Background

 

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“Hurt, he’ll never be hurt—he’s made to hurt other people.”

 

 

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“Physical love is unthinkable without violence.”

 

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“Men with a history of violence live with the knowledge of eventual retribution.”

 

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“There were people whom you positively ached to please, somewhere deep-down, buried under the lofty contempt and outright dissmisal of them. There is always something in them that I envy, and I envy so very, very well. It is a delightful emotion, a thing of such fun. I do not know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust. If you failed with such people they would put you into a category in their minds where they could keep you and have contempt for you forever.”

 

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“Knowing how to behave on grand occasions has never been her problem; it’s the ordinary that could never sustain her interest.”

 

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“Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it’s not their fault, it is only how they are brought up.”

 

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“How could I feel nostalgia when he was right in front of me? How can you suffer from the absence of a person who is present?”

 

 

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“Never did anybody look so sad. Morose and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waves swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.”

 

 

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“I missed him. Love, I realized, is something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.”

 

 

 

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“Masks. She tried to keep on the right side of power, tried to be loyal to so many things that she herself couldn’t tell which one of her selves was authentic, if any.”

 

 

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“Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose. You play.”

 

 

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“You’re only young once, they say, but doesn’t it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.”

 

 

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“I do not know what it was about that man but just looking at him, I wanted to clout him on the head. It was a head that invited violence.”

 

 

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“I was taught that at the heart of all people, all things, lay raw self-interest. Sure, you could dress a person up nice, put pretty words in his mouth, but underneath the silk tie and pressed shirt was an animal. A territorial, hungry animal anxious to satisfy his own needs.”

 

 

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“I’ve tried to be forgiving. And yet. There were times in my life, whole years, when anger got the better of me. Ugliness turned me inside out. There was a certain satisfaction in bitterness. I courted it. It was standing outside, and I invited it in.”

 

 

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“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”

 

 

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“It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another’s heart.”

 

 

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“Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side.”

 

 

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“I could be denounced from the heavens, and it only makes people interested.”

 

 

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“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

 

 

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“A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. A woman must do what he can’t.”

 

 

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“Not all games are innocent. Some come dangerously close to cruelty.”

 

 

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“But it was too interesting, too new, too flattering, too deeply comforting to resist, it was a liberation to be needed, to hear the words, to fall again, and she could only let herself go deeper.”

 

 

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