Canned Quotes (page 732)
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The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure,...
Italo Calvino
...we never cease hoping--and thus did our Judge condemn us to suffer in saecula.'
Ferrante asked: 'But what is it that you hope for?'
You might as well ask what you will hope for yourself. ...You will hope that a wisp of wind, the slightest swell of the tide, the arrival of a single hungry leech, can return us, atom by atom, to the great Void of the Universe, where we would somehow again participate in the cycle of life.
Umberto Eco
Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.
Annie Dillard
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