Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

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Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

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Realism can break a writer's heart.

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Masks beneath masks until suddenly the bare bloodless skull.

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I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.

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Faith without doubt is addiction

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Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.

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To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?

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Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.

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The only people who see the whole picture,' he murmured, 'are the ones who step out of the frame.

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