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"As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to take the right one...each of those moments is the theft of your childhood, each of them a blow that kills some part of the child you were, leaving another part of the man exposed, a new creature, tougher but tempered with bitterness and disappointment."
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"A child's best friend is often the one telling bedtime stories."
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Personal Development
"A boy is of all wild beasts the most difficult to manage."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Leading up to Christmas, there was talk of Santa. But I'd never even heard of Santa. Bunty, one of the workers who I grew to love, tried to explain, 'He brings little angels like you, presents."
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Personal Development
"Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence."
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Personal Development
"I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome."
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Personal Development
"It was not, of course, a proper thing to do. But then I have never pretended, nor will ever pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them."
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Personal Development
"And yet a child's utter innocence is but its blank ignorance, and the innocence more or less wanes as intelligence waxes."
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Personal Development
"Their suburbia house in Brentwood' was how she referred to the house when we bought it, a twelve-year-old establishing that it was not her decision, not her taste, a child claiming the distance all children imagine themselves to need."
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Personal Development
"There are miracles and glory in every child. Our glory lies in empowering them to flourish their glory."
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Personal Development
"We were still children and residing in the mosque from morning to evening. We were about to turn into monsters."
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Personal Development
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"Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man's memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull."
Memory
"We all practice self-deception to a degree; no man can handle complete honesty without being cut at each turn. There's not enough room in a man's head for sanity alongside each grief, each worry, each terror that he owns. I'm well used to burying such things in a dark cellar and moving on."
Mental
"Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else's blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn't trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn't trust them."
Relationship
"Tell me, tutor,' I said. 'Is revenge a science, or an art?"
Philosophy
"There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone."
Life
"All the best secrets are told at night."
Lifestyle
"For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I'd not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again. I threw them wide."
Psychology
"I can help you, Jorge. I can give you back your self. I can give you your will.' He held out his hand, palm open. 'Free will has to be taken,' I said."
Will
"A book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat them with respect."
Reading
"Cold has its own taste. It tastes of a bitten tongue. It coils around you, a living thing, a beast that means to kill you, not with wrath, not with tooth nor claw, but with the mercy of surrender, with the kindness of letting you go gentle into the long night after such a burden of pain and misery."
Reflection
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