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I know enough to know that no woman should ever marry a man who hated his mother.Martha Gellhorn
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You are all a lost generation, " Gertrude Stein said to Hemingway. We weren't lost. We knew where we were, all right, but we wouldn't go home. Ours was the generation that stayed up all night.James Thurber
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If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?Emily Dickinson
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My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.Virginia Woolf
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Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.Virginia Woolf
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For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone. Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.D.h. Lawrence
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And so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid —Emily Dickinson
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I don't know why we live–the gift of life comes to us from I don't know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is any yet left in the cup. In other words consciousness is an illimitable power, and though at times it may seem to be all consciousness of misery, yet in the way it propagates itself from wave to wave, so that we never cease to feel, though at moments we appear to, try to, pray to, there is something that holds one in one's place, makes it a standpoint in the universe which it is probably good not to forsake. You are right in your consciousness that we are all echoes and reverberations of the same, and you are noble when your interest and pity as to everything that surrounds you, appears to have a sustaining and harmonizing power. Only don't, I beseech you, generalize too much in these sympathies and tendernesses–remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another's, and content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own. Don't melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other–even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves–no one can know that better than you–but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see … .Henry James
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But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.Emily Dickinson
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The past is not a package one can lay away.Emily Dickinson
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I do not think it matters whether one agrees or not as long as one is forced to think.Vanessa Bell
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Irony takes nothing away from pathos.Gustave Flaubert
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I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am now leading a posthumous existence.John Keats
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A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.Gustave Flaubert