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“I imagine it's always easier to do something monstrous if you can convince yourself you aren't going to, up to the last minute, until you do.”

“NO USE!
THOUGH I SHATTER EVERY MIRROR IN MY KINGDOM...
IN THE WORLD...
IT WILL NEVER RESTORE ME TO NORMAL!
NOTHING
CAN EVER AGAIN
MAKE ME FEEL LIKE...A MAN!
AND, WHY SHOULD I WANT TO BE A
WHEN I AM
MERE MAN?
MORE..
SO MUCH MORE??
I AM HE WHO HAS RAVAGED A WORLD...
I AM
DOOM!
DOOM!
HE WHOSE
VERY NAME
BESPEAKS THE DIRE DESTRUCTION I CAN RAIN DOWN
UPON A HELPLESS
PLANET!”

“If the garden above was a fairy tale, there was another story being told in this place, one where the children never came home, and smiling wizards drank a soup of bones.”

“

‘Thank you for listening to me all those years. It does a man good to know that what he wrote has meant something...’

“

“It is often said that the best teacher is failure. This is true. But it is also the best killer. May you be lucky enough in failure to live, and unlucky enough in success to struggle.
-Proverbs for Towers and War, Zenaz, date unknown”

“But perhaps re-forming the truth into what you wanted it to be was not a trait merely of liars, but of all human beings.”

“IT BECOMES OPPRESSIVE, AN ENDLESS GALLERY OF GLOOM HUNG WITH DAMNED PORTRAITS BY BOSCH AND
AND DALI,
ALL DEPICTING THE SINS OF THE AGES AS PERSONIFIED BY IMAGINATIONS
KNOWING NO SHAME OR BOUNDS.”

“…she felt as if she'd been plunged into a nightmare world—an older world from a time before civilization, full of char and bodies, that perpetuated itself through violence and brutality without any possibility of change. Or perhaps it wasn't the past, but the future.”

“For a moment she was gripped by the strange idea that she wasn't even a person, but a ghost that had taken possession of a body it had seen while passing by.”

“She'd done every. thing in her power to keep him satisfied. She'd been everything he desired. He loved her. For that, wasn't she owed the right to make him do what she wanted?”

“…I swooned, under the impact of the ethical corollary.
—What is the ethical corollary?
—More.
—When you swooned, did you fall?
—I swooned upward.”

“It felt more like magic than magic. As though it could make everything all right. As if the whole world had become a different place.
But it hadn't.”

“Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind, and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire, and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

“Oppression follows logically from exploitation, so as to guarantee the latter.”

“Borges had written once of a distant wildfire, colored the pink of a leopard's gums. The cat was close enough now that Alice could see its raw wound of a mouth. She wondered if this was Borges's leopard. Fire in a maw, ravenous flame.”

“A red dog on a blue tree.
A blue dog on a red tree.”

Brilliant.

“Blade was born in an English brothel, and trained in hand to hand combat by a jazz trumpeter.”

“Today, when hardly any philosophical statement, no matter how daring, will be taken seriously enough to endanger the philosopher's life, even this rare chance of having a philosophical truth politically validated has disappeared.”

“She taught him about the intricacies of Chinese grammar, or really how there was none, and how in Chinese the conceptual metaphors for time and space were the opposite of in English. The Chinese believe you can see the past, but not the future, she explained; therefore you can only walk backward into the future.”

“As Aristotle put it, complete happiness was some form of study.”

“She felt, as she often did, that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world; that if she stopped holding herself together as a subject, she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea.”

“All reasons and principles come from emptiness. The meaning of this sentence is impossible to explain—be so good as to reflect on it yourself.”

“The body of a rock is the state of an unmoving mind, powerful and large.
Something inexhaustible that comes from the universal principle exists in the body. It is through this that the power of the mind resides in every living being. The grass and trees, which do not have a consciousness, are powerfully rooted in the earth. This mind is also found in the rain and the wind.”

“The white whale may only be a symbol of death!”

“
— The body knows.
— The body is perspicacious.
— The body ain't dumb.
— Words can't say what the body knows.
“

“IF CIVILIZATION IS GOING TO LAST, IF IT'S GOING TO AMOUNT TO ANYTHING MORE THAN JUST A PLACE TO WATCH TV AND GET CHEAP SNAKE MEAT, IT WILL ONLY BE BECAUSE WE'VE LEARNED TO DO ONE THING.”
“AND WHAT'S THAT?”
“TO CARE FOR PEOPLE WHO MEAN NOTHING
TO US.”
“GROAN. THAT MUST HAVE BEEN ONE CLAMMY
NIGHT OF LOVEMAKING THAT PRODUCED YOU, FLINTSTONE. WHATEVER.I'M GOING HOME!”

“Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him.”

Fred Flintstone: “We participated in a genocide, Barney.”
Waitress: “Scone sample?”

Fantasy audiobooks will end with the most crushing and dramatic sequence you’ve ever read and then leap right into a glossary of definitions.

“WE'RE
A CIVILIZATION
NOW, FLINTSTONE!
MEN ARE ONLY REMEMBERED
FOR THEIR
ACCOMPLISHMENTS.
YOU WANT AN AFTERLIFE?
THIS IS IT.”