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21 " It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience; how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil. "
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 (Abridged)
22 " In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate was inescapable. Why did these women love each other to the point of madness? Why did they loathe one another so vehemently, and why did sworn enemies feel such horror and fascination for one another? Why should furious hate become obsession, then intoxication and the very reason to live?Because love and hate were the two heads of the demon. "
― Shan Sa , Empress
23 " The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over--this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success. "
― Simone de Beauvoir , The Woman Destroyed
24 " Our historical pastime is the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov describing how a peasant lashes a horse on the eyes, 'on its meek eyes,' everyone must have seen it. It's peculiarly Russian. He describes how a feeble little nag has foundered under too heavy a load and cannot move. The peasant beats it, beats it savagely, beats it at last not knowing what he is doing in the intoxication of cruelty, thrashes it mercilessly over and over again. 'However weak you are, you must pull, if you die for it.' The nag strains, and then he begins lashing the poor defenceless creature on its weeping, on its 'meek eyes.' The frantic beast tugs and draws the load, trembling all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort of unnatural spasmodic action- it's awful in Nekrassov. But that only a horse, and God has horses to be beaten. "
― Fyodor Dostoevsky , The Brothers Karamazov
25 " I could have blamed it on the intoxication of youth. Others might find fault on just intoxication. My parents would say that it was an act of plain stupidity. Reality would point out that it was Thursday night at college and the youth are prone to err. "
― Mara Joaquin , Lost in the Sky
26 " The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers. "
― Charles Baudelaire
27 " The feeling was less like chemical intoxication than being drunk on life. Spinning round and round, he experienced absolute bliss— unadulterated and unconfined—in which he transcended his own personality and became one with everything he perceived. "
― Sol Luckman , Snooze: A Story of Awakening
28 " Isn't it the task of the Holy Spirit to introduce some madness and intoxication into the world? Why this propensity for balance and safety? Don't we all long for one moment of raw risk, one moment of divine madness? "
29 " The intoxication with the theatre, with its limelight, costumes, and masks, and with its passions and conflicts, accords well with the adolescence of a man who was to act his role with an intense sense of the dramatic, and of whose life it might indeed be said that its very shape had the power and pattern of classical tragedy. "
― Isaac Deutscher , The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879-1921
30 " I had never tried other drugs... But how can any of them with their effects transcend the intoxication of a first love?! It swallowed me unexpectedly. It tied me to a man once and for all. It blinded me... Disarmed me... And made me lose my mind. "
31 " It was vertigo. A heady, insuperable longing to fall. We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down." -Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 76 "
32 " And when this intoxication has worn away... when every desire is fulfilled and every language learned- when there are no more distant cities to explore; no classics to be studied; not another coin to be stuffed in to one's coffers- what then? One can have all the comforts of the world, but what use are they if there is no comfort in them? "
― Seth Grahame-Smith , Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, #1)
33 " There was a kindliness about intoxication - there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. "
― F. Scott Fitzgerald , The Beautiful and Damned
34 " The day when a sportsman stops thinking above all else of the happiness in his own effort and the intoxication of the power and physical balance he derives from it, the day when he lets considerations of vanity or interest take over, on this day his ideal will die. "
35 " The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves. "
