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"The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins."
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"The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
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Personal Development
"We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."
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Personal Development
"The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
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Personal Development
"One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred."
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Personal Development
"There are sins much more serious than socio-pathologies which really are mental illnesses, whereas self-righteousness is an illness of the soul."
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Personal Development
"Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers."
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Personal Development
"The Ten Commandments are the most visible symbol because these commandments are recognized by Christians and Jews alike as being the foundation of our system of public morality."
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Personal Development
"On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."
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Personal Development
"Morality without a sense of paradox is mean."
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Personal Development
"The world won't be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything."
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Personal Development
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"When people do the cowardly thing, it's not about respect, it's about fear."
Courage
"Perhaps because my relationship with my father went through such a long, bumpy time, it's been very important for me to work to try to keep lines of communication open between my sons and myself to try to avoid my father's mistakes. At least if you're making mistakes, make different mistakes."
Family
"A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins."
Writing
"This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid ground beneath their feet."
Identity
"Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn't exist in any declaration I have ever read. If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it. To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended."
Freedom
"It seems that the right of freedom of speech that was enshrined in numerous constitutions is now under attack by religious institutions."
Politics
"Human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions."
Psychology
"Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete."
Relationship
"I allowed myself the supernatural, the transcendent, because, I told myself, our love of metaphor is pre-religious, born of our need to express what is inexpressible, our dreams of otherness, of more."
Expression
"Parents are impelled by the profit motive - nothing more, nothing less. For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness."
Family
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