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"It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us."
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"We rode on the winds of the rising storm,We ran to the sounds of the thunder.We danced among the lightning bolts,and tore the world asunder."
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Personal Development

"She looked like a head-on collision between a fashion plate and a nightmare."
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Personal Development

"The dust was antique spice, burnt maple leaves, a prickling blue that teemed and sifted to earth. Swarming its own shadows, the dust filtered over the tents."
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Personal Development

"His eyes were open wounds beneath his heavy brows, a blue as dark as the sea by night."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen, with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair- He took her bag."
Author Name
Personal Development

"It is photography itself that creates the illusion of innocence. Its ironies of frozen narrative lend to its subjects an apparent unawareness that they will change or die. It is the future they are innocent of. Fifty years on we look at them with the godly knowledge of how they turne dout after all - who they married, the date of their death - with no thought for who will one day be holding photographs of us."
Author Name
Personal Development

"So the freshness lives onin a lemon,in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,the proportions, arcane and acerb."
Author Name
Personal Development
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"It troubles him to consider the powerful currents and fine-tuning that alter fate, the close and distant influences, the accidents of character and circumstance."
Philosophy


"Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy."
Writing


"Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages-he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be."
Lifestyle


"At that moment, the urge to be writing was stronger than any notion she had of what she might write."
Writing


"When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever get out of this lot... They could never be counted, the dreamed-up children, mentally conceived on the walk into Dunkirk, and later made flesh."
Life


"So here I am, upside down in a woman."
Humor


"There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already."
Life


"Revenge may be exacted a hundred times over in one sleepless night. The impulse, the dreaming intention, is human, normal, and we should forgive ourselves. But the raised hand, the actual violent enactment, is cursed. The maths says so. There'll be no reversion to the status quo ante, no balm, no sweet relief, or none that lasts. Only a second crime. Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves, Confucius said. Revenge unstitches a civilisation. It's a reversion to constant, visceral fear."
Morality


"I've never outgrown that feeling of mild pride, of acceptance, when children take your hand."
Emotion


"It's at moments like these in a game that the essentials of his character are exposed: narrow, ineffectual, stupid-and morally so. The game becomes an extended metaphor of character defect. Every error he makes is so profoundly, so irritatingly typical of himself, instantly familiar, like a signature, like a tissue scar or some deformation in a private place."
Life
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