Someone said to me once that a cigarette at the right moment is better than all the ideals in the world.

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Keep things at arm's length. If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

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Mirrors are there when we are and yet they never give anything back to us but our own image. Never, never shall we know what they are when they are alone or what is behind them.

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We have our dreams because without them we could not bear the truth.

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With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.

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For a moment I had a strange intuition that just this, and in a real, profound sense, is life; and perhaps happiness even - love with a mixture of sadness, reverence, and silent knowledge.

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But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.

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Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

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Every little bean must be heard as well as seen!

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To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

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