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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living. Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
The natural world was a tightly integrated web, and every time humans messed with it, there were as many unintended consequences as there were intentional. But that was a lesson nobody ever seemed to learn.
Maybe it was a good thing that eager young people like Heidi here were ready to take up the challenge.
What is it Wilde wrote in that Dorian Gray book? “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”’
‘It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.’
Wicked thoughts can lead to wicked deeds,
and wicked deeds can, in turn, poison the mind further.
‘If you reduce people to savage circumstance,’ I said, ‘then savagery may indeed erupt.’
Under questioning, it is always best to share as much of the truth as possible, not only to display cooperation, but to obfuscate whatever portion of the tale you are hoping to conceal. A simple lesson of the storyteller’s art.
but regardless of his constitution, a man needs his whiskey and his cigars, or what’s the point of living at all?
If you have it within your powers to summon the devil, why not summon angels instead?’
