Everyone Brave is Forgiven
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Read between July 13 - July 24, 2016
44%
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One settled.
Donna Wilkey
Hmmm
49%
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Mary decided that she would never speak of how she felt.
49%
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It was the genius of motivated men that even when rendered impotent by conditions of total encirclement, they could make themselves preternaturally shiny.
Donna Wilkey
Hah!
49%
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Donna Wilkey
New word - rank just below captain ; second lieutenant
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it was prudent for their officer to drop by and project a soothing equanimity.
Donna Wilkey
Self sacrifice
51%
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London could, but here the great old nautilus lay gasping and cracked at the throat of the Thames, at the place where sweet water met salt.
54%
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if I went along with you, and attended your functions and married some outrageously suitable Henry, or whether you wouldn’t secretly be much happier if I just said ‘hang it all,’ and flew as close to the sun as I jolly well dared.” “Yes, you are quite right, you don’t know that.”
54%
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Donna Wilkey
Fulvous means reddish, yellow or tawny.
57%
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was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season.
Donna Wilkey
Title
57%
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One felt nothing at all from the dead. They died, and then they were gone, and one’s heart ached from the sudden absence of feeling more than from any surfeit.
Donna Wilkey
Loss
57%
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There in the sweet sacking smell of the mailbags he understood that he was dying, and it pleased him that he was going in the company of so many soft words home. He looked down through the Perspex side panel of the Wellington and watched the endless blue Mediterranean wash the blood away from all shores.
Donna Wilkey
A Sweet death
60%
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This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel. Dear Tom. Without the war they might have finished as friends.
64%
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“Don’t you think we shall all be kinder to one another? I hope one’s class will matter less and one’s convictions more. I hope we might be more inclined to pardon one another for our errors with both.”
66%
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When it was over, Alistair stood. He and Simonson watched the man in silence, not at all sure he was dead. If the war had proved anything it was that life had unexpected resistance to the instruments with which men had been issued.
Donna Wilkey
Resistance to death
78%
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There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely.
Donna Wilkey
Loss of body part
80%
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Everything can be restored. If one won’t believe that, how does one endure all this?”
Donna Wilkey
Hope
83%
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One was brought up to scorn the tendency to despair. But it seemed that the darkness knew this, and found a way to reach one nevertheless.
Donna Wilkey
A trick of Evil.
83%
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Donna Wilkey
New word - lucifulgous
85%
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You’re what I might have been if I’d ever had the courage to tell my mother to mind her own business.”
86%
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We are a nation of glorious cowards, ready to battle any evil but our own.”
Donna Wilkey
Facing the truth of society
88%
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Or else it was the solitude, in which the self hardened but also grew brittle.
Donna Wilkey
Effects of Solitude
91%
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The true moments of one’s life were sadder for the fact that they must always be synchronized with the ordinary:
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EATS NNLDNN CEMTHGY. He had drawn his thumbs together, isolating each letter as Mary had shown him. He had made a one-letter prison between his thumbs and slid it across the first word: E . . . A . . . S . . . T. He had repeated the word to himself, then interrogated the whole sentence. EAST LONDON CEMETERY. Beside the location had been written a plot number for a mass grave.
Donna Wilkey
I loved the authors explanation of dyslexia.
92%
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and so what if the man wrote around?
93%
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One knew how one felt only when things ended.
Donna Wilkey
You know what you when....
94%
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The staff at the Ritz had the quality of apologizing with a murmur for each of their perfect actions. They smelled of nothing and had faces that made no demands on the eye or on the heart. They melted into shade, not allowing themselves to be silhouetted against the chandelier. They eluded cognition entirely, like sorcerers, or fathers. At the tables all around them the guests chattered away as if life were not on the meter, while the waiters took away ash.
Donna Wilkey
Staff at the Ritz
95%
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One had only to follow one’s first name from table plan to wedding banns and all the way through to the headstone.
Donna Wilkey
Society
95%
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The heart declared only forgiveness, for which there was no grand precedent and no instrument of surrender.
Donna Wilkey
Def of love
95%
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It was an air one might still breathe, if everyone forgiven was brave.
Donna Wilkey
A life is ...
97%
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