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"Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who blew the roof off the Parthenon? the mullahs who had ordered the destruction of the Buddhas at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world."
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"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction."

"Kronos would be 10 times more powerful. His very presence would incinerate you. And once he achieves this he will empower the other Titans. They are weak, compared to what they soon will become, unless you can stop them, the world will fall, the gods will die, and I will never achieve a perfect score on this stupid machine."

"Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction."

"Markets as well as mobs respond to human emotions; markets as well as mobs can be inflamed to their own destruction."

"The British seizure of Hongkong was an aspect of one of the most ugly crimes of the British Empire: the takeover and destruction of India, and the use of India to flood China with opium."

"The politicians in this world... have at their command weapons of mass destruction far more complex than their own thinking processes."

"China is one of the world's greatest proliferators of weapons of mass destruction to these rogue nations."

"For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor."

"The more we are consuming oil that either comes from places that are bent on our destruction or helping those who are... the more we are enabling those who are trying to kill us."

"He wanted to grind every Federation world into dust beneath his boot as his army blazed a trail of blood and corpses all the way to Seneca.He wanted to storm their inner sanctum and fire a laser into the skull of their Field Marshal while their Chairman watched, then fire a laser into the skull of their Chairman.He wanted to burn their bodies on a pyre and carry the ashes back to Deucali and spread them on his mother's consecrated grave."
Explore more quotes by Donna Tartt


"Taking on challenging projects is the way that one grows and extends one's range as a writer, one's technical command, so I consider the time well-spent."


"To really be centered and to really work well and to think about the kinds of things that I need to think about, I need to spend large amounts of time alone."


"Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world "postmodernist."


"I'm not sure whay I've been drawn to this subject, except that murder is a subject that has always drawn people for as long as people have been telling stories."


"We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people " the ancients no less than us " have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self."


"When we are sad-at least I am like this-it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change."


"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."


"So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter."


"What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way?"
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