They were unexpected visitors, those stories were, he explained to the eager little boy, and they stood outside his door until they were asked to come in. He did not know why they called upon him and did not call on many others. They
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“You do not,’ cried Giovanni, sitting up, ‘love anyone! You never have loved anyone, I am sure you never will! You love your purity, you love your mirror—you are just like a little virgin, you walk around with your hands in front of you as though you had some precious metal, gold, silver, rubies, maybe diamonds down there between your legs! You will never give it to anybody, you will never let anybody touch it—man or woman. You want to be clean. You think you came here covered with soap and you think you will go out covered with soap—and you do not want to stink, not even for five minutes, in the meantime.’ He grasped me by the collar, wrestling and caressing at once, fluid and iron at once: saliva spraying from his lips and his eyes full of tears, but with the bones of his face showing and the muscles leaping in his arms and neck. ‘You want to leave Giovanni because he makes you stink. You want to despise Giovanni because he is not afraid of the stink of love. You want to kill him in the name of all your lying little moralities. And you—you are immoral. You are, by far, the most immoral man I have met in all my life. Look, look what you have done to me. Do you think you could have done this if I did not love you? Is this what you should do to love?”
― Giovanni’s Room
― Giovanni’s Room
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
― Dune
― Dune
“You don’t forget the face of the person who was your last hope.”
― The Hunger Games
― The Hunger Games
“Hope clouds observation.”
― Dune
― Dune
“I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act.
I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
― Giovanni’s Room
I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”
― Giovanni’s Room
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