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95e267a When all hope was gone, they heeded the counsels of despair. Had they continued to strive, defying their doom, some unforseen wonder might have occurred. And if it did not, still their glory would have surpassed their failure. inspirational Stephen R. Donaldson
d5b30bd Pacing back and forth now on the spur of his conflicting needs, Covenant growled, "Baradakas said just about the same thing. By hell! You people terrify me. When I try to be responsible, you pressure me -- and when I collapse you -- You're not asking the right questions. You don't have the vaguest notion of what a leper is, and it doesn't even occur to you to inquire. _That's_ why Foul chose me for this. Because I can't-- Damnation! Why don.. Stephen R. Donaldson
ce65374 Still, the best augurs are those who divine from the portents of the past. They compile phenomenal records. Glen Cook
9b5c333 Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The Glen Cook
8d13a67 It was one of those moments in which I become very uncomfortable. One of those times when nothing you say can be right, and almost anything you do say is wrong. I could see no answer but the classic Croaker approach. I began to back away. That is how I handle my women. Duck for cover when they get distressed. I almost made it to the door. She could move when she wanted. She crossed the gap and put her arms around me, rested a cheek against .. humour Glen Cook
407fdb6 In religion, precise truth has almost no currency. True believers will kill and destroy to defend their inaccurate beliefs. Glen Cook
ce28509 I cry for a little girl's dreams. I cry because the dreams will not die, though I am powerless to make them come true. Glen Cook
d535818 The imaginative is produced by the human mind as it tries to respond to something greater than itself, struggling to find images adequate to the reality. Alister E. McGrath
3d4be44 When the old poets made some virtue their theme, they were not teaching but adoring, leadership passion Alister E. McGrath
2aa6693 One of the most effective ways of changing the way people think is to change the way they worship. emotion thought-life work worship Alister E. McGrath
c2eaf23 I didn't want to be educated. It wasn't the right time of my life for concentration, it really wasn't. The spirit of the age among the people I knew manifested itself as general drift and idleness. We didn't want money. What for? We could get by, living off parents, friends or the State And if we were going to be bored, and we were usually bored, rarely being self-motivated, we could at least be bored on our own terms, lying smashed on matt.. work youth Hanif Kureishi
0a4ab5b Surely you've noticed that most people live without love, spending their lives trying to find people they're not turned on by. Hanif Kureishi
7c68c05 The best stories are the open ones, those you don't quite understand. Hanif Kureishi
76b82bd Truth telling, therefore, has to be an ultimate value, until it clashes with another ultimate value, pleasure, at which point, to state the obvious, there is conflict. Hanif Kureishi
089c33f Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. Hanif Kureishi
fb7d856 If you want to know a man, see how he is in love. Hanif Kureishi
2af9858 Of course, when you love the unwell, you constantly have to ask yourself: Do I love her, or her illness? Am I her lover or her healer? Hanif Kureishi
490c43e The world is made from our imagination ; our eyes enliven it , as our hands give it shape.Wanting makes it thrive; meaning is what you put in , not what you extract. you can only see what you are inclined to see, and no more. We have to make the new. Hanif Kureishi
e6c6bf1 lmwt~ ldhyn l ymwtwn ykwnwn mSdr z`j Manuel Rivas
f411fde The Epstein Drive hadn't given humanity the stars, but it had delivered the planets. James S.A. Corey
9ac351c Look for Joy: that's God's echo, and his footprint. Happiness . . . happiness and wittiness and cleverness do not count for much when the darkness falls. Joy is tougher. Sean Stewart
5bd823b When you look at the dark side, careful you must be ... for the dark side looks back. Sean Stewart
26de330 The behaviour of the English people I had run into was making it very difficult to nail down a theory that the reason my trip so far had been such a bizarre success, was that Irish people were crazy. One Englishman had spent a morning on the telephone trying to organise a helicopter to take me out to an island, when a boat was leaving only a few yards away, and here was another, making a two-hour round trip for no reason other than to lend .. hospitality irish-people welcoming Tony Hawks
6be6f19 yn nshnh hwshmndy st khh bpdhyrym m hm bh lTf w mHbt, thbt w rhnmyy nyz drym drst mthl anchh khwdkhn m nyz drnd. Alain de Botton
e00562d It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement. Alain de Botton
30eabd6 We incline towards feelings of isolation and persecution because we have an unrealistic sense of how much difficulty is normal. We panic too easily, as we misjudge the meaning of our troubles. We are lonely - not that we have no one to talk to, but because those around us can't appreciate our travails with sufficient depth, honesty and patience. This is partly because the ways we show the pain of our choppy relationships, envy or unfulfille.. Alain de Botton
795b4ea Though debts are condemned in the financial world, the world of friendship and love may perversely depend on well-managed debts. Alain de Botton
5e07b8d Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself (the crown for the monarchy, the wheel for the car, the White House for the US government, Chloe's.. Alain de Botton
8d944f5 The most significant fact of political life, which almost no news organization will dare to acknowledge - because it would at a stroke exclude half of its speculations and disappointments - is that in some key areas of politics, nothing can be achieved very quickly by any one person or party; it would be impossible for anyone - not simply this fool or that group of cretins - to change matters at a pace that would flatter the expectations of.. Alain de Botton
5b19fa8 b twjh bh pyshrft `lm, bry nsn mdrn dygr twn `tqd bh khd wjwd nkhwhd dsht. drntyjh dyn w ymn bzychhy myshwd dr dst frTyh w khsny khh dr mrHl pyny zjr w drd z bymry `lj npdhyr qrr drnd. Alain de Botton
1b41ffd Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything. Alain de Botton
f640078 The arrogance of wanting to be loved had emerged only now it was unreciprocated--I was left alone with my desire, defenseless, beyond the law, shockingly crude in my demands: Love me! And for what reason? I had only the usual paltry, insufficient excuse: Because I love you . . Alain de Botton
cfcbc3f A marriage doesn't begin with a proposal, or even an initial meeting. It begins far earlier, when the idea of love is born, and more specifically the dream of a soulmate. Rabih Alain de Botton
5e41630 It is difficult when reading the description of certain fictional characters not at the same time to imagine the real-life acquaintances who they most closely, if often unexpectedly, resemble. literature philosophy-of-life Alain de Botton
641cd16 In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow. Alain de Botton
13b770e Q: Did he think that love could last forever? A: Well, no, but the limits to eternity didn't lie specifically with love. They lay in the general difficulty of maintaining an appreciative relationship with anything or anyone that was always around. Alain de Botton
df3719e Valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present. Alain de Botton
c6a73d0 Nature's kind trick is to make everything happen so slowly that we don't get as scared as we should. Alain de Botton
93b0387 Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray. The woman who grows furious every time a politician breaks an election promise reveals a precariously utopian belief that elections do not involve deceit. The news.. hope journalism news optimism Alain de Botton
63a988c What should worry us is not the number of people who oppose us, but how good their reasons are for doing so. We should therefore divert our attention away from the presence of unpopularity to the explanations for it. It may be frightening to hear that a high proportion of a community holds us to be wrong, but before abandoning our position, we should consider the method by which their conclusions have been reached. It is the soundness of th.. Alain de Botton
bf17eb2 Differ though we might with Christianity's view of what precisely our souls need, it is hard to discredit the provocative underlying thesis, which seems no less relevant in the secular realm than in the religious one--that we have within us a precious, childlike, vulnerable core which we should nourish and nurture on its turbulent journey through life. christianity life needs nourishment nurturing religion soul Alain de Botton
2b654ca It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants, while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on.. Alain de Botton
73c9139 We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having found such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let along in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been abl.. Alain de Botton
fd40ebe There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as 'normal', as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple - all of this our lover can understand and accept us for. Alain de Botton