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28ef260
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People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their surroundings. so they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.
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people
human
life
chemicals
breakfast-of-champions
kurt-vonnegut
body
ugly
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Kurt Vonnegut |
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766dd96
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Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.
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mind
life
truth
denial
body
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Sara Gruen |
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9f5f37d
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He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.
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ancient-china
ancient-chinese
conquers
philosophical
philosophy
inspirational
chinese
body
training
ancient
fighting
warrior
self-realization
self-improvement
proverb
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Confucius |
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0f1111a
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Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings...but there's something dead about it, something deserted.
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solitude
sex
fantasy
love
arms
lack
body
need
desire
dead
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Margaret Atwood |
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6c9c7f9
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Action is the activity of the rational soul, which abhors irrationality and must combat it or be corrupted by it. When it sees the irrationality of others, it must seek to correct it, and can do this either by teaching or engaging in public affairs itself, correcting through its practice. And the purpose of action is to enable philosophy to continue, for if men are reduced to the material alone, they become no more than beasts.
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mankind
mind
reason
philosophy
continuance
civilization
body
rationality
materialism
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Iain Pears |
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6341d65
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Every secret of the body was rendered up--bone risen through flesh, sacrilegious glimpses of an intestine or an optic nerve. From this new and intimate perspective, [Briony] learned a simple, obvious thing she had always known, and everyone knew: that a person is, among all else, a material thing, easily torn, not easily mended.
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philosophy
truth
body
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Ian McEwan |
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3d1587b
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The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice. But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
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love
body
soul
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Milan Kundera |
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5802e95
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Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.
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history
body
self
home
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Rebecca Solnit |
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44ff264
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If someone wants to suck your toes, those toes should be worth sucking.
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toes
erotic
body
erotica
suck
feet
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Margaret Atwood |
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2fa74c9
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Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This gawky wormbent tabernacle.
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mortality
body
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Cormac McCarthy |
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d87f81f
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In some warped way, having an embalmed body with us made perfect sense.
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corpse
mummy
quest
body
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Tahir Shah |
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9a47fcd
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After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.
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body
old-age
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Margaret Atwood |
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abe99f7
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A pretty face and a beautiful body blind a man more quickly than any poker through the eyes.
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man
face
body
blind
pretty
eyes
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Francine Rivers |
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0ef26c6
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Life is a balance. We tend to forget that as we go blithely from day to day. We eat and drink and sleep and assume we will always rise up the next day, that meals and rest will always replenish us. Injuries we expect to heal, and pain to lessen as time goes by. Even when we are faced with wounds that heal more slowly, with pain that lessens by day only to return in full force at nightfall, even when sleep does not leave us rested, we still expect that somehow tomorrow will all come back into balance and that we will go on. At some point, the exquisite balance has tipped, and despite all our flailing efforts, we begin the slow fall from the body that maintains itself to the body that struggles, nails clawing, to cling to what it used to be.
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struggle
time
pain
reality
death
life
truth
tomorrow
strive
balance
body
believe
belief
health
decline
effort
fight
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Robin Hobb |
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69a80df
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Our heart is an organ that pumps our blood through our body, but our heart is also an organ that fills that blood with whatever we are feeling and the blood, the blood, the blood moves through every part of us, every fiber of us, every cell.
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heart
james-frey
emotions-love
katerina
body
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James Frey |
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858a3b5
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They never look very big on the table, the bodies. It's built to accommodate the largest frames, there's that. And they're naked. But it's something else. That parcel of the being called the soul-weighing twenty-one grams, according to the experiments of the American doctor Duncan MacDougall-takes up a surprising amount of space, like aloud voice. In its absence, the body seems to shrink
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death
dead-bodies
post-mortem
body
soul
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Yann Martel |
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8dd332d
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The major religious fundamentalisms--Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu--certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women's bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control--men's bodies, adolescents' bodies, infants' bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care... Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation's highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.
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nationalism
body
fundamentalism
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Antonio Negri; Michael Hardt |