My name is Percy Jackson. I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York. Am I a troubled kid? Yeah. You could say that.
Maybe I'd always been broken and dark inside. Maybe someone who've been born whole and good would have put down the ash dagger and embraced death rather than what lay before me.
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilisation, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine, with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age -- the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night -- are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.
"The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. ----- "A Clockwork Orange Resucked" intro to first full American version 1986"
It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
Is truth something that in fact we do--and should--especially care about? Or is the love of truth, as professed by so many distinguished thinkers and writers, itself merely another example of ?
"[Karen Lundegaard] was quite frail, debilitated by metastatic breast cancer, which she had long known she had but for which she had been unable to get adequate treatment because she lacked medical insurance. ("If you mention anything about me," she said, "tell people that.")" --
Do you prefer Mitch? Or is Mitchell better?'.. .. Mitch, I say. Mitch is what my friends called me. 'Well, Mitch it is then,' Morrie says, as if closing a deal. 'And, Mitch?' Yes? 'I hope one day you will think of me as your friend.