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"Don't you feel that at this rate there isn't much in it? In what? In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed - nothing has happened."
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"The important thing is not to survive, but to live."

"Who am I to say that these things might nit be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?"

"Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference."

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."
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"Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement."


"To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies."


"Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening."


"As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one's own, to be one's self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point."


"And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him."


"The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world."


"Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger."
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