A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

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The writer's job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.

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Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

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I have no desires, save the desire to express myself in defiance of all the world’s muteness.

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The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition

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Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.

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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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Genius is finding the invisible link between things.

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Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards.

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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.

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