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Quote by Seneca

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Apocolocyntosis

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Seneca

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“Why do you think so few women run away? WHy do you think nothing really changes for book eaters, century after century?”…. “We lack imagination,” Devon said, relentless. “Even if we used dictaphone and scribes, we’d never be able to write books the way humans can. We struggle to innovate, are barely able to adapt, and end up stuck in our traditions. Just eating the same books generation after generation, thinking along the same rigid lines. Creativity is our world and yet we aren’t creative.”…… ‘Our childhood books always end in marriage and children. Women are taught not to envision life beyond those bounds, and men are taught to enforce those bounds. We grow up in a cultivated darkness and not even realize we are blind.”……. “I should have run sooner,” Devon said, voice cracking a little. “But I didn’t. Know what really stopped me? My lack of imagination, the same one that all ‘eaters suffer from. I could not imagine a better or different future, Hes, and because I couldn’t imagine it, I assumed it didn’t exist.” Her throat was lumping up. “I was wrong. Life can be different.”

FearCreativityImageTraditionalismA New Life
Book:The Book Eaters
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“If you are not aware of something, you are not actively directing the process. If you are not visualising a great family relationship, you are not actively participating in making it reality.”

Fear QuotesPurpose Driven LifeToxic RelationshipsFearless QuotesFamily QuotesPurposeful LifeToxic FriendsVisualisationA New LifePurposeful Quotes
Book:Broken Families: How to get rid of toxic people and live a purposeful life
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“Accept success as a good thing, and invite it into your life. Set today as the starting point for a new life. Every race starts at one point. Every building starts with one stone. Every great work, every dream, every great achievement starts somewhere. The march of a thousand miles begins with one step, said Confucius. Everyone, absolutely everyone, have to start the walk somewhere. It does not matter where you are right now. It does not matter if you are a student, a professional, a housewife, a peasant coming to the city looking for a better life. It does not matter if you are unemployed and out of work (or as I like to refer to it: awaiting for a really wonderful and transformative life experience that I was not having in my former employment). What matters is not if you have a lot or have a little; but what you decide to do with what you have.”

SuccessA New Life
Book:YES! TO SUCCESS
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“You see, it is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with which we teach them to respond to it--all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.”

SoulDevilPerseveranceTemptationAttritionDrabness
Book:The Screwtape Letters
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“Why don't you just do it, then?" Racath hissed. "Just kill me. I dare you." Now, I assume you know what this is. You've seen this before in other stories - the part where the disgruntled villain stands over the hero. He is triumphant, the hero now at his mercy. But when commanded to slay him, he hesitates. He lowers his sword. And he says: "I cannot." If you are to take away but one thing from the words I have spoken, let it be this: there is a world of difference between "I Cannot" and "I will not". "I cannot" is a surrender. It implies a lack of options. Someone who says such a thing does so only because they have no other choice. They do not WISH to relent - in fact, they usually want to obey their mandate and destroy the hero at their feet. But they cannot, because the guilt is too unbearable. But that does not make him a better man; all that a man who says "I cannot" has done, is given in to the compulsion to repent. Allow me to make myself perfectly clear - I HAD other options. Easy options. Simple options. I could have killed Racath Thanjel that day. I could have killed him and all the others, too. I could have left them dead and bloody on that grassy hill, and gone trotting back to the Imperator's lap. I could have shrugged off the attrition that had dogged my every step, thought better of my disenssion, given up on all hope of absolution and accepted my damnation. And I could have spent the rest of eternity destroying God's green earth at Lavethion's side. I could have. It would have been so easy. So simple. So wrong. And I didn't want to. And so I took a sickened step away. Stabbed Osveta into the grass. Shook my head. And said: "I won't.”

HeroRepentanceVillainPenanceDissensionAttritionPenitent God
Book:Dissension: the Second Act of Penance
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“My palm connected with the final looking-glass. A wave of brittle fractures rippled outward from the place my sanguine hand had struck. It shattered. I watched the pieces of my former life--the reflection of this monster I'd become—fall about my feet in a hailstorm of blood, tears, and broken mirrors. My attrition was complete. And now dissension boiled in my veins. I would find my penance. Even if God could not forgive me, even if she could not forgive me...maybe I could at least find the power to forgive myself.”

PenanceDissensionAttritionPenitent GodSaccarri
Book:Dissension: the Second Act of Penance
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