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Quotes by Writer
"No one can tell you what your life is goin to be, can they?No. It's never like what you expected.Quijada nodded. If people knew the story of their lives how many would then elect to live them?"
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"Just stay close to us. If we get in trouble, we'll kill everything."
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"Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses."
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"The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I'm watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain't talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets."
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"You don't have to buy from anyone. You don't have to work at any particular job. You don't have to participate in any given relationship. You can choose."
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"To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year, Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed, The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation--sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles."
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"Without the faintest possibility of finding a job, I decided to devote myself to literature: it was about time to find out what I was worth as a writer."
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"He plugged the phone into the outlet.It rang. Roman stared at it as if it were a viper. The phone rang again. He unplugged it. "There. "It can't be that bad, I told him. "Oh, it's bad. Roman nodded. "My dad refused to help my second sister buy a house, because he doesn't like her boyfriend. My mother called him and it went badly. She cursed him. Every time he urinates, the stream arches up and over."
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"You never know what lurks just beneath the surface of my fragile sanity."
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"What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading."
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"He left to do whatever editors do."
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"Do you think that a doe in the jaws of a tiger feels less horror than you? People thought up the idea that animals don't have the same capability for suffering as humans, because otherwise they couldn't bear the knowledge that they are surrounded by a world of nature that is horror and nothing but horror." Paul was pleased that man was gradually covering the whole earth with concrete. It was as if he were watching a cruel murderess being walled up."
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"I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations."
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"A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers."
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"I trust our connection, regardless of what logic has to say."
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"And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
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"It is easier to appear worthy of a position one does not hold, than of the office which one fills."
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"Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don't know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can't act if you don't know. Acting without knowing takes you right off the cliff."
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"If tragedy never entered our lives, we wouldn't appreciate the magic."
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"It was an odd experience, this bringing to life of pages born of my pen and forgotten. From time to time they interested me -- they surprised me as much as if someone else had written them; yet I recognized the vocabulary, the shape of the sentences, the drive, the elliptical forms, the mannerisms. These pages were soaked through and through with my self -- there was a sickening intimacy about it, like the smell of a bedroom in which one has been shut up too long."
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"There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine."
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"Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the welder, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist."
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"The real Antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity."
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"Every calling is great when greatly pursued."
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"I don't know what it is with you, but I somehow become more a woman when ever your around."
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"As she uttered the words of the prayer, she glanced up at him as if he were God Himself. He watched her with growing pleasure. In front of him was kneeling the directress, being humiliated by a subordinate; in front of him a naked revolutionary was being humiliated by prayer; in front of him a praying lady was being humiliated by her nakedness.This threefold image of degradation intoxicated him and something unexpected suddenly happened: his body revoked its passive resistance. Edward was excited!As the directress said, 'And lead us not into temptation,' he quickly threw off all his clothes. When she said, 'Amen,' he violently lifted her off the floor and dragged her onto the couch."
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"If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses."
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"Do what you love and the necessary resources will follow."
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"It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn't."
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"The best preparation for good work tomorrow is to do good work today."
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"What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?"
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"Insanity is a gradual process - don't rush it."
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"For a long time imagination was all i had. I allowed it to take me to all the places i yearned to be, all the sights i longed to see, make beauty out of all thats been and create art from this suffering."
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