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"A child is asleep. Her private life unwinds inside skin and skull; only as she sheds childhood, first one decade and then another, can she locate the actual, historical stream, see the setting of her dreaming private life-the nation, the city, the neighborhood, the house where the family lives-as an actual project under way, a project living people willed, and made well or failed, and are still making, herself among them. I breathed the air of history all unaware, and walked oblivious through its littered layers."
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"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."
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Personal Development

"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
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Personal Development

"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."
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Personal Development

"Hasn't there always been a moon?""Bless you. Not in the slightest. I remember the day the moon came. We looked up in the sky--it was all dirty brown and sooty gray here then, not green and blue..."
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Personal Development

"What is history? An echo of the past in the future; a reflex from the future on the past."
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Personal Development

"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."
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Personal Development

"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
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Personal Development

"Mankind, not womankind, has slaughtered more humans in the name of God and Religion than for any other reason."
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Personal Development

"The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it."
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Personal Development

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept, Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare, The shaft we raise to them and thee."
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"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
Literature


"Private life, book life, took place where words met imagination without passing through the world."
Imagination


"I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, 'If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?' 'No,' said the priest, 'not if you did not know.' 'Then why,' asked the Eskimo earnestly, 'did you tell me?"
Ethics


"Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?"
Relationship


"Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears that spin the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in midair."
Work


"There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what that means, simply take yourself - in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love - and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."
Philosophy


"Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you're alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet's roundness arc between your feet."
Life


"Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again."
Love


"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order-willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living."
Structure


"I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."
Awakening
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