Pain has an element of blank—
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It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.
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To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
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The snow was falling heavily outside. I sat before a blank page for close to ten hours. I refused to get up; instead attempted with great pains to coerce stubborn thoughts from my noodle. Useless it seemed until the 11th hour and then all I'd seen and felt and heard, arrived, and was transcribed effortlessly like the tune of chirping birds.
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Happy are the people whose annals are blank in history books
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God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time .
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It's no mystery why many of us in the media can't get enough of the fabricators Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, the latter of whom concocted more than a score of bogus feature stories for the New Republic (and who wrote for other magazines, including this one, once) in the mid-1990s. Anyone--journalist, student, academic--who has ever stared at a blank screen, their brains grinding emptiness, and thought, How can I fill this hole? knows that in those desperate moments before a deadline, almost anyone can do almost anything: make stuff up, plagiarize, scribble senseless half-truths.
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Individualism, as a definition of holding to personal ideals, is classed as obstinacy and anti-social. Inevitably we run point blank into the evils of compromise. When compromise enters our moral fiber, it spreads like a cancerous growth. We think we plan adequate safeguards around areas in which we contemplate yielding our standards, but once we lower the fence and break our strong will to do right, come what may, we expose ourselves to forces that spread beyond control. Compromise always starts on some rather insignificant principle. The dangers of yielding seem negligible and we usually risk those things first where observation and detection by others is difficult. We thus seek to avoid censure and discipline. In a short time we find ourselves trading our principles for false values and doing it in the black market of human relationships. . . .
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You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.
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When one has money like this, you want to invest it the best way possible, where you can maximize the gains from it, ... If you want to get money back to people, I think cutting taxes is a good idea, especially cutting taxes that are doing the most harm to the economy, rather than just giving a blank cheque to people.
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'Fairness' is one of the great mantras of the left. Since everyone has his own definition of fairness, that word is a blank check for the expansion of government power. What fairness means in practice is that third parties -- busybodies -- can prevent mutual accommodations by others.
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Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.
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You know...that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at. The wall of a museum -- a canvas -- a piece of film -- or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something -- that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you.
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We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic of life is its coerciveness it is always urgent, 'here and now,' without any possible postponement. Life is fired at us point-blank.
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Each new day is a blank page in the diary of your life. The secret of success is in turning that diary into the best story you possibly can.
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The past but lives in written words: a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips.
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People imagine that Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin arrived in Yalta with a blank sheet of paper to decide the fate of Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth,
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Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.
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I killed the President of Paraguay with a fork.
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The human brain is like a TV set. When it goes blank, it's time to turn off the sound.
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Vindication is the last thing I feel, ... The only thing I feel is satisfaction that I am no longer being met with blank stares.
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A blank, helpless sort of face, rather like a rose just before you drench it with DDT.
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I followed his argument with the blank uneasiness which one might feel in the presence of a logical lunatic.
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I am a blank slate - therefore I can create anything I want.
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A blank helpless sort of face, rather like a rose just before you drench it with D.D.T.
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Life is much like writing in ink : All you can do is read over your past and look forward to a blank page for your future that will soon be filled with words that can never be erased.
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Happy the people whose annals are blank in the history books
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I just finished my income tax forms. Who says you can't get wounded by a blank?
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The human mind is like a TV set. When it goes blank, it's a good idea to turn off the sound.
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It is OK to let your mind go blank, but please turn off the sound.
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