils, and snares, and finally cross the River of Death and enter the Celestial City. But that is not the way I have done it, so far. I am a pilgrim, but my pilgrimage has been wandering and unmarked. Often what has looked like a straight line to me has been a circling or a doubling back. I have been in the Dark Wood of Error any number of times. I have known something of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, but not always in that order. The names of many snares and dangers have been made known to me, but I have seen them only in looking back. Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will. ~ Wendell Berry

To change her mind is a woman's prerogative, to change his mind is a man's purgatory. ~ Roy Richardson

He'd never seen a more miserable gown. The color hovered in some purgatory between raincloud and ditchwater and it looked as if the pieces of it were cut to a pattern of indifference, then stitched with resentment. ~ Jayne Fresina

My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters. ~ Lincoln Child

Welcome to Ruler's purgatory. It's the special club you love to hate. ~ Scarlett Dawn

Our two taco specials get shoved up on the serving counter, crispy, cheesy goodness in brown plastic baskets lined with parchment paper, sour cream and guacamole exactly where they should be.

On the side.

There is a perfect ratio of sour cream, guac, and salsa on a shredded chicken tostada. No one can make it happen for you. Many restaurants have tried. All have failed. Only the mouth knows its own pleasure, and calibration like Taco Heaven cannot be mass produced.

It simply cannot.

Taco Heaven is a sensory explosion of flavor that defies logic. First, you have to eye the amount of spiced meat, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and tomatillos. You must consider the size and crispiness of the shells. Some people–I call them blasphemers–like soft tacos. I am sitting across from Exhibit A.

We won't talk about soft tacos. They don't make it to Taco Heaven. People who eat soft tacos live in Taco Purgatory, never fully understanding their moral failings, repeating the same mistakes again and again for all eternity.

Like Perky and dating.

Once you inventory your meat, lettuce, tomato, and shell quality, the real construction begins. Making your way to Taco Heaven is like a mechanical engineer building a bridge in your mouth. Measurements must be exact. Payloads are all about formulas and precision. One miscalculation and it all fails.

Taco Death is worse than Taco Purgatory, because the only re ~ Julia Kent

Is that why you do good deeds, Richie? To shorten your time in Purgatory?' 'Oh, honey,' he said, brushing lint from an orange sleeve. 'I'm going to hell. That's where the action is. ~ Michael Nava

In medieval times, the Church used to sell 'indulgences' for money. This amounted to paying for some number of days' remission from purgatory, and the Church literally (and with breathtaking presumption) issued signed certificates specifying the number of days off that had been purchased ... And of all its money-making rip-offs, the selling of indulgences must surely rank among the greatest con tricks in history ... ~ Richard Dawkins

We are master alchemists: We may not have discovered how to make gold out of lead, but we are able to make heaven out of hell, hell out of heaven, and purgatory out of nothing. ~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

If you think your desires are selfish or cruel, hate yourself. If you think the world unjust, then hate your god. ~ Katherine Pine

God forbid we should both go to heaven. Its endlessness would make us hate each other. Better for you to be in heaven and me in hell. We would long for each other, dream of each other, idealize each other. You would rail against God, since he was keeping you from consummating your love. I would send smoke signals from my pit of brimstone - love letters that smelled like sulfur and made you choke. Maybe we would even try to sneak off to purgatory for illicit rendezvous. ~ Supervert

If Hell is other people ... then Purgatory is airports. ~ Neil Gaiman

Filth, filth, filth, from morning to night. I know they're poor but they could wash. Water is free and soap is cheap. Just look at that arm, nurse.'
The nurse looked and clucked in horror. Francie stood there with the hot flamepoints of shame burning her face. The doctor was a Harvard man, interning at the neighborhood hospital. Once a week, he was obliged to put in a few hours at one of the free clinics. He was going into a smart practice in Boston when his internship was over. Adopting the phraseology of the neighborhood, he referred to his Brooklyn internship as going through Purgatory, when he wrote to his socially prominent fiancee in Boston.
The nurse was as Williamsburg girl... The child of poor Polish immigrants, she had been ambitious, worked days in a sweatshop and gone to school at night. Somehow she had gotten her training... She didn't want anyone to know she had come from the slums.
After the doctor's outburst, Francie stood hanging her head. She was a dirty girl. That's what the doctor meant. He was talking more quietly now asking the nurse how that kind of people could survive; that it would be a better world if they were all sterilized and couldn't breed anymore. Did that mean he wanted her to die? Would he do something to make her die because her hands and arms were dirty from the mud pies?
She looked at the nurse... She thought the nurse might say something like:
Maybe this little girl's mother works and didn't have time to wash he ~ Betty Smith

The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in. ~ Arthur Koestler

O England,' said Kiaya Khátún. Her voice, mellow and strong, held an accent or a mingling of accents Philippa was unable to name. 'O England, the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of Servants and the Paradise of Women.' She turned her splendid eyes on the soothsayer. 'She will be like Avicenna, and run through all the arts by eighteen. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Sometimes I think that the amount of time you live on earth is just an inverse reflection of how good you were in a previous existence. For example, infants who die from SIDs were actually great people when they were alive for real, so they get to go to heaven after a mere five weeks in purgatory. Meanwhile anyone Willard Scott ever congratulated for turning one hundred two was obviously a terrible individual who had many many previous sins to pay for and had to spend a century in his or her own unknown purgatory even though the person seemed perfectly wholesome in this particular world. ~ Chuck Klosterman

Purgatory is hell with hope. ~ Philip Jose Farmer