purloined QUOTES

1 " Great teachers had great personalities and that the greatest teachers had outrageous personalities. I did not like decorum or rectitude in a classroom; I preferred a highly oxygenated atmosphere, a climate of intemperance, rhetoric, and feverish melodrama. And I wanted my teachers to make me smart. A great teacher is my adversary, my conqueror, commissioned to chastise me. He leaves me tame and grateful for the new language he has purloined from other kings whose granaries are filled and whose libraries are famous. He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom. Bad teachers do not touch me; the great ones never leave me. They ride with me during all my days, and I pass on to others what they have imparted to me. I exchange their handy gifts with strangers on trains, and I pretend the gifts are mine. I steal from the great teachers. And the truly wonderful thing about them is they would applaud my theft, laugh at the thought of it, realizing they had taught me their larcenous skills well. "

― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline

2 " As melancholia replaced the jarring of my invention, I sat.

Unable to breathe in the smog I had created, unable to stand on my betraying legs, unable to howl at the heavens over my sordid soul.

In this inferno, I became paroxysmic, my self-hatred, superparamount, numbness dulling the agony of such a devilish act,

An iron curtain fell upon the surrounding world, or at least what I had left of it to be owned by the laconic eclipse.

All the angels fled, disowning my prayers, the lurid world backed away, leaving me forsaken and detached,

I could no longer hear the bombings, hear them fall, my own fabrication, only the dead air that came after, the intense silence.

Cynical and paralyzed, I realized I had purloined a portion of Hell and given it to the unwilling Earth,

Punishing those I had no right to punish, judging those I had no reason to condemn, destroying cities I had never set foot in.

This is how I became Death, the destroyer of Worlds. "

― Moonshine Noire

3 " What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of " The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions. "

4 " My high school English teacher in junior year, Dr. Robert Parsons, assigned us some Poe stories, including 'The Black Cat' and 'The Purloined Letter.' Being an animal person, I had trouble with 'The Black Cat!' I got hooked instead by 'The Purloined Letter,' a Poe story with detective C. Auguste Dupin. "

5 " Like the firm handshake and looking people straight in the eye, the blazer had originally been a symbol of trust. Because of this, it had been purloined by the less-than-trustworthy and became their preferred disguise. "