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61 " If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term. "
― David Mitchell , Cloud Atlas
62 " Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye. "
63 " She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman. "
64 " Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me. "
65 " Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves. "
66 " Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b'fore, o'course, but a mountain you're planning on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty, nay. "
67 " Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk. "
68 " My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops? "
69 " Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. "
70 " People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching. "
71 " Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. "
72 " Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. "
73 " We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely. "
74 " We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing. "
75 " Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears. "
76 " The weak are meat the strong do eat. "
77 " Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword. "
78 " Sunlight bent around the world, lending fragile color to wildflowers. "
79 " Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched. "
80 " The pieces fell into place. I fell into pieces. "