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b7f480c
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All knowledge hurts.
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wisdom
disillusionment
experience
knowledge
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Cassandra Clare |
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b39147e
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I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
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disillusionment
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Oscar Wilde |
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eea716e
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"Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers." "
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gilding
disillusionment
idols
touch
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Gustave Flaubert |
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5127910
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I would look up at the moon and see that it was not the smooth orb we had all believed, but a pitted and scarred world with no air.
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reality
sita
disillusionment
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Christopher Pike |
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6f2b966
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But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn't going anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return. Was that so depressing? Who knows? Maybe that was 'despair.' What Turgenev called 'disillusionment.' Or Dostoyevsky, 'hell.' Or Somerset Maugham, 'reality.' Whatever the label, I figured it was me.
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reality
dostoyevsky
disillusionment
maugham
self
hell
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Haruki Murakami |
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8bc30f3
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When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn't have one. I didn't care. I finished the drink and went to bed.
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southern-california
disillusionment
los-angeles
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Raymond Chandler |
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984d3f9
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You will never win anyone through pity. You must create the right kind of dream, the sober, adult kind of magic: illusion born from disillusion.
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magic
dreams
disillusionment
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Sylvia Plath |
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a536d36
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In all the mad incongruity, the turgid stultiloquy of life, I felt, at least, securely anchored to myself. Whatever the vacillations of other people, I thought myself terrifically constant. But now, here I am, dragging a frayed line, and my anchor gone.
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cool-words
vacillation
incongruity
disillusionment
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John Steinbeck |
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7205990
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"Most of us hoped to be able to trust. When we were little we did not yet know the human invention of the lie - not only that of lying with words but that of lying with one's voice, one's gesture, one's eyes, one's facial expression. How should the child be prepared for this specifically human ingenuity: the lie? Most of us are awakened, some more and some less brutally, to the fact that people often do not mean what they say or say the opposite of what they mean. And not only "people," but the very people we trusted most - our parents, teachers, leaders."
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hope
truth
disillusionment
society
innocence
lie
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Erich Fromm |
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bcf27e6
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All writers are to some extent inventors, describing people as they would like to see them in life.
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idealism
disillusionment
evangelism
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Harold Bloom |
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0bde7f3
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Fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony.
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faith
sovereignty-of-god
disillusionment
disappointment
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Thomas Hardy |
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9636d57
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Something can only become an illusion after disillusionment. Before that, it is something real.
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lynda-barry
disillusionment
illusions
childhood
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Lynda Barry |
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0eac78e
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I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more--the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort--to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires--and expires, too soon, too soon--before life itself.
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youth
life
disillusionment
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Joseph Conrad |
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5a65531
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"The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men's House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility ... The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream--the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance."
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progress
illusion
business
disillusionment
race
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Ralph Ellison |
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2d199ae
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"Strike said "Huh" again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke."
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disillusionment
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Richard Price |
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86f4258
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Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.
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idealism
disillusionment
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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1eb158f
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The Republic cured me of the Republic.
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disillusionment
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Barbara W. Tuchman |