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1 " What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. "
― Friedrich Nietzsche
2 " And then there are those you stop counting the years with because they are here to stay.They are here. And they aren't going anywhere.Nothing will make them flinch.Nothing will make them think twice.They know you at your worst,the worst you didn't even know you had.They know the sound of your mood swings, the color of your anger, how you curse when you curse, how you shout when you throw a tantrum. They know when you're avoiding a subject. They know when you're lying. They know when you're jealous. They know your vices by heart and they celebrate them. They celebrate you-- vices included.They know your lost dreams and how life fucked you over. They know the battles you lost. And they think your fabulous when you think you're just an unlucky mediocre person who once thought will make it big in life.They know the last time you were happy. They see the unspoken sadness in your eyes. They know the words behind your silence. They know the photographs playing in your mind when you're looking afar.They know YOU, the naked YOU, the raw YOU, not the embellished YOU people see, not the YOU that will be read in biographies or in elegies once you're dead, not the YOU that introduces you to others.They love you from the bottom of their heart. They are your family regardless of their blood. They are your squad. They are your people.And no matter how many times you make them open the door, they can't walk out. They just can't. Because, just sometimes, when people say forever, they mean it. They do. "
― Malak El Halabi
3 " Some of them screamed. Some of them wept. Some of them grinned like LSD was a blast. A case officer said John Stanton hatched the idea - lets flood Cuba with this shit before we invade. Langley co-signed the brainstorm. Langley embellished it: Let's induce mass hallucinations and stage the second coming of Christ!!!! Langley found some suicidal actors. Langley dolled them up to look like J.C. Langley had them set to pre-invade Cuba concurrent with the dope saturation. Peter howled. The case officer said, 'It's not funny.' A drug-zorched peon whipped out his wang and jacked off. "
― James Ellroy , American Tabloid (Underworld USA #1)
4 " I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people. "
― Jean Giono , Voyage en Italie
5 " Well, Mr Markham, you that maintain that a boy should not be shielded from evil, but sent out to battle against it, alone and unassisted - not taught to avoid the snares of life, but boldly to rush into them, or over them, as he may - to seek danger rather than shun it, and feed his virtue by temptation - would you-''I beg your pardon, Mrs Graham - but you get on too fast. I have not yet said that a boy should be taught to rush into the snares of life - or even wilfully to seek temptation for the sake of exercising his virtue by overcoming it - I only say that it is better to arm and strengthen your hero, than to disarm and enfeeble the foe; and if you were to rear an oak sapling in a hot-house, tending it carefully night and day, and shielding it from every breath of wind, you could not expect it to become a hardy tree, like that which has grown up on the mountain-side, exposed to all the action of the elements, and not even sheltered form the shock of the tempest.''Granted; but would you use the same arguments with regard to a girl?''Certainly not.''No; you would have her to be tenderly and delicately nurtured, like a hot-house plant - taught to cling to others for direction and support, and guarded, as much as possible, from the very knowledge of evil. But will you be so good as to inform me why you make this distinction? Is it that you think she has no virtue?''Assuredly not.''Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith. It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin, is at once to make her a sinner, and the greater her knowledge, the wider her liberty, the deeper will be her depravity - whereas, in the nobler sex, there is a natural tendency to goodness, guarded by a superior fortitude, which, the more it is exercised by trials and dangers, it is only further developed-''Heaven forbid that I should think so!' I interrupted her at last.'Well then, it must be that you think they are both weak and prone to err, and the slightest error, the nearest shadow of pollution, will ruin the one, while the character of the other will be strengthened and embellished - his education properly finished by a little practical acquaintance with forbidden things. Such experience, to him (to use a trite simile), will be like the storm to the oak, which, though it may scatter the leaves, and snap the smaller branches, serves but to rivet the roots, and to harden and condense the fibres of the tree. You would have us encourage our sons to prove all things by their own experience, while our daughters must not even profit by the experience of others. "
― Anne Brontë
6 " These things were in the past now, many long years ago, though the memory remained as solid and present as his heartbeats. Time's passage had made the events seem almost crazed, hyper-real, stretched across a surreal dreamscape that felt more like a skjald's embellished saga than the intact past. Perhaps it had not happened like that. Perhaps the Lion had taken his Stormbirds to the Tyrant's fortress, and he himself had teleported in. Perhaps it had not been Ogvai there, but Gunn, or someone else. Had Bjorn been there too? It was a long time ago, so doubtful, but Bjorn seemed to always have been there, right from the start, just waiting for his time to come to maturity. "
― , Leman Russ: The Great Wolf (The Horus Heresy: Primarchs #2)
7 " The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagrant data that gravitated and stuck to what was left to remember. But in the end he rejected this idea. The memories were too perfect: take one detail away and they collapsed into disorder. "
― Nicole Krauss , Man Walks into a Room
8 " A typical Celestine will devote a large proportion of their time to passing through the inscribed sectors of the planet studying the writings, either alone or accompanied by companions with whom to share comments. This is a favourite pastime among them, and as they travel towards the boundaries of the inscribed regions they can watch the ongoing work of those Celestines that have been chosen to record their ideas – tirelessly twisting, pausing to gather energy, then exerting themselves again; painstakingly working the same patch of dust several thousand times over to shape each individual furrow; to capture, symbol by symbol, the knowledge they have contributed to the Celestine corpus. There is great pride and precision, as well as immense labour, in their toil. Before they commence work, the piece of ground that will house the writing will be chosen very carefully for its aspect. Then, the most favourable angle to the light will be calculated, for the orientation of the wording. The language used is of the most poetic and grandiose sort, quite different from the vernacular, and the symbols themselves are embellished with flourishes, extravagances and curlicues that are unique to the creator. Celestines love to observe this work, which constitutes the pinnacle of their art and of their ceaseless thought-endeavours, and embodies their very reason for being. "
9 " True poetry is composed of metaphors and symbols which are born in the heart, rise like clouds, and assume a celestial form; verses formed otherwise are not poetry, but only artificial words, each of which contradicts the feelings inside. The utterances and words that have not been formed in a person’s soul as the voice of conscience are all hollow, no matter how embellished they are or how dazzling they seem to be. "
― M. Fethullah Gülen , Speech and Power of Expression: On Language, Esthetics, and Belief
10 " Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. What is worse, they have fallen in love with this image, and can no longer accept that it is untrue. "
11 " God presents His works embellished with color, meaning, and content in order to make Himself known and loved to those seeking Him. We are sent to this world with the responsibility, then, to affect and reshape things with His permission, to reflect our understanding, but also to be attentive to the true purpose and meaning of the creation of things. "
12 " Any story worth telling has been embellished a little bit, Skyco, but the best stories are born from an honest seed that simply grows a little in the retelling of it. "
― , Spirit Quest (The Legend of Skyco #1)
13 " With the million or more words contained in the English language, one notorious word has been able to stand out and hold its title as the most physically demanding. Violence; a word commonly bestowed upon embellished acts of crude conflict, and physical contact. The word has never brought good feelings, or good thoughts, but rather emotions of unpleasant behavior due to the severity of its nature. Over the years, violence has evolved from a basic skirmish, to an array of things. Violence in modern day time is now being used to install fear, and to persuade innocent individuals into doing whatever the perpetrator desires, such as: personal gain, rape, and advancement of power. Every day another innocent person is being robbed, and demeaned by violent characters lurking the dark streets. Not only has violence been an ongoing epidemic, but it’s only getting worse as the years go on. We see horrendously violent acts being committed every day. "
― Slavoj Žižek
14 " He had a ruggedness about him that was appealing. Despite his groomed presentation, his chiseled face was shadowed with an attractive scruff of hair. His beautiful smile burned into me, melting me from the inside out while it exposed perfect white teeth embellished with alluring fangs. For a moment, I allowed myself to indulge in the idea of them sinking into my neck. Would it provoke the ecstasy I imagined or the horror I feared? "
― J.M. Northup , Soul Searching
15 " Another site of Leftist struggle [other than Detroit] that has parallels to New Orleans: Palestine. From the central role of displacement to the ways in which culture and community serve as tools of resistance, there are illuminating comparisons to be made between these two otherwise very different places.In the New Orleans Black community, death is commemorated as a public ritual (it's often an occasion for a street party), and the deceased are often also memorialized on t-shirts featuring their photos embellished with designs that celebrate their lives. Worn by most of the deceased's friends and family, these t-shirts remind me of the martyr posters in Palestine, which also feature a photo and design to memorialize the person who has passed on. In Palestine, the poster's subjects are anyone who has been killed by the occupation, whether a sick child who died at a checkpoint or an armed fighter killed in combat. In New Orleans, anyone with family and friends can be memorialized on a t-shift. But a sad truth of life in poor communities is that too many of those celebrate on t-shirts lost their lives to violence. For both New Orleans and Palestine, outsiders often think that people have become so accustomed to death by violence that it has become trivialized by t-shirts and posters.While it's true that these traditions wouldn't manifest in these particular ways if either population had more opportunities for long lives and death from natural causes, it's also far from trivial to find ways to celebrate a life. Outsiders tend to demonize those killed--especially the young men--in both cultures as thugs, killers, or terrorists whose lives shouldn't be memorialized in this way, or at all. But the people carrying on these traditions emphasize that every person is a son or daughter of someone, and every death should be mourned, every life celebrated. "
― Jordan Flaherty , Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six
16 " [I]t is no doubt true that our image of what a messiah might look like may keep us from recognizing the real thing when it stands before us. Could it be that we have embellished the long-awaited event with so many aggadic flourishes that we can no longer recognize the reality when it happens? Could our overly literal reading of our sages’ poetic descriptions have led us to overlook completely the miracle as it happened? One of the dangers of taking the statements and speculations of our sages as literal truth—when they were not meant as such—is the distortion of our expectations. "
― Nathan Lopes Cardozo , Foreword to A Damaged Mirror: A story of memory and redemption: Rabbi Nathan Lopes Cardozo discusses prophecy and memory
17 " A woman can slip on a pair of embellished cage heels one night and a pair of streamlined, lightweight sneakers the next day. The beauty of modern luxury is the absence of rules. "
