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At that, their quarreling commenced all over again. Their quarreling chewed through the curtains, pierced the casements, and rattled over the cobblestones outside. How strange it must have sounded, this quarreling about dematerialization, voluntary aging, goat gods, and immortality, to a city that was primed for the Age of Reason, a populace that was beginning to put Descartes before des horse.
Dr. Dannyboy has suggested a fifth element: positive thought. Pointing out that their breathing, bathing, dining, and screwing brought Alobar and Kudra much physical pleasure, and that an organism steeped in pleasure is an organism disposed to continue, he has said that the will to live cannot be overestimated as a stimulant to longevity. Indeed, Dr. Dannyboy goes so far as to claim that ninety percent of all deaths are suicides. Persons, says Wiggs, who lack curiosity about life, who find minimal joy in existence, are all too willing, subconsciously, to cooperate with—and attract—disease,
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“Death hath more than one way to defeat a man, it seems. Death bests thee even while thou liveth.”
Said in the context of deep grieving, wishing a departed love one’s return
there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe.
“I have spoken to you this afternoon of poetry and of sexual magic. Not too many years ago, the names of our perfumes bore testimony to such things. There was a popular scent called Tabu, there was Sorcery, My Sin, Vampire, Voodoo, Evening in Paris, Jungle Gardenia, Bandit, Shocking, Intimate, Love Potion, and L'Heure Bleue—The Blue Hour. Nowadays what do we find? Vanderbilt, Miss Dior, Lauren, and Armani, perfumes named after glorified tailors"—there were murmurs and gasps in the audience—"names that evoke not the poetic, the erotic, the magic, but economic status, social snobbery, and the
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By then, it was that part of the day that is officially morning but which any dunce can see is purest night.
If one has a religious life, one can rationalize one's slide into the abyss; if one has a sense of humor (and a sense of humor, properly developed, is superior to any religion so far devised), one can minimalize it through irony and wit.
They glared at her as if she were a piece of modern art at a county fair.
However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.
he was obviously an old man—Priscilla would have guessed seventy-five—yet he revealed not a tremor of the fear or fragility that so often causes us to look with pity, or disgust, upon the old.
In the end, politics is always a depressant, and I've preferred to be stimulated.
