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"Books-they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions."
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"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
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Personal Development
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
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Personal Development
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
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Personal Development
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
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Personal Development
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
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Personal Development
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
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Personal Development
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
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Personal Development
"If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."
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Personal Development
"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
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Personal Development
"A book may be compared to your neighbour: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."
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"We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers."
Power
"Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn't have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?"
Identity
"You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to."
Communication
"Nuts, arms, stomachs -- they never hurt. All hurt is brain hurt."
Health
"How wil we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?"
Emotion
"He was gone and did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."
Forgiveness
"You don't get to have an opinion on whether .999 is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they've figured out."
Science
"So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved."
Reality
"I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before his recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again."
Future
"You don't get to chose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."
Relationship
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