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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown;
everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.
‘We are,’ said Mohammed, with a faint undertone of menace, ‘capable of virtually anything.’
There was once a young man named Desiderio who set out upon a journey and very soon lost himself completely. When he thought he had reached his destination, it turned out to be only the beginning of another journey infinitely more hazardous than the first
‘But how is one to distinguish between the will and a desire?’ ‘Desire can never be coerced,’ said Albertina with the crispness of a pedagogue even though, at that moment, she was coercing mine.
They prized fidelity above all other virtues. An unfaithful wife was flayed alive and her hide given to her husband to cover his next marriage bed, a mute deterrent to his new bride to keep from straying, while her lover was castrated and forced to eat his own penis, uncooked.
