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"Sad stories make good books."
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"It would be an existence rife with difficulties... but of a pleasurable kind, difficulties they could take pride in, possess, value, as one would a family heirloom."
Life
"I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I'd ever loved anyone, and I wanted to to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake. I wasn't worthy of this sacrifice; I was a liar, a cheat, a thief. And I would have told, except that a part of me was glad. Glad that this would all be over with soon. Baba would dismiss them, there would be some pain, but life would move on. I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again."
Self
"Children aren't coloring books. You don't get to fill them with your favorite colors."
Family
"He used to wonder how such a frail little body could house so much joy, so much goodness. It couldn't. It spilled out of her, came pouring out her eyes."
Emotion
"A creative writing teacher at San Jose State used to say about clichés: 'Avoid them like the plague.' Then he'd laugh at his own joke. The class laughed along with him, but I always thought clichés got a bum rap. Because, often, they're dead-on. But the aptness of the clichéd saying is overshadowed by the nature of the saying as a cliché."
Art
"She remembered all too well how time had dragged without him, how she had shuffled about feeling waylaid, out of balance. How she could ever cope with his permanent absence?"
Reflection
"They rarely look at Baba -- the teenagers -- and then only with cold indifference, or even subtle disdain, as if my father should have known better than to allow old age and decay to happen to him."
Life
"Mariam saw now the sacrifices a mother made. Decency was but one."
Family
"That same night, I wrote my first short story. It took me thirty minutes. It was a dark little tale about a man who found a magic cup and learned that if he wept into the cup, his tears turned into pearls. But even though he had always been poor, he was a happy man and rarely shed a tear. So he found ways to make himself sad so that his tears could make him rich. As the pearls piled up, so did his greed grow. The story ended with the man sitting on a mountain of pearls, knife in hand, weeping helplessly into the cup with his beloved wife's slain body in his arms."
Literature
"I'm all you have in this world Mariam, and when I'm gone you'll have nothing. You ARE nothing!"
Emotion
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"Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire."
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Personal Development
"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
"Molly Bloom is simply the most sensuous woman in literature."
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Personal Development
"I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt."
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Personal Development
"If the novels are still being read in 50 years, no one is ever going to say: 'What's great about that sixth book is that he met his deadline!' It will be about how the whole thing stands up."
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Personal Development
"It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."
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Personal Development
"Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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Personal Development
"A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures."
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Personal Development
"I've read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Look Homeward, Angel.'"
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Personal Development
"And Marianne, who had the knack of finding her way in every house to the library, however it might be avoided by the family in general, soon procured herself a book."
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Personal Development
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