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"Somewhere I'd heard, or invented perhaps, that the only pleasures found during a waning moon are misfortunes in disguise. Superstition aside, I avoid pleasure during the waning or absent moon out of respect for the bounty this world offers me. I profit from great harvests in life and believe in the importance of seasons."
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"It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything."

"In my limited realm of experience, beginnings led to endings."

"The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other."
Explore more quotes by Roman Payne

"As a very young man, I thought of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen."

"Although I love elegant parties, dancing and dining and spending the night with a sweet woman in my arms, my life belongs to literature."

"I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side."

"They say Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I have never led an army, I am a wanderer. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's 'Odyssey' as if it were the sweet body of a woman."

"He was no god, just an artist; and when an artist is a man, he needs a woman to create like a god."

"Of all public figures and benefactors of mankind, no one is loved by history more than the literary patron. Napoleon was just a general of forgotten battles compared with the queen who paid for Shakespeare's meals and beer in the tavern. The statesman who in his time freed the slaves, even he has a few enemies in posterity, whereas the literary patron has none. We thank Gaius Maecenas for the nobility of soul we attribute to Virgil; but he isn't blamed for the selfishness and egocentricity that the poet possessed. The patron creates 'literature through altruism,' something not even the greatest genius can do with a pen."

"When no possessions keep us, when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess."

"I was glad to be made awarethat "Veimke (jeune fille au pair),is subject to natural law,and can be made fat,by such things as poor diet,and alcohol."

"Without knowing why or how, I found myself in love with this strange Wanderess. Maybe I was just in love with the dream she was selling me: a life of destiny and fate; as my own life up until we met had been so void of enchantment. Those things: mystery, fate, enchantment... they are things that young people offer us as soon as we get close to them. And if we're not careful, we can be seduced by, and drawn back into, the youthful world they preside over."

"Alexander the Great slept with 'The Iliad' beneath his pillow. Though I've never led an army, I am a wanderer. I cradle 'The Odyssey' nights while the moon is waning, as if it were the sweet body of a woman."
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