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"Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."
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"Fate has this weird way of making your wish come true by supplementing it with ten other spiteful things."
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Personal Development
"The lieutenant-colonel realized for the first time what most people never realize about themselves--that he was not only a victim of outrageous fortune, but one of outrageous fortune's cruelest agents as well."
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Personal Development
"I'm supposed to believe it's a coincidence that we're both former spies that ended up together?"
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Personal Development
"I could have done even better, miss, and I'd know a lot more, if it wasn't for my destiny ever since childhood. I'd have killed a man in a duel with a pistol for calling me low-born, because I came from Stinking Lizaveta without a father, and they were shoving that in my face in Moscow. It spread there thanks to Grigory Vasilievich. Grigory Vasilievich reproaches me for rebelling against my nativity: 'You opened her matrix,' he says. I don't know about her matrix, but I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all, miss."
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Personal Development
"And I was holding someone who was destined to be my best friend, or possibly my worst enemy."
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Personal Development
"The Weird Sisters, hand in hand,Posters of the sea and land,Thus do go, about, about,Thrice to thine, thrice to mine,And thrice again to make up nine.Peace, the charm's wound up."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I always knew, on some level, that I wouldn't live long. It's simply not written in my stars."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards."
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Personal Development
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves. Easy enough to say when you're a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars."
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Personal Development
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"The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness."
Happiness
"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent."
Animals
"In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
Companionship
"The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything."
Wisdom
"People meet in the course of life, they talk together, they discuss, they quarrel, without realizing that they're talking to one another across a distance, each from an observation post standing in a different place in time."
Life
"Keep this in mind: it is our religion to praise life. The word "life is the king of words. The kingword surrounded by other grand words. The word "adventure! The word "future! And the word "hope! By the way, do you know the code name for the atomic bomb they dropped on Hiroshima? "Little Boy! That's a genius, the fellow who invented that code! They couldn't have dreamed up a better one. Little boy, kid, tyke, tot - there's no word that's more tender, more touching, more loaded with future."
Celebration
"Every novel says to the reader: "Things are not as simple as you think. That is the novel's eternal truth, but it grows steadily harder to hear amid the din of easy, quick answers that come faster than the question and block it off. In the spirit of our time, it's either Anna or Karenin who is right, and the ancient wisdom of Cervantes, telling us about the difficulty of knowing and the elusiveness of truth, seems cumbersome and useless."
Literature
"How would I explain to him that I couldn't make peace with him? How would I explain that if I did I would immediately lose my inner balance? How would I explain that one of the arms of my internal scales would suddenly shoot upward? How would I explain that my hatred of him counterbalanced the weight of evil that had fallen on my youth? How would I explain that he embodied all the evils in my life? How would I explain to him that I needed to hate him?"
Anger
"Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? ... Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us."
Fate
"Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding."
Writing
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