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“What is the son but an extension of the father?”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“All our best men
are laughed at
in this nightmare land
but the newspapers preen
in virtue - Throughout
the world the left & right
the east & west, are both vicious”
― Jack Kerouac, Pomes All Sizes

“Who are you? A simple son of the soil, as you pretend to yourself? Oh, no. You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky… But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there's something here, something to find. Well, in the world you'd learn soon enough. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you'd always expect the world to be something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place to go in the world.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more
than other people, but care more about their opinion than our
own. If a god appeared to us—or a wise human being, even
—and prohibited us from concealing our thoughts or
imagining anything without immediately shouting it out, we
wouldn’t make it through a single day. That’s how much we
value other people’s opinions—instead of our own.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations