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"The blue-backed notebooks, the two pencils and the pencil sharpener (a pocket knife was too wasteful) the marble-topped tables, the smell of early morning, sweeping out and mopping, and luck were all you needed. For luck you carried a horse chestnut and a rabbit's foot in your right pocket. The fur had been worn off the rabbit's foot long ago and the bones and the sinews were polished by wear. The claws scratched in the lining of your pocket and you knew your luck was still there."
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"The first thing I did when I got inside was turn on the kitchen light. Then I moved to the table, putting my dad's iPod on the speaker dock, and a Bob Dylan song came on, the notes familiar. I went into the living room, hitting the switch there, then down the hallway to my room, where I did the same. It was amazing what a little noise and brightness could do to a house and a life, how much the smallest bit of each could change everything. After all these years of just passing through, I was beginning to finally feel at home."
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Personal Development
"I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade."
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Personal Development
"A Tennyson garden, heavy with scent, languid; the return of the word swoon."
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Personal Development
"For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? -some days, some sights bringing him back to her calmly, without the old bitterness; which perhaps was the reward of having cared for people; they came back in the middle of St. James's Park on a fine morning-indeed they did."
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Personal Development
"Fifty yards ahead of us, a doe had come out of the woods. She stepped delicately over one rusty GS&WM track and onto the railbed, where the weeds and goldenrod were so high they brushed against her sides. She paused there, looking at us calmly, ears cocked forward. What I remember about that moment was the silence. No bird sang, no plane went droning overhead. If my mother had been with us, she'd have had her camera and would have been taking pictures like mad. Thinking of that made me miss her in a way I hadn't in years."
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Personal Development
"Sometimes when you're young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you're living on someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been. Then we grow up and our hearts break into two."
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Personal Development
"The uncertainty of the future made them turn their hearts toward the past. They saw themselves in the lost paradise of the deluge, splashing in the puddles in the courtyard, killing lizards to hang on Asrsula, pretending that they were going to bury her alive, and those memories revealed to them the truth that they had been happy together ever since they had had memory."
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Personal Development
"And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time."
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Personal Development
"This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone."
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Personal Development
"Sometimes people think the old days were better than today. Even though life was simpler and slower, it was not necessarily easier."
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"I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]"
Character
"Hail Mary full of Grace the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.' Then he added, 'Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish wonderful though he is."
Religion
"As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand."
Art
"I wonder. Of course maybe that isn't what they figure to do. Maybe they aren't going to do any such thing. But it's natural that's what they would do and I heard that word."
Curiosity
"Wonder what day god created the egg' 'how should we know? we should not question. our stay on earth is not for long. let us rejoice and believe and give thanks'. 'eat a egg."
Spiritual
"If I had waited long enough I probably never would have written anything at all since there is a tendency when you really begin to learn something about a thing not to want to write about it but rather to keep on learning about it always and at no time, unless you are very egotistical, which, of course, accounts for many books, will you be able to say: now I know all about this and will write about it."
Creativity
"What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little outhouse surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog? The question is: Can you write?"
Creativity
"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
Life
"That's my town,' Joaquin said. 'What a fine town, but how the buena gente, the good people of that town, have suffered in this war.' Then, his face grave, 'There they shot my father. My mother. My brother-in-law and now my sister.' 'What barbarians,' Robert Jordan said. How many times had he heard this? How many times had he watched people say it with difficulty? How many times had he seen their eyes fill and their throats harden with the difficulty of saying my father, or my brother, or my mother, or my sister? He could not remember how many times he heard them mention their dead in this way. Nearly always they spoke as this boy did now; suddenly and apropos of the mention of the town and always you said, 'What barbarians."
War
"I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it."
Sacrifice
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