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All that we know is nothing, we are merely crammed wastepaper baskets, unless we are in touch with that which laughs at all our knowing.
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Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
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Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.
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You don't want to love - your eternal and abnormal craving is to be loved. You aren't positive, you're negative. You absorb, absorb, as if you must fill yourself up with love, because you've got a shortage somewhere.
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Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
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Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
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The war is dreadful. It is the business of the artist to follow it home to the heart of the individual fighters - not to talk in armies and nations and numbers - but to track it home.
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I shall be glad when you have strangled the invincible respectability that dogs your steps.
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I shall always be a priest of love.
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If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!
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Sex is the one thing you cannot really swindle; and it is the centre of the worst swindling of all, emotional swindling.... Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love.
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The Moon! Artemis! the great goddess of the splendid past of men! Are you going to tell me she is a dead lump?
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When one jumps over the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.
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One can no longer live with people: it is too hideous and nauseating. Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease.
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Night, in which everything was lost, went reaching out, beyond stars and sun. Stars and sun, a few bright grains, went spiraling round for terror, and holding each other in embrace, there in a darkness that outpassed them all, and left them tiny and daunted. So much, and himself, infinitesimal, at the core of nothingness, and yet not nothing.
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The Christian fear of the pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
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But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
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The day of the absolute is over, and we're in for the strange gods once more.
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The dead don't die. They look on and help.
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I cannot cure myself of that most woeful of youth's follies - thinking that those who care about us will care for the things that mean much to us.
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The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.
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Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.
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Loud peace propaganda makes war seem imminent.
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The American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn't got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.