A tide began to surge beneath the calm surface of Stephen's friendliness. This race and this country and this life produced me, he said. I shall express myself as I am. Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful. My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy that I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for? For our freedom, said Davin. No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Wolfe Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I'd see you damned first. They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet, believe me. Stephen, following his own thought, was silent for an instant... When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets ... Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
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At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.
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If the lilacs bloomed earlier, it could mean we had a milder winter, so look out for potential insect outbreaks.
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If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.
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The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
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Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later... that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.
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Our cravings canno't be comforted by our creativity, although we like to think they can. A million words after writing 'Look Homeward Angel' Thomas Wolfe was still tormented. After a million notes, Beethoven was not happy, after a million brush strokes, Van Gogh cut off his ear.
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Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.
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There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
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Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
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Knowledge is soon changed, then lost in the mist, an echo half-heard.
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These studies demonstrate that there are vulnerable patient populations and potential additional costs associated with surgery but suggest that surgical volume helps mitigate these risks and costs,
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Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
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You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
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It is comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved.
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You cannot hope to bribe or twist (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there's no occasion to.
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If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded and has a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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I try to know what I need to know. I make sure to know what I want to know.
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There is no limit to stupidity. Space itself is said to be bounded by its own curvature, but stupidity continues beyond infinity.
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One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
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The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art ... is merely romantic fiction.... The game is completed and the trophies...
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The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
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A cult is a religion with no political power
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A cult is a religion with no political power.
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be able to get away with twisting the truth a little bit, enough to convince patients to go to their doctors [and] to convince their doctors to prescribe the drug.
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It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.
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Over the past ten years, for the first time, intelligence had become socially correct for girls.
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