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Quotes by Novelist
"Perhaps the strongest evidence that women have as broad and deep a capacity for physical aggression as men is anecdotal. And as with men, this capacity has expressed itself in acts from the brave to the brutal, the selfless to the senseless."
52
"It is wise to apply the oil of refined politeness to the mechanism of friendship."
52
"Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence."
52
"There was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones."
52
"A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy."
52
"We are not primarily put on this earth to see through one another, but to see one another through."
52
"He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing they hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling belief in the inferiority of others."
52
"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself."
52
"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth."
52
"Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets."
52
"Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision."
52
"I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised."
52
"If you had hope, maybe you could find a way to make things change,. Because if you thought about it, there were so many reasons to try."
52
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need."
52
"Fire's the sun, unwindin' itself out o' the wood."
52
"You're talking about gold and silver, cash and securities. I'm talking about the sheer beauty of the land, the value of unpolluted parkland made wild and staying wild forever."
52
"We know, at least, that this decision (ending factory farming) will help prevent deforestation, curb global warming, reduce pollution, save oil reserves, lessen the burden on rural America, decrease human rights abuses, improve publish health, and help eliminate the most systematic animal abuse in history."
52
"From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back."
52
"For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first."
52
"Wisely mingled poetry and prose."
52
"Nothing and no one can destroy the Chinese people. They are relentless survivors."
52
"Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child."
52
"No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense, and relatively clean finger nails."
52
"Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren't sacred beings crafted in the Almighty's image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the spit." He mimicked my usual voice, very well. "'But why *me*, Henry, are we not friends?' Well, Adam, even friends are made out of meat."
52
"I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems."
52
"We chart delusions through collective agreement."
52
"It is worthwhile for anyone to have behind him a few generations of honest, hard-working ancestry."
52
"The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory."
52
"He didn't know why, but seeing her made him feel like a man. She was something out of a dream - a dream in which he was not a spoiled young prince, but a king."
52
"The dream thatwe are our fathers. I walked to the Brod,41without knowing why, and looked intomy reflection in the water. I couldn't lookaway. What was the image that pulled mein after it? What was it that I loved? Andthen I recognized it. So simple. In thewater I saw my father's face, and that facesaw the face of its father, and so on, and soon, reflecting backward to the beginningof time, to the face of God, in whoseimage we were created. We burned withlove for ourselves, all of us, starters ofthe fire we suffered-our love was the afflictionfor which only our love was thecure . . ."
52
"I should have known that if any girl was going to disobey an order, it would be you."
52
"Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?"
52
"Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world, I said, "but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld *hope* their own world to be-it isn't a mirror, it's an aspiration."
52
"For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow."
52
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