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"The door of Reverend Verringer's impressive manse is opened by an elderly female with a face like a pine plank; the Reverend is unmarried, and has need of an irreproachable housekeeper. Simon is ushered into the library. It is so self-consciously the right sort of library that he has an urge to set fire to it."
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"He wants to see, he wants to know, only to see and know. I'm aware that it is this mentality, this curiosity, which is responsible for the hydrogen bomb and the imminent demise of civilization and that we would all be better off if we were still at the stone-worshipping stage. Though surely it is not this affable inquisitiveness that should be blamed."
Curiosity
"How could I have been so ignorant? she thinks. So stupid, so unseeing, so given over to carelessness. But without such ignorance, such carelessness, how could we live? If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you'd be doomed. You'd be as ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to."
Fear
"All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn't be that hard."
Humor
"Things that are falling apart encourage me: whatever else, I'm in better shape than they are."
Positivity
"Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit."
Relationship
"I love you. You're the only one." She isn't the first woman he's ever said that to. He shouldn't have used it up so much earlier in his life, he shouldn't have treated it like a tool, a wedge, a key to open women. By the time he got around to meaning it, the words had sounded fraudulent to him and he'd been ashamed to pronounce them."
Romance
"Confronted by too much emptiness, said Adam One, the brain invents. Loneliness creates company as thirst creates water. How many sailors have been wrecked in pursuit of islands that were merely a shimmering?"
Psychology
"We want to get there faster. Get where? Wherever we are not. But a human soul can only go as fast as a man can walk, they used to say. In that case, where are all the souls? Left behind. They wander here and there, slowly, dim lights flickering in the marshes at night, looking for us. But they're not nearly fast enough, not for us, we're way ahead of them, they'll never catch up. That's why we can go so fast: our souls don't weigh us down."
Spiritual
"I shouldn't have taken a vow of silence, I told myself. What did I want? Nothing much. Just a memorial. But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a commemoration of wounds endured? Endured, and resented. Without memory, there can be no revenge."
Memory
"No wires tender even as nervescan transmit the impact ofour seasons, our catastropheswhile we are closed inside them."
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"I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice."
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Personal Development
"He [Old Mr. Turveydrop] was a fat old gentleman with a false complexion, false teeth, false whiskers, and a wig. He had a fur collar, and he had a padded breast to his coat, which only wanted a star or a broad blue ribbon to be complete. He was pinched in, and swelled out, and got up, and strapped down, as much as he could possibly bear."
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Personal Development
"The god's chosen beverage. Tremble before the horror of Diet Coke!"
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Personal Development
"On the Kite, the situation was being 'workshopped'. This is the means by which people who don't know anything get together to pool their ignorance."
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Personal Development
"Or he'd watch the news: more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself?"
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Personal Development
"I think that we may safely trust a good deal more than we do."
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Personal Development
"What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.American novels, answered Lord Henry."
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Personal Development
"Now-a-days, men wear a fool's cap, and call it a liberty cap."
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Personal Development
"We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it."
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Personal Development
"Silena appeared out of the woods, her sword drawn. Her Aphrodite armour was pink and red, colour coordinated to match her clothes and makeup. She looked like Guerilla Warfare Barbie."
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Personal Development
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