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"I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy."
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"We must leave the discovery of this mystery, like all others, to time, and accident, and Heaven's pleasure."
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Personal Development
"Now me, said Mr. Vandemar."What number am I thinking of? "I beg your pardon? "What number am I thinking of? repeated Mr. Vandemar. "It's between one and a lot, he added, helpfully."
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Personal Development
"I'm sure that I know that, it's behind one of all doors."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Unknown is interesting like the Dead zone... you never know where you will go."
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Personal Development
"He is the greatest mystery I had even known, one that always had me craving just a little bit more."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I'd seen weirder things than a haunted shoe, but not many."
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Personal Development
"The invisible God."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I didn't intend to go in that direction but strange things happen when the lights go out."
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Personal Development
"Such nice people, the Hillingdons, though she's not really very easy to know, is she? I mean, she's always very pleasant and all that, but one never seems to get to know her better.'Miss Marple agreed thoughtfully. 'One never knows what she is thinking.''Perhaps that is just as well.''I beg your pardon?''Oh nothing really, only that I've always had the feeling that perhaps her thoughts might be rather disconcerting."
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Personal Development
"The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not."
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Personal Development
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"Fate is cruel but maybe not random. Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and gravel to it."
Fate
"It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy-pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning."
Addiction
"Real age, as I came to see from the genuine pieces that passed through my hands, was variable, crooked, capricious, singing here and sullen there, warm asymmetrical streaks on a rosewood cabinet from where a slant of sun had struck it while the other side was as dark as the day it was cut."
Time
"And I'm hoping there's some larger truth about suffering here, or at least my understanding of it - although I've come to realize that the only truths that matter to me are the ones I don't, and can't, understand. What's mysterious, ambiguous, inexplicable. What doesn't fit into a story, what doesn't have a story. Glint of brightness on a barely-there chain. Patch of sunlight on a yellow wall. The loneliness that separates every living creature from every other living creature. Sorrow inseparable from joy."
Suffering
"It seems to me that psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate."
Fate
"Grown children (an oxymoron, I realize) veer instinctively to extremes: the young scholar is much more a pedant than his older counterpart. And I, being young myself, took these pronouncements of Henry's very seriously. I doubt if Milton himself could have impressed me more."
Youth
"But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there."
Meaning
"But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead."
Grief
"For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian."
Poetry
"It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to lose control completely? To throw off all the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?"
Beauty
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