Resemblances are the shadows of differences. Different people see different similarities and similar differences.

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There is nothing dictators hate so much as that unassailable, eternally elusive, eternally provoking gleam. One of the main reasons why the very gallant Russian poet Gumilev was put to death by Lenin's ruffians thirty odd years ago was that during the whole ordeal, in the prosecutor's dim office, in the torture house, in the winding corridors that led to the truck, in the truck that took him to the place of execution, and at that place itself, full of the shuffling feet of the clumsy and gloomy shooting squad, the poet kept smiling.

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Only one letter divides the comic from the cosmic.

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For I do not exist: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.

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And the rest is rust and stardust.

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I shall continue to exist. I may assume other disguises, other forms, but I shall try to exist.

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The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.

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Life is a message scribbled in the dark.

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Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical.

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I talk in a daze, I walk in a maze I cannot get out, said the starling

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