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1 " Oh, the torment bred in the race, the grinding scream of deathand the stroke that hits the vein,the hemorrhage none can staunch, the grief,the curse no man can bear.But there is a cure in the house, and not outside it, no,not from others but from them,their bloody strife. We sing to you,dark gods beneath the earth.Now hear, you blissful powers underground --answer the call, send help.Bless the children, give them triumph now. "
― Aeschylus , The Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides
2 " Yet a much more fundamentally political dimension of the socially constructed nature of capital - nothing less than the specification of a parallel universe with its own natural laws and rules for the physical existence and subsistence of financial capital and its interaction with the other factors of production - has also often been overlooked in contemporary academic literature. Under the current monetary arrangements financial capital is a peculiar creature indeed. Money can be created ex nihilo at the stroke of a pen - or a keyboard - by a specific type of legal person entrusted with the task, not other legal or natural person. With the socially constructed ability to attract compound interest in a world where physical assets rot and break, it does not share the same physical reality with the mere mortal factors of production: even in cases where productive investments which enable the payment of interest in real terms can be identified, the compounding of interest on financial capital is not temporally limited to the period that the relevant physical assets can continue to produce exponential returns in real terms. Rather than representing accumulated wealth that could be " saved" to finance investment, the bulk of money disappears as soon as other factors of production are not willing to pay a tribute to induce its continuing circulation in the form of interest payments. In addition to the inherently political nature of specifications of money have been detached from virtually any substantive connection to the rules or the realities experienced by other factors of production in the physical world that is nonetheless supposed to achieve economic efficiency and a host of other objectives through monetary calculation and monetarily mediated social relationships deserves particular scrutiny. "
3 " Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon, which in crushing benumbs. "
― Ambrose Bierce
4 " Deep sadness is an artist of powers that affects people in different ways. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, shocking all the emotions to a sharper life. To another, it comes as the blow of a crushing strike. "
― Ambrose Bierce , The Boarded Window
5 " The master doesn’t need to chain his slaves; their needs will chain them to him. You can end slavery by the stroke of a pen, but the pressing call of necessity will reestablish it. "
― Bangambiki Habyarimana , Book of Wisdom
6 " And on this night, the last of its kind before we get married to each other at the stroke of 8 tomorrow in the evening, as I walk towards my bed to call the day off, the last puff of wind brought from a fairy-tale land urges me to write this letter as your girlfriend, for one last time. "
― Debalina Haldar
7 " Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men. "
― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower
8 " Most of the vegetables in the allotments had died back but one, tended by a Jamaican man, was full of squash. They lay among the dying leaves, rimmed with frost, huge, orange and alien, half hidden by the mist. They reminded her of the fairy stories she’d read as a young child, of white horses and gold carriages that turned into mice and pumpkins on the stroke of midnight. "
― Sanjida Kay , Bone by Bone
9 " I am a master wordsmith. I have the ability to bend words at will and invoke feelings with the stroke of my pen. But I'm yet to master the art of finding the right words to describe what happens in my heart when I see you. "
10 " Writers write because they're writers. Because their imaginations boil up inside of them, waiting to overflow into the written word. Ordinary people have little capacity for unyielding imagination, whereas the natural-born writer can do little but yield to the tug of imagination. Ordinary people may practice for years to 'perfect' the challenge of writing; but the one destined to create and destroy with the stroke of a pen, the strike of the key, their wells of imagination shall never run dry. "
11 " He almost blacks out again, but he’s not sure if it’s the stroke or the thrust gravity. He’s pretty sure driving blood pressure higher while having a stroke is considered poor form. "
― James S.A. Corey , Drive (The Expanse, #2.6)
12 " Balance, the stroke of the wise, the style of the sharp. The way, the groove. Bal-ance: the sole of the feet, the soul of the Universe, takes step after step down the beat to time: da DUM, da DUM. Bal. Ance. "
― Mark Donnelly
13 " The stroke of the whip maketh marks in the flesh but the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones. Many have fallen by the edge of the sword but not so many as have fallen by the tongue. "