What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?


John Updike

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Dreams can change histories and songs can alter destinies.
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He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Ye be a sight for sore eyes, lass,” he told her. “But we�...
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She made a fence of phrases, which seemed a treachery to herself.
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You are the blood of the dragon. You can make a hat.
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I want to share this bed with you, though," I breathed. "I want you to hold me."
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Lᴏᴠᴇ ɪs ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡɪɴᴅ ... Yᴏᴜ ᴄᴀɴ'ᴛ sᴇᴇ ɪᴛ, ʙᴜᴛ ʏᴏ...
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She filed the image away as an excellent and insulting question to ask the earl at an utterly inappr...
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I would no...
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There was nothing but uncompromising w...
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There you are. I've been looking for you.

His first words to me— not a lie at a...
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I was not prey any longer, I decided as I eased up to that door.
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I ...
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No one was my master— but I might be master of everything, if I wished. If I dared.
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He drained his glass. "I made a mistake."
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Julia poured tea gracefully, but it all ran over into the saucers.
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All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom w...
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Naturalistic atheism debunks itself. It has no power to explain even some of the most basic principl...
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Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complime...
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Because death is the only thing that could have ever kept him from you.
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To the people who look at the stars and wish, Rhys."
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Males are horrible creatures, aren’t they?
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When you spend so long trapped in darkness, you find that the darkness begins to stare back.
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Many atrocities, have been done in the name of the greater good.
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Aemon’s blind white eyes came open. “Egg?” he said, as the rain streamed down his cheeks. “E...
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But I forgot to tell him,” I said quietly, opening the door, “that the villain is usually the pe...
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You know nothing, Jon Snow.
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Make a place to sit down.
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Kehidupan perempuan itu sembilan bagian kacau dan satu bagian ajaib, kau akan segera mengetahuinya.....
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Jaime smiled knowingly. Men will read all sorts of things into a knowing smile if you let them.
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Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you...
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Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is nev...
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In the real world, they told you who to be, not the other way around.
RHODA BELLEZA
A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in ...
GEORGE R.R. MARTIN
Well, well, well I am trap in well, half way to hell.
DEYTH BANGER
A tooth for a tooth, will make the world's inhabitants a people without teeth
SOTONYE ANGA
Why, darling, I don't live at all when I'm not with you.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
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He said we were all cooked but we were all right as long as we did not know it. We were all cooked. ...
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After Rilke's Letters
-- by John VanDyke Wilmerding II

this is my letter to a young ...
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Yes, their reasons are overwhelming. They are as big as hope and as deep as revolt. They are the rea...
ALBERT CAMUS
…A city deprived of everything, devoid of light and devoid of heat, starved, and still not crushed...
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Words always take on the color of the deeds or sacrifices they evoke.
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No, no. Don't make that face. Every time I propose to you, you make that twisty, unhappy face. It we...
TESSA DARE
Learn to stand for something in life otherwise you will fall for anything that comes along which is ...
EUGINIA HERLIHY
We are born different to make a difference.
LISA R. REYNOLDS
When people begin to define the things that they believe in, based upon the exclusion of all the thi...
C. JOYBELL C.
(All the grief she had suffered over her lifetime had moulded her face into a mask of eternal sadnes...
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Come on, Feyre. We don’t bite. Unless you ask us to.
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My mate. Death incarnate. Night triumphant.
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We need hope, or else we cannot endure.
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You mistake patience for forbearance.
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Peace does not walk up to our doorsteps and press the calling bell! We have to go out there and sear...
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Each man lives in his own universe and when he dies the world is over
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JOHN UPDIKE
Life is like an overlong drama through which we sit being nagged by the vague memories of having rea...
JOHN UPDIKE
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it al...
JOHN UPDIKE
All sunshine without a little rain makes a desert.
JOHN UPDIKE
"Upon shaving off one's beard." The scissors cut the long-grown hair; the razor scrapes the remnant ...
JOHN UPDIKE
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or...
JOHN UPDIKE
Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism
JOHN UPDIKE
If she’d been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.
JOHN UPDIKE
The reader knows the writer better than he knows himself; but the writer's physical presence is ...
JOHN UPDIKE
On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly pu...
JOHN UPDIKE
Chaos is God's body. Order is the Devil's chains.
JOHN UPDIKE
I don't think about politics," Rabbit says. "That's one of my Goddam precious American rights...
JOHN UPDIKE
Dollars had once gathered like autumn leaves on the wooden collection plates; dollars were the flour...
JOHN UPDIKE
Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to ou...
JOHN UPDIKE
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. As soon as one is aware of being somebody, to be watche...
JOHN UPDIKE
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.
JOHN UPDIKE
Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying
JOHN UPDIKE
The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So t...
JOHN UPDIKE
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating noti...
JOHN UPDIKE
An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they ...
JOHN UPDIKE
His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes...
JOHN UPDIKE
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and...
JOHN UPDIKE
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, becaus...
JOHN UPDIKE
The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just start...
JOHN UPDIKE
A room containing Philip Roth, I have noticed, begins hilariously to whirl and pulse with a mix of r...
JOHN UPDIKE
Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers' main mater...
JOHN UPDIKE
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a super...
JOHN UPDIKE
Wickedness was like food: once you got started it was hard to stop; the gut expanded to take in more...
JOHN UPDIKE
Ich habe in diesen Tagen viel über Liebe nachgedacht, und darüber, wie ich das Wort hasste und es ...
JOHN UPDIKE
But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a sta...
JOHN UPDIKE
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted h...
JOHN UPDIKE
Harry has heard this before. Thelma's voice is dutiful and deliberately calm, issuing small family t...
JOHN UPDIKE
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating ...
JOHN UPDIKE
In tennis, there is the forehand, the backhand, the overhead smash and the drop volley, all with a d...
JOHN UPDIKE
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people'll pay your price.
JOHN UPDIKE
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of ru...
JOHN UPDIKE
There's something very reassuring... about the written record.
JOHN UPDIKE
…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like li...
JOHN UPDIKE
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over...
JOHN UPDIKE
If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extincti...
JOHN UPDIKE
For a long time, I was under the impression that 'Terry and the Pirates' was the best comic ...
JOHN UPDIKE
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside o...
JOHN UPDIKE
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although ...
JOHN UPDIKE
Memory has a spottiness, as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.
JOHN UPDIKE
My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and uns...
JOHN UPDIKE
He imagines the plane exploding as it touches down, ignited by one of its glints, in a ball of red f...
JOHN UPDIKE
Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.
JOHN UPDIKE
I love you,” he says, and the fact that he doesn’t makes it true.
JOHN UPDIKE
Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It's not that you get better ideas, the old ones just g...
JOHN UPDIKE