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Quote by Fitz-James O'Brien

“Now, I can understand why the appearance of a man struggling violently, as it would seem, with an airy nothing, and calling for assistance against a vision, should have appeared ludicrous. Then, so great was my rage against the mocking crowd that had I the power I would have stricken them dead where they stood.”

Quote by Fitz-James O'Brien

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Fitz-James O'Brien

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“And then, on the final day, it was time for the faux Underground Railroad. This is the part that no one believes. "No adult would ever do that," they say. "You can't be remembering that right." I am, in fact, remembering it perfectly. The counselors "shackled" us together with jump ropes so we were "like slave families" and then released us into the woods. We were given a map with a route to "freedom" in "the North", which must have been only three or four hundred feet but felt like much more. Then a counselor on horseback followed ten minutes later, acting as a bounty hunter. Hearing hooves, I crouched being a rock with Jason Baujelais and Sari Brooker, begging them to be quiet so we weren't caught and "whipped." I was too young, self-involved, and dissociated to wonder what kind of impact this had on my black classmates. All I knew was that I was miserable. We heard the sound of hooves growing closer and Max Kitnick's light asthma wheezes from beind an oak tree. "Shut up," Jason hissed, and I knew we were cooked. When the counselor appeared, Sari started to cry.”

AbsurdHilariousChildhood MemoriesLudicrous
Book:Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"
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“What is it that Australians celebrate on 26 January? Significantly, many of them are not quite sure what event they are commemorating. Their state of mind fascinated Egon Kisch, an inquisitive Czech who was in Sydney at the end of January 1935. Kisch has a place in our history as the victim, or hero, of a ludicrous chapter in the history of our immigration laws. He had been invited to Melbourne for a Congress against War and Fascism, and was forbidden to land by order of the attorney-general, R. G. Menzies. He had jumped overboard, broken his leg, gone to hospital, failed a dictation test in Gaelic and been sentenced to imprisonment and deportation. When the High Court declared Gaelic not a language, Kisch was free to hobble on our soil...”

LawHistoryImmigrationAustraliaHilariousCzechGaelicAustralia DayLudicrousMenziesEgon Kisch
Book:Observing Australia: 1959–1999
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“The fires of refinement will shine the light of Christ into the dark places of our hearts, burn off the chaff, and restore us to a state of greater purity.”

Life QuotesFireLife And LivingLife Quotes And SayingsLife Lessons QuotesRefinementLifestyle QuotesLife ChallengesLight Of ChristRefinement Quotes
Book:No Regrets: How Loving Deeply and Living Passionately Can Impact Your Legacy Forever
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“This is why the conclusion of the book cannot be a strategy for winning the cultural game. Any such strategy would betray the thesis. The point is precisely that panludism cannot be solved by optimisation, because optimisation is the disease-form of play. The book instead closes on a criterion: whenever play is used to extract obedience, it ceases to be play; whenever play preserves the possibility of refusal, it becomes a form of freedom. The final level is therefore not triumph but exit. Not the victory screen, but the ability to stop, to step back, to accept loss without humiliation, and to remember that rules are human and victories provisional. In Homo Ludens 2.1 the most subversive act is not to play harder, but to play lightly. If panludism names the condition, then the answer to the condition is not a new ideology but a recovered attitude: the capacity to participate without surrendering the self to the scoreboard, and to treat even the most totalising games as what they are—temporary arrangements sustained only by continued belief. A culture that plays incessantly but cannot play freely is a culture at war with its own humanity. The task, then, is not to end play, but to rescue play from the systems that have learned to profit from it. Civilisation becomes dangerous not when people play, but when they forget that they are playing and mistake the game for destiny. Culture turns cruel at the moment seriousness hardens into necessity and rules begin to demand sacrifice rather than consent. To recover the ludic is therefore not to escape responsibility, but to remember that every role, institution, and value is sustained only by continued participation. Play is the last defence against absolute meaning, because it preserves the right to step aside, to lose, and to exit without disgrace. A society that cannot tolerate losing will always compensate by demanding victims. The most radical freedom left to Homo Ludens is not winning the game, but remembering that the game can always be left. The Ludicrous Culture survives wherever humans remember that meaning is something they play with together, not something that must be obeyed at the cost of life. “Play is older than culture, for culture presupposes human society, and human society has not waited for culture to begin playing. Civilization arises and unfolds in and as play.” —Johan Huizinga”

Ludicrous
Book:The Ludicrous Culture: Homo Ludens 2.1
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“The feasting people were Wood-elves, of course. These are not wicked folk. If they have a fault it is distrust of strangers. Though their magic was strong, even in those days they were wary. They differed from the High Elves of the West, and were more dangerous and less wise. For most of them (together with their scattered relations in the hills and mountains) were descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West. There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves went and lived for ages, and grew fairer and wiser and more learned, and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvellous things, before some came back into the Wide World. In the Wide World the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands that are now lost. They dwelt most often by the edges of the woods, from which they could escape at times to hunt, or to ride and run over the open lands by moonlight or starlight; and after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk. Still elves they were and remain, and that is Good People.”

FantasyElvesHigh ElvesWood Elves
Book:The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
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