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It is no the truth which you seek; it is not the guilty whom you punish; the innocent, having no crimes to confess, are the victims of your cruelty, or, to escape from it, become criminal and proclaim a lie.

A dark malignity overspread the features of the monk, and at that moment Vivaldi thought he beheld a man whose passions might impel him to the perpetration of almost any crime, how hideous soever. He recoiled from him, as if he had suddenly seen a serpent in his path, and stood gazing on his face....

[H]e heard a sudden sound near him, and raising his head from the clock, he perceived the same figure! Before he had time for exclamation, the stranger crossed him again, "Go not to the villa Altieri," said he in a solemn voice, "lest you meet the fate you ought to dread."

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house,
Write loyal cantons of contemned love'And sing them loud even in the dead of night.

It took about an hour to make the étoufée. We peeled the shrimp, then wilted the vegetables, and added tomatoes and garlic. I found peace in the small motor activity.... To cook is to heal.

Madame de Burne felt herself specifically born to the role of a fetish, created for that mission assigned to women by nature -- to be worshipped and pursued, to triumph over men by beauty, by grace, by coquetry and charm. She was indeed a sort of human goddess, delicate, disdainful, and demanding, worshipped by men whose love enthroned and deified her, like so much incense.

During her years of marriage, a longing for revenge may have germinated within her heart, an obscure need to pay all men back for what she had received from one of them, to be the stronger in her turn, to bend their wills, to search out their resistances, and to make them suffer too.

I wondered whether in the last month, now that curfew was over, she had chosen a different rendezvous, and I wondered with whom. That she had found a substitute I had no doubt. No one banks on fidelity nowadays.

Zen is not a systematic explanation of life, it is not an ideology, it is not a world view, it is not a theology of revelation and salvation, it is not a mystique, it is not a way of ascetic perfection, it is not mysticism as this is understood in the West, in fact it fits no convenient category of ours.

Just when I am sure he is a rapist and a swine, a sexual predator beyond the bounds of society and law, his conviction that he is doing nothing that the women around him don't wish him to do almost convinces me.

All of us dig at our own pure holes. We have nothing to achieve by our activities, nowhere to get to. Is there not something marvelous about this? We hurt no one and no one gets hurt. No victory, no defeat.

Junior coughed into a white handkerchief, inspecting it before putting it back in his pocket. Never trust a man who carries a handkerchief, I always say. One of many prejudicial rules of thumb.

As for the children, they were walking in an endless gray column down a gray, muddy road, walking, stumbling, slipping and falling in the pouring rain, walking, huddled, soaked to the skin, clutching pitiful wet bindles in little blue paws....

Countries Mr. President liked were conducting just wars in the name of their respective nations, and also democracy. Countries Mr. President disliked for whatever reason were conducting annexationist wars -- or not wars so much as thuggish, rapacious attacks.

What you just don't get, apparently, is how an unshaven, hysterical, inveterate drunk can still be a great person, a person you can't help loving, a person you worship, whose hand it's an honor to shake, because he made it through a hell it's terrifying even to imagine and managed to stay human nonetheless.

I was also thinking about all the dismal, absurd, and even suspicious things that keep happening to me lately, as if Whoever Is Supposed to Oversee My Fate had gone utterly stupid with boredom and started playing pranks.

He cites the case of the Tarahumara Indians of [Mexico]; while the family as a whole are laboring in the fields it is the office of one man to dance uninterruptedly on the dance place of the house; if he fails in his office the labour of the others will be unsuccessful.

The sadness of others one should leave alone. It is a small garden, a fragile delicate Arcadia, one should not disturb it.

For the young woman who 14 years earlier had smuggled herself into Alexandria to plead for her diminished kingdom, it was a sensational reversal. Cleopatra stood divine and indomitable, less queen than empress, the supreme Roman commander [Antony] at her side. Her rule extended over a vast swath of Asia, its frontiers established and now at peace.

Within a matter of days [after Caesar's death] Cleopatra traded the persistent gloom and chilly air of Europe for the opulent warmth of Egypt. In sunny Alexandria she returned to the grind of public business and private audiences.... She would never again set foot in Rome. She had played the game cannily and correctly, more effectively than any Ptolemy before her, only to find herself back at square one....

She's a three-o'clock woman, a woman who never wants to go to bed, who has to keep her emotions at fever pitch no matter how, who has to drink, smoke, and talk until she falls into a man's arms out of sheer nervous exhaustion.

They would fail. We would always fail. We weren't built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn't change them. We had a built-in shortsightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we traveled.

The Godfather was the glorification of a bunch of bums who never existed. The best of them were the kind of people you'd expect to drive a beer truck. They had no class. The classy gangster is a Hollywood invention.

Other conservative senators muttered that it was a mistake to give the theatre—that most Greek of institutions—a permanent home in the city. In the past most of the audience for any performance had stood, and they feared that giving them seats would just encourage more citizens to waste their days as idle spectators.

Battles usually lasted for hours, but hand-to-hand fighting was physically and mentally exhausting and seems usually to have occurred in short furious bursts, before the lines separated by maybe just a few yards, drew breath and tried to build up enough enthusiasm to close again.

Although his political instincts had failed him a few times during these days, Caesar had shown his ability to realize that he had made a mistake and the skill of recovering from it.

Ultimately, most of the Roman elite preferred to allow some of the major problems facing the Republic to go unanswered rather than see someone else gain the credit for dealing with them.

I began to see that among the many universes in which the world of living creatures existed, some were large, some small, but that all, including man's, were in some way limited or finite. We were creatures of many different dimensions passing through each other's lives like ghosts through doors.

During the Buddha's last months, he always taught, "Take refuge in yourselves, not in anything else. In you are Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Don't look for things that are far away. Everything is in your own heart. Be an island unto yourself."