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“I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be”
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“I liked that sentence then and I like that sentence now but then I had no way of making any sense of it, I could only keep it in my mind's eye, where it rested and grew in the embryo that would become my imagination”
― See Now Then
― See Now Then
“Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.”
― A Small Place
― A Small Place
“In a way, a garden is the most useless of creations, the most slippery of creations: it is not like a painting or a piece of sculpture—it won’t accrue value as time goes on. Time is its enemy’ time passing is merely the countdown for the parting between garden and gardener.”
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“I learned a lot, when I was a child, from novels and stories, even fairytales have some point to them--the good ones. The thing that impressed me most forcibly was this: the villains went to work with their brains and always accomplished something. To be sure they were "foiled" in the end, but that was by some special interposition of Providence, not by any equal exertion of intellect on the part of the good people. The heroes and middle ones were mostly very stupid. If bad things happened, they practised patience, endurance, resignation, and similar virtues; if good things happened they practised modesty and magnanimity and virtues like that, but it never seemed to occur to any of them to make things move their way. Whatever the villains planned for them to do, they did, like sheep. The same old combinations of circumstances would be worked off on them in book after book--and they always tumbled.
It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn't they ever read anything? Couldn't they learn anything from what they read--ever? It appeared not. And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it.
"A good villain. That's what we need!" I said to myself. "Why don't they write about them? Aren't there ever any?"
I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one.”
― Benigna Machiavelli
It used to worry me as a discord worries a musician. Hadn't they ever read anything? Couldn't they learn anything from what they read--ever? It appeared not. And it seemed to me, even as a very little child, that what we wanted was good people with brains, not just negative, passive, good people, but positive, active ones, who gave their minds to it.
"A good villain. That's what we need!" I said to myself. "Why don't they write about them? Aren't there ever any?"
I never found any in all my beloved story books, or in real life. And gradually, I made up my mind to be one.”
― Benigna Machiavelli
Never too Late to Read Classics
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NTLTRC will help you find your love of Classcis! Find intrigue, well-developed characters, prose that is complex and beautiful, compelling stories tha ...more
Luna’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Luna’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
50 books
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6 friends
140 books
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4 friends
6 books
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2 friends
0 books
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18 friends
172 books
|
1 friend
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