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1 " you can lie to everybody but yourself, because when you lie to yourself, all you do is train yourself to believe in lies, which makes it easier for your opponents to feed you theirs "
― Francesco Dimitri , The Book of Hidden Things
2 " When you are young, you are immense—then you shrink. Everything is possible at five, but what is left for you at forty? With every choice you make you renounce all the choices you could have made instead, and so you become smaller and smaller, each choice consuming you a little, burning your possibilities, until nothing is left of you. Death is a progressive shrinking that brings you from vastness to nothingness "
3 " The secret is that we all, boys and girls, think we are the centre of the universe. We think we are significant. You make someone believe that you think that too, that you think they are significant, and they'll do whatever you want, just to please you and confirm your belief. It's as simple as that. "
4 " Memory is like Alice's medicines; it makes things bigger and smaller at whim. "
5 " What we call a coincidence, he would say, is a system we don’t understand yet. "
6 " How is it that seventeen years have passed? Surely there is a mistake. They are dead and I am a grown-up who has wasted his best years following pipe dreams, squandering what little talent he had. "
7 " But we didn’t know what we were afraid of; we were just afraid, and our incapacity to put a name on that fear made it infinitely worse. "
8 " I haven’t heard that sound in fifteen, sixteen years, and it hits me so hard that is sends me flying, not through space, but through time, to travel back to when I was a teenager, to when I knew beyond a doubt that I was going to do brilliantly in life, that I had my friends on my side, and I was immortal. "
9 " Every grown man carries a dick-driven teenager inside, and we have to be careful not to unleash him; "