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There is no better teacher of rough necessity than bad luck, and you will have great use of me, I promise.
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But I am a sly and wicked narrator. If there is a secret to be plumbed for your benefit, Dear Reader, I shall strap on a head-lamp and a pick-ax and have at it.
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It was at thirteen years old that Marya Morevna learned how to keep a secret, and that secrets are jealous things, permitting no fraternization.
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Surely you didn't think deathless meant dickless.
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What matters is entertainment. Eternity takes forever. The infinite expanse of time just does not know when to quit. The dead fear boredom the way mortals fear death.
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Folk are just folk, wherever you go, and it's only a nasty sort of person who thinks a body's a devil just because they come from another country and have different notions
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The Glasshobs built it to keep an eye on the stars, who have a tendency to run off on adventures and forget about how much we down-below folks need to navigate and cast horoscopes and meet lovers on balconies.
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Funniest thing about love, how it shakes loose when no one's looking. How the dark helps it along. Maybe that's why we dug caves so much, way back when.
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A tale may have exactly three beginnings: one for the audience, one for the artist, and one for the poor bastard who has to live in it.
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The hinterlands. Where the criminals and the carnivals and the concatenating counterfeiters of no morals to speak of make a home.
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God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking.
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Morality is more dependent on the state of one's stomach than of one's nation.
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Flowers are always more serious than they appear.
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In both marriage and war you must cut up the things people say like a cake and eat only what you can stomach.
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I ate all of my husbands. First I ate their love, then their will, then their despair, and then I made pies of their bodies – and those bodies were so dear to me!
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People are clocks who think they wind themselves.
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Horses, in secret, love hats more than any other creature. It is a horse’s tragedy that they can never properly wear one.
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But soon the wine sack was empty, and sleep brushed my ears with her ash-lips.
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I can't stop," the shark rasped. "If I stop, I shall sink and die. That's the way I'm made. I have to keep going always, and even when I get where I'm going, I'll have to keep on. That's living.
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She must have cried for some secret amphibian reason. Then her dress caught on fire while they danced, and there was a mess, but that's neither here nor there.
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She is so stubborn, her heart has an argument with her head every time it wants to beat.
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People who share a secret share a heart.
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It's easier to use somebody if you can think of them as mute and dumb and made for your pleasure.
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A labyrinth, when it is big enough, is just the world.