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Bonfires of the Vanities.
pusillanimous
It was clear then—as it is today—that Rotella and the carabinieri, despite all their missteps, were in fact on the right trail. The Monster of Florence was very likely a member of that Sardinian clan.
scuba knife
There was only a brief hesitation. Antonio never stopped smiling for a moment. “No,” he said. “I like my pussy alive.”
Wow!!
You cannot stare evil in the face; it has no face. It has no body, no bones, no blood. Any attempt to describe it ends in glibness and self-delusion.
“There is no longer true communication among us, because our very language is sick, and the sickness of our discourse carries us inevitably to sickness in our bodies, to neurosis, if not finally to mental illness. “When I can no longer communicate with speech, I will speak with sickness. My symptoms are given life. These symptoms express the need for my soul to make itself heard but cannot, because I don’t have the words, and because those who should listen cannot get beyond the sound of their own voices. The language of sickness is the most difficult to interpret. It is an extreme form of
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“Mental illness lies at the very end of this struggle to be heard. It is the last refuge of a desperate soul who has finally understood that no one is listening or ever will listen. Madness is the renunciation of all efforts to be understood. It is one unending scream of pain and need into the absolute silence and indifference of society. It is a cry without an echo.
We all have a Monster within; the difference is in degree, not in kind.”
“Dietrologia is the idea that the obvious thing cannot be the truth. There is always something hidden behind, dietro.
“In Italy,” he continued, “there is a permanent climate of witch-hunting.
Woe to the person”—he eyed me significantly—“who disputes their theory because that makes him an accomplice.
Spezi could not know what the crimes were—they were under a judicial order of secrecy.
In Naples, the heart is everything—courage, happiness, love. To rip it out of your enemy and bite it is to reduce your enemy to the level of meat, animal meat.
