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Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous

Book by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low · 16 quotes · Age, Medicine, Wtf

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Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous Quotes

“Death for a noble cause, I understand, but...death for its own sake? Death as the...as the noble cause? That's not a good answer, either. It's not as bad as theirs, not as bad as those who are marching against you out there, but that...the fact that it's the worst answer doesn't make it a good answer. Isn't...isn't worshiping the inevitability of death just, like, just another bullshit way of trying to have the illusion of control over it?”

WarDespairFatalism
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“When she asked him why he'd shot her daddy, he just shrugged and said that he'd been planning on shooting six people when he rode into town. She looked up at him, eyes wide, batting her eyelashes, feigning awe, looking on him the way that Joshua must have looked on the walls of Jericho, and asked him why six; and he said back to her: because his pistol had six bullets in it. With another shrug, as though that answered everything. And then he turned to face her, with his livid scar and gap teeth and breath that stank like the devil and hell, and the words flashed sudden through her mind, clear as if they'd been laid out on parchment: this is what the face of a free man looks like.”

EvilFreedomNihilism
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“I must strive to remain rational. For surely reason, and reason alone, is the faculty which divides us from the lower beasts of this earth, who grunt and crawl about on all fours; it is the capacity that ennobles the human spirit above all others, if the human spirit is indeed a thing that can be ennobled - a supposition that I have of late been given copious cause to doubt. Yet still I find that I must trumpet the cause of reason, reason, human reason, above all else - if only because it was no brief time ago that I found myself bereft of its beneficence, reduced to a naked, howling, gibbering thing upon which I shudder to reflect.”

ReasonHumanism
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“He had seen dogs and ponies feverishly coupling with bored young girls, and overfed women with rats and mice crawling across their brown bare skin, and felt nothing; but at the sight of vertebrae pushing against the back of her neck, pushing between her perfectly symmetrical shoulder blades as she inclined her head forward, brow furrowed, his mouth went dry, and he felt the planet sliding beneath his feet.”

LoveMadnessAddiction
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“I nodded sagely, pretended to be making some sort of useful observation of the white surfaces and clear tubes and gray machines that I lacked the doctorates to comprehend, and thought about dualism. Good and evil. Man and woman. All forces and powers and principalities equal and opposite. The notion that we live in a universe with that kind of comforting, obvious ledger. That is the kind of thinking that makes people believe that the moon controls menstrual cycles, that vaginas are magic, when all they really are is blood and tissue and, in the instance of one particularly ugly case that I drink to forget about, teeth. They're impressively versatile and under the right circumstances a lot of fun, but no more or less miraculous than your twenty-ninth vertebra.”

FeminismDualismMagical ThinkingVaginas
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“Don't you understand? If that's the case, then - then everything is dicated by random chance! Somewhere, there's a universe where you - for whatever reason - you didn't come looking for me, and I - I slit my throat. And who's to say that this universe is somehow better than that one? How can we claim that we live in a moral universe, and that every other one is immoral?”

ExistentialismMultiverseAmorality
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“I silently absorb the statement. He's not the first person to call me an idiot. In fact, he's one of many. I guess I just have one of those faces, y'know? But in an age of cynicism, I choose to live with my senses open to the universe. Okay, yes, I did obliterate my trust fund on an MLM - well, technically, more than one - but that's a small price to pay for a universe of possibility.”

MlmPyramid Scheme
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