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"I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments."
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"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"
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Personal Development
"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."
Author Name
Personal Development
"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."
Author Name
Personal Development
"What you are seeking is yourself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."
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Personal Development
"The world is full of vanities."
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Personal Development
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"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."
Literature
"One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely."
Resilience
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
Philosophy
"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."
Art
"May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby."
Life
"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
Art
"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
Perception
"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
Society
"Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something."
Music
"History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated."
History
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