The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't just that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses, or that you must be strong and steady as the horse careens to the far end of the arena and back with you riding on its back. It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart. The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either. It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind. Alexander Chee
About This Quote

Here is a list of quotes in a similar vein: "It's a funny thing. We don't spend our lives trying to get free, we spend them trying to feed our addictions." __________________________________________________ "It is when we lose the ability to pretend that life has some purpose that we begin to understand its true value." __________________________________________________ "The trick was not to think or feel or desire - the trick was to be floating in a place where these things no longer mattered and where they were not needed." __________________________________________________ "The world is changed by light; and such is the nature of light that its effect upon our minds is different at different times and places. It would be like comparing beauty to ugly: one can only see beauty when it has been given form." __________________________________________________ "Be kind, for everyone you meet is struggling, even the person who shouts the loudest." __________________________________________________ "To be beautiful is to be like something real, like a flower or a majestic animal, but beauty lies in what lies behind it, not in front of it. It lies in the hands that hold it and the mind that uses it, and it lies in what we do with it after we have used it.

And this is how we know that sometimes beauty can come from something ugly: when you see someone capable of using something beautiful in such a terrible way that you shudder. And this frightens you, for there are times when beauty can be so close to ugliness that you cannot tell them apart - until you look back on them again and again and see what they really were." __________________________________________________ "You will never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice" __________________________________________________ "Life has taught me how easy it is for us all to believe what we want to believe without having any way of knowing if what we believe is true. And I have learned that there are many ways in which life can hurt us before we die, without having done anything wrong ourselves" __________________________________________________ "We are always at war with ourselves because somewhere deep inside us exists an opponent who wants to win every battle without ever making peace with himself" __________________________________________________ "And at last I found myself alone in my room with two volumes open on my desk.

One was Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the other Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling" __________________________________________________ "What do I believe

Source: The Queen Of The Night

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