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We can only pay our debt to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

John Buchan

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Buchan, John. Address to the people of Canada on the coronation of George VI. 12 May 1937, Canada.

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There is only one success, he said to himself-to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Christopher Morley

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Morley, Christopher. Where the Blue Begins. William Heinemann/Doubleday, 1922, ch. 8.

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Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends.

Robert Graves

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Graves, Robert. "The Case for Xanthippe." The Crane Bag. Cassell & Company, 1969.

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The zipless fuck is absolutely pure. It is free of ulterior motives. There is no power game. The man is not "taking" and the woman is not "giving." No one is attempting to cuckold a husband or humiliate a wife. No one is trying to prove anything or get anything out of anyone. The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.

Erica Jong

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Jong, Erica. Fear of Flying. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, ch. 1.

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So we think of Marilyn who was every man's love affair with America, Marilyn Monroe who was blonde and beautiful and had a sweet little rinky-dink of a voice and all the cleanliness of all the clean American backyards.

Norman Mailer

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Mailer, Norman. Marilyn: A Biography. Grosset & Dunlap, 1973.

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A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinaesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status-all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido.

J.G. Ballard

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Ballard, J. G. "The Penthouse Interview: J. G. Ballard: Sci-Fi Seer." Interviewed by Lynn Barber. Penthouse, May 1970, vol. 5, no. 5, pp. 26-30.

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For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once.

Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain

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Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain]. S. Fischer Verlag, 1924, ch. 7.

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Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Everyman's Library, 2005, ch. 7.

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The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

E.M. Forster (Edward Morgan Forster)

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Forster, E.M. "A Book that Influenced Me," Two Cheers for Democracy. Hogarth Press, 1951. Originally published in 1944, publisher unknown.

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It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.

W. Somerset Maugham

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Maugham, William Somerset. The Moon and Sixpence. William Heinemann, 1919, ch. 17.

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Maugham, William Somerset. The Moon and Sixpence. Vintage Classics, 2009, ch. 17.

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It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how... And still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.

Henry Miller

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Miller, Henry. The Colossus of Maroussi. Colt Press, 1941, pt. 1.

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Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at it while it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud.

Yann Martel

Life of Pi (novel)

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Martel, Yann. Life of Pi. Knopf Canada, 2001, ch. 1.

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People who are always praising the past
And especially the times of faith as best
Ought to go and live in the Middle Ages
And be burnt at the stake as witches and sages.

Stevie Smith

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Smith, Stevie. "The Past." Not Waving but Drowning. Andre Deutsch, 1957, I. 1.

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I will write until my knuckles are worn and my brain bewildered, but I will write on and on.

William Styron

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Styron, William. Letter to William C. Styron Sr. 1 June 1951.

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We can't all be happy, we can't all be rich, we can't all be lucky-and it would be so much less fun if we were... Some must cry so that others may be able to laugh the more heartily.

Jean Rhys

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Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. Constable Press, 1939.

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Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.

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We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life. But the beginning and end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events, and that's that.

Thomas Mann

The Magic Mountain

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Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain]. S. Fischer Verlag, 1924, ch. 6.

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Current Citation

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Everyman's Library, 2005, ch. 6.

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New York makes one think of the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it.

Saul Bellow

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Bellow, Saul. Mr. Sammler's Planet. Viking Press, 1970, pt. 6.

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And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

Roald Dahl

The Minpins

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Dahl, Roald. The Minpins. Jonathan Cape, 1991.

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You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

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Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Houghlin Mifflin, 2005.

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Afflicted by the thought that where
Beauty was, nothing ever ran quite straight,
which, no doubt, was why so many people
looked on it as immoral.

John Galsworthy

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Galsworthy, John. In Chancery. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920, pt. 1, ch. 13.

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Children are the future not because they will one day be adults but because humanity is becoming more and more a child, because childhood is the image of the future.

Milan Kundera

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

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Original Citation

Kundera, Milan. Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting]. Gallimard, 1979.

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Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Aaron Asher. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

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