“The one generalization which is true about America is that everything is true about it. It's impossible to say anything that isn't true, good or bad. Our enemies are right. Our friends are right. It's an awful big country, an awful lot of different kinds of people in it, and violence always has been part of our story. It is, you know. I've seen it in my own lifetime, long before this period and we certainly read about it in history. That's the way we won in the country and stole it away from the Indians and all the rest of it... I've talked to people in other ex-colonies. Nice people. When you mention the British [they] burst into tears of anger. Literally tears of rage about our nice English cousins, so the bad things are true about them. They burnt the roofs off of the Irish and starved them out into the cold. There's nothing that you can think of that the English didn't do to that Island right next door to them, to the Irish over a period of seven hundred years. And we're English, then we added a lot of other violent mixtures to the brew. I think man is a crazy animal.”
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“It’s only in your twenties and in your seventies and eighties that you do the greatest work. The enemy of society is the middle class, and the enemy of life is middle age.”
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“Bast knew true silence was unnatural. To a careful ear, silence sounded like a knife in the dark.”
― The Narrow Road Between Desires
― The Narrow Road Between Desires
“Of all the echoing phrases in all the double talk of diplomacy, non-intervention is one the emptiest. There’s no such animal. If you see a man knock down a woman and you don’t knock down the man, you probably tell yourself you’re practicing the policy of non-intervention, but of course you’re doing no such thing. By failing to intervene on behalf of the woman, you are in fact intervening on behalf of the man.”
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“Agamemnon, Calchas, and Odysseus, on the other hand, know that one doesn’t grow powerful thanks to the gods: they take matters into their own hands and fight to have their names written into eternity. It is no wonder they have survived for so long: they are cruel and cunning. Although they are very different from one another, they have something in common—they believe they are special because no one but them sees the horrible things that need to be done. They believe others shy away from the brutal nature of life but that they are clever enough to see and act upon it.”
― Clytemnestra
― Clytemnestra
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