Quote collection
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"She fell asleep, lying there, her hand clasping his. Her last awareness, before she surrendered the responsibility of consciousness, was the sense of an enormous void, the void of a city and of a continent, where she would never be able to find the man whom she had no right to seek."
"Hank, this is great." "Yes." He said it simply, openly. There was no flattered pleasure in his voice, and no modesty. This, she knew, was a tribute to her, the rarest one person could pay another: the tribute of feeling free to acknowledge one's own greatness, knowing that it is understood."
"A quest for self-respect is proof of its lack"
"Today we have discovered the word that could not be said. "I"
"You know, I think that only if one feels immensely important can one feel truly light."
"Whatever their future, at the dawn of their lives, men seek a noble vision of man's nature and of life's potential."
"The three of them set out every morning on adventures of their own kind. Once, an elderly professor of literature, Mrs. Taggart's friend, saw them on top of a pile in a junk yard, dismantling the carcass of an automobile. He stopped, shook his head and said to Francisco, 'A young man of your position ought to spend his time in libraries, absorbing the culture of the world.' 'What do you think I'm doing?' asked Francisco."
"That which exists possesses identity; he could keep it out of existence by refusing to identify it."
"The view that man was ever to be drawn by some vision of the unattainable shining ahead, doomed ever to aspire, but not to achieve, my life and my values could not bring me to that."
"Degrees do not matter... one does not bargain about inches of evil."
"So long as men desire to live together, no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. . . . When a man attempts to deal with me by force, I answer him by force. It is only as retaliation that force may be used and only against the man who starts its use. No, I do not share his evil or sink to his concept of morality: I merely grant him his choice, destruction, the only destruction he had the right to choose: his own."
"You'd let the whole world perish rather than soil that immaculate self of yours with a single spot of which you'd have to be ashamed."
"What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue."
"It's such a waste to be subtle and vicious with people who don't even know that you're being subtle and vicious"
"When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience."
"We'll meet again. We'll meet when years have passed, and years make such a difference, don't they?"
"but their eyes were as cold blue glass buttons."
"Don't bother to examine a folly-ask yourself only what it accomplishes."
"My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists - and in a single choice: to live."
"Your eyes are as a flame, but our brothers have neither hope nor fire. Your mouth is cut of granite, but our brothers are soft and humble. Your head is high, but our brothers cringe. You walk, but our brothers crawl. We wish to be damned with you, rather than blessed with all our brothers. Do as you please with us, but do not send us away from you."