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Quotes by Writer
"Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity, than straightforward and simple integrity in another."
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"I had no more alphabetthan the journeying of the swallows,the pure and tiny waterof the small, fiery birdthat dances rising from the pollen."
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"Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves."
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"Here's the point to be made - there are no synonyms. There are no two words that mean exactly the same thing."
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"People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try to be 'consistent'."
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"I have my father's lopsided mouth. When I smile, my lips slope to one side. My doctor sister calls it my cerebral palsy mouth. I am very much a daddy's girl, and even though I would rather my smile wasn't crooked, there is something moving for me about having a mouth exactly like my father's."
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"The reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light."
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"As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft."
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"JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life?LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?LENORE: I smell trap.JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn't more?LENORE: I would kill for a shower."
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"The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."
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"I left the ending ambiguous, because that is the way life is."
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"Except in cases of necessity which are rare leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies they are ready enough to tell him."
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"I definitely have character arcs in mind for each character unless I kill them."
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"You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame no less than 7 X 10^18 joules of potential energy-enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point."
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"The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself."
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"The depressed person was in terrible andunceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror. Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain itself, the depressed person hoped at least to be able to express something of its context, its shape and texture, as it were-by recounting circumstances related to its etiology."
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"It is not every question that deserves an answer."
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"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
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"I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time."
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"What do you consider the most interesting man-made structure in the galaxy?The dam they are building at the Three Gorges on the Yangtse. Though perhaps '"baffling'" would be a better word. Dams almost never do what they were intended to do, but create devastation beyond belief. And yet we keep on building them, and I can''t help but wonder why. I''m convinced that if we go back far enough in the history of the human species, we will find some beaver genes creeping in there somewhere. It''s the only explanation that makes sense."
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"You don't expect to get the letter saying, Her Majesty would like to appoint you Knight Commander of the British Empire! It was just a completely overwhelming and exciting day."
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"If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition."
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"Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness-- they cannot work and their civilization collapses."
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"When we are born our eyes open onto the world.When we learn the truth about the world we choose to close our eyes to the world around us.And when we die, we open our eyes for that last time to see that in our ignorance, we could have changed the world for all to see."
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"These little grey cells. It is up to them."
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"The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it."
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"There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another."
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"When you are measuring life, you are not living it."
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"What do you mean by faith? Is faith enough for Man? Should he be satisfied with faith alone? Is there no way of finding out the truth? Is the attitude of faith, of believing in something for which there can be no more than philosophic proof, the true mark of a Christian?"
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"No man is useless while he has a friend."
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"Ford Prefect suppressed a little giggle of evil satisfaction, realized that he had no reason to suppress it, and laughed out loud, a wicked laugh."
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"If you don't want me to attend the patient I'll go.''But she can't see a doctor now.''Why not?''She isn't well."
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"It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven-that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain-and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world-to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage."
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