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"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
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"The bowl is warmer than the soup."
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Personal Development

"No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer."
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Personal Development

"Good God. Men everywhere."
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Personal Development

"Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business."
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Personal Development

"Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life. If they observed this duty conscientiously, they would give us fewer pictures chequered with vivid contrasts of light and shade; they would seldom elevate their heroes and heroines to the heights of rapture - still seldomer sink them to the depths of despair; for if we rarely taste the fulness of joy in this life, we yet more rarely savour the acrid bitterness of hopeless anguish."
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Personal Development

"I tried to bring up boyfriends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done--whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was."
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Personal Development

"He hated this feeling of free-floating, just drifting from place to place, thought to thought, without any sense of anchor or root."
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Personal Development

"She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house. How she got from story to story was a mystery beyond solution. A lady so decorous in herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility of locomotion suggested the wild idea. Another noticeable circumstance in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried. She would shoot with consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there. Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace."
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Personal Development

"While humans play God, dogs learn from their masters."
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Personal Development

"Yeah, something was wrong. That was the understatement of the year."
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Personal Development
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"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."
Power


"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
Observation


"Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do."
Perception


"Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel."
Fiction


"No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog."
Humor


"This is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash."
Mortality


"The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey."
Optimism


"He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself."
Privacy


"Those who are made can be unmade."
Impermanence


"To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king's whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn't, and I am dead."
Conscience
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