“
Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.
”
”
Frederick Buechner (The Alphabet of Grace)
“
There is no such thing as a clean slate. I know that now. You just embrace your dirty slate and build over it.
”
”
Tarryn Fisher (Thief (Love Me with Lies, #3))
“
Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but every day is a clean slate and a fresh opportunity
”
”
Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project)
“
What’s broken is broken—and I’d rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I live…I’m too old to believe in such sentimentalities as clean slates and starting all over.
”
”
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
“
Appetite comes with eating. So does the truth. If we are willing to come clean, spill the beans, and spit out the truth, we can start with a clean slate and peace of mind, living a life without guilt or fear. ("Behind the frosted glass”)
”
”
Erik Pevernagie
“
A fool may scrawl on a slate and if no one has the wit to wipe it clean for a thousand years, the scrawl becomes the wisdom of ages.
”
”
Mark Lawrence (King of Thorns (Broken Empire, #2))
“
Because dogs live in the present. Because dogs don’t hold grudges. Because dogs let go of all of their anger daily, hourly, and never let it fester. They absolve and forgive with each passing minute. Every turn of a corner is the opportunity for a clean slate. Every bounce of a ball brings joy and the promise of a fresh chase.
”
”
Steven Rowley (Lily and the Octopus)
“
I know absolutely nothing about where I'm going. I'm fine with that. I'm happy about it. Before, I had nothing. I had no life, no friends, and no family really, and I didn't really care. I had nothing, and nothing to lose, and then I knew loss. What I cared about was gone; it was all lost. Now I have everything to gain; everything is a clean slate. It's all blank pages waiting to be written on. It's all about going forward. It's all about uncertainty and possibilities.
”
”
Gregory Galloway (As Simple as Snow)
“
I loved him in that moment, loved him more than I'd ever loved anyone, and I wanted to to tell them all that I was the snake in the grass, the monster in the lake. I wasn't worthy of this sacrifice; I was a liar, a cheat, a thief. And I would have told, except that a part of me was glad. Glad that this would all be over with soon. Baba would dismiss them, there would be some pain, but life would move on. I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)
“
There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.
”
”
Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes)
“
Because sometimes it’s easier to start over with a clean slate than to drag the baggage of your past with you wherever you go.
”
”
Shaun David Hutchinson (We Are the Ants)
“
I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
Does it ever make you sad?"
"Does what?"
"The Sunset,"
"Sad? Nah, I think it's peaceful."
"Not to me. I've always found it depressing."
"How so?"
"I guess because it's the end. I hate endings."
"Not all endings are bad though. I think of sunsets more as a clean slate. Besides, they're beautiful... like you"
"Beautiful things never last.
”
”
Steph Campbell (Grounding Quinn)
“
You have a clean slate every day you wake up. You have a chance every single morning to make that change and be the person you want to be. You just have to decide to do it. Decide today’s the day. Say it: this is going to be my day.
”
”
Brendon Burchard
“
Mornings are like almost clean slates. I say almost clean because the residue of yesterdays is sometimes stuck on them.
”
”
Medeia Sharif (Bestest. Ramadan. Ever.)
“
You’ve got a chance to start out all over again. A new place, new people, new sights. A clean slate. See, you can be anything you want with a fresh start.
”
”
Annie Proulx (The Shipping News)
“
Who needs to be a Phoenix for rebirth? One simply requires themselves and an instrument to clean the slate and start over, perhaps create their own world where everything is better..
”
”
TheBakaViolinist
“
I wanted that, to move on, to forget, to start with a clean slate. I wanted to be able to breathe again.
”
”
Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)
“
I want a clean slate with you, Clare. You’re special to me. I don’t know what we’re doing or where it’s going but I’ve never felt anything like this, and I can’t mess that up by doing the same shit I’ve always done.
”
”
J.L. Berg (When You're Ready (Ready, #1))
“
...you betrayed me, but after all those years I discover, my tears have wiped the slate clean...
”
”
John Geddes (A Familiar Rain)
“
I like mornings because each day is like another chance.
”
”
Carrie Arcos (Out of Reach)
“
To properly do penance one must express contrition for one’s sins and perform acts to repair the damage caused by those transgressions. It is only when those acts are complete that the slate can truly be wiped clean and amnesty gives way to a new beginning.
”
”
Emily Thorne
“
You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)
”
”
Robert A. Caro (The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York)
“
It seems silly to worry about the arbitrary moment some person long dead declared to be the end of one year and the beginning of another, as if our attempts to divide time into meaningful chunks actually mean anything. People wait for the countdown to tell them it's okay to believe in themselves again. They end each year with failure, but hope that when the clock strikes twelve, they can begin the new year with a clean slate. They tell themselves that this is the year things will happen, never realizing that things are always happening; they're just happening without them.
”
”
Shaun David Hutchinson (We Are the Ants)
“
People need to stand up for their wrongs, as they stand up for their rights.
”
”
Anthony Liccione
“
Clean slate?
No no never.
That's not life.
Life is beginner mind with a full slate
a dirty slate
whatever slate you've got,
you are,
complicated interactions
(with related and unrelated history and triggers),
unfinished tasks and incomplete projects.
”
”
Shellen Lubin
“
Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate.
”
”
Arthur C. Clarke (Rama II (Rama, #2))
“
I want to look out a window at something bright and wide, and at that point accept my nature and understand my intended use and have a clean shirt and clean hands and feel similar to a small planet.
”
”
Jenny Slate (Little Weirds)
“
Tomorrow when I awaken, the slate will be clean, and a new day will stretch before me. God's mercies are new every morning.
”
”
Lori Hatcher
“
But the thing is, my slate will never be swiped clean--this will never fade into the background and become some sort of learning experience or bump in the road. The shit that happened in my life and this book is real. And because I finally woke up to that whole realization much too late--the realization that life really happens and there is always a consequence for your actions--I lost everything in some sense, but in a weird kind of great way, if you flip it all around, I may have gained the most important thing of all: the truth.
I can live with that.
”
”
Jason Myers (Exit Here.)
“
Who are we really? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random for some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply?
Or the same soul, immortal and eternal, refurbished and reused through endless lives, by that thrifty Housekeeper? In Her wisdom and benevolence She wipes off the memory slates, as part of the cleaning process, because if we could remember all the things we have experienced in earlier lives, we might object to risking it again.
”
”
Barbara Michaels (The Sea King's Daughter)
“
Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it.
”
”
Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person)
“
I had just finished cleaning up after breakfast when my cell phone rang.
The caller identification came across as ‘G-Man’?
“Hello?”
“Hey baby,” the soft, sexy voice said.
“Slate?”
“Who the fuck else would be calling you that?”
“Did you program your number into my cell phone?”
“Uhh, yeah - is that a problem?
”
”
Andrea Smith (Diamond Girl (G-Man, #1))
“
You’re safe here and you can start fresh. Your slate is clean with me.
”
”
K.A. Tucker (Four Seconds to Lose (Ten Tiny Breaths, #3))
“
One look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate,,, The obliteration of memory.
”
”
Colum McCann
“
Each new breath and moment is a gift. We can choose to start with a clean slate in the here and now.
”
”
K.J. Kilton
“
I am renewed and I feel like a brand-new person that has a new, clean slate.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (Dying on The Inside and Suffocating on The Outside)
“
What makes me think I could start clean slated?
The hardest to learn was the least complicated
”
”
Indigo Girls
“
Starting anew with a clean slate has been one of the most harmful ideas in history. It treats previous knowledge as an impediment and imagines that only present knowledge deployed in theoretical purity can make real the wondrous new vision.
”
”
Stewart Brand (The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility)
“
By then I had moved often enough not to have the usual illusions about a clean slate or a fresh start or a new life. I knew that I could not escape myself. And the idea of beginning again, with no furniture and no friends, was exhausting. So my happiness then is hard to explain. I am tempted now to believe that entering the life one is meant to inhabit is a thrilling sensation and that is all.
”
”
Eula Biss (Notes from No Man's Land)
“
She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate
”
”
Isabel Allende
“
Like—getting a new start doesn’t mean you have to
wipe the slate clean. Just pick up the pieces. Begin again.
”
”
Emma Lord (Begin Again)
“
Even if you forget that´s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean; you can´t reclaim the person you were beforehand; your state of innocence is not there to be retrieved.
”
”
A.S.A. Harrison (The Silent Wife)
“
I’ve always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.
”
”
Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
“
Have you even thought that who you are now is exactly the person you’re supposed to be? That maybe with the slate wiped clean of bullshit outside influences that you are now more yourself than ever before?
”
”
T.M. Frazier (King (King, #1))
“
He knew there was no magic to wipe clean the slate of memory. You just learned how to move on.
”
”
William Kent Krueger (Lightning Strike (Cork O'Connor, #0))
“
The work of man is done behind the back of the natural world. When nature notices, and can muster the energy, it wipes the slate clean again.
”
”
Dave Eggers (A Hologram for the King)
“
I cannot predict what the future will bring when tomorrow may not come. Any number of things may happen. God may decide He's had enough of us and wipe the slate clean.
”
”
Kerri Maniscalco (Hunting Prince Dracula (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #2))
“
I've always loved walking through cities at dawn. The sense it gives you of entering into a new existence with a clean slate.
”
”
Glenn Haybittle (Scorched Earth)
“
Life says: " Write down your experiences in a notebook, not on a blackboard. Don't start with a clean slate, but with a new page, so you can look back.
”
”
Naveed Nawab Ali (Life Says)
“
Life after parents is like a clean slate.
[Rachel Mondray]
”
”
Katy Hays (The Cloisters)
“
Your energy in the morning is a clean slate, and you get a chance each day to build it up the way you want
”
”
Mridula Singh
“
Before? That was a false start. This? This is a clean slate. I want all your right nows. All your tomorrows. I want it all with you.
”
”
Elsie Silver (A False Start (Gold Rush Ranch, #4))
“
A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.
”
”
Joseph Conrad (Lord Jim)
“
People like to talk about clean slates. But the only truly clean slate is a new one. The rest are gray from whatever’s been written on them before.
”
”
J.P. Delaney (The Girl Before)
“
Because each of us is the sum of all we have ever experienced. Only the very young have a clean slate. The rest of us must live forever with everything we have ever been.
”
”
Arthur C. Clarke (Rama II (Rama, #2))
“
It was always the same for her when she arrived to meet the body. After she unbuckled her seat belt, after she pulled a stick pen from the rubber band on the sun visor, after her long fingers brushed her hip to feel the comfort of her service piece, what she always did was pause. Not long. Just the length of a slow deep breath. That's all it took for her to remember the one thing she will never forget. Another body waited. She drew the breath. And when she could feel the raw edges of the hole that had been blown in her life, Detective Nikki Heat was ready. She opened the car door and went to work . . . Heat could have made it easier on herself by parking closer, but this was another of her rituals: the walk up. Every crime scene was a flavor of chaos, and these two hundred feet afforded the detective her only chance to fill the clean slate with her own impressions.
”
”
Richard Castle
“
What a thing it is to live in New York City. To move here and not know a soul. A clean slate, a chance to walk away from the past and start anew...I will feign coolness. I will slowly learn the art of not showing that I am surprised or impressed or moved. I will feel the elation that comes from anonymity. I will feel the comfortable loneliness of wandering the avenues in the rush of humanity, the side streets by myself.
”
”
John Kenney (Truth in Advertising)
“
The question isn't whether we're guilty; it's how we deal with that guilt. Do we seek to shift it; seek to work it off; carry it till it crushes us; or give it to Jesus, let Him deal with it, and know the burden lifting wonder of a clean slate?
”
”
Mike McKinley (Passion)
“
Set aside the old traditional notion of female as nurturer and male as leader; set aside, too, the new traditional notion of female as superwoman and male as oppressor. Begin with that most frightening of all things, a clean slate. And then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: Because they are what I want, or wish for. Because they reflect who and what I am.
This is the hard work of life in the world, to acknowledge within yourself the introvert, the clown, the artist, the homebody, the goofball, the thinker. Look inside. That way lies dancing to the melodies spun out by your own heart.
”
”
Anna Quindlen (Being Perfect)
“
We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. For not living up to some standard we think applies across the board to all of us. We all spend our lives trying to follow the same path, live by the same rules. I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.
”
”
Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person)
“
Hermione looked at him, not blinking. It was a moment before she replied, “I know that you served your time on Azkaban Station.” She looked out the porthole into the inky blackness of space, twirling her fork between her fingers. “Everyone here is hoping for a clean slate when they reach Alpha Centauri, but that will only happen if we all agree to forget and forgive the past. As far as I’m concerned, you’ve earned your redemption.
”
”
Refictionista (Alpha Centauri)
“
There's nothing wrong with trying to change things you don't like about yourself, but i don't think you need to wipe the slate clean.
”
”
S.H. Kolee (Love Left Behind)
“
Everyone starts out with a clean slate to soil.' (Daisy, 'Friendship on Fire', p. 280)
”
”
Danielle Weiler
“
Mornings are the best time of day, Isadora. A clean slate. A chance to do better than you did yesterday.
”
”
Courtney Walsh (The Happy Life of Isadora Bentley)
“
Making a fresh start isn't just a matter of having a new address in a new town. It isn't a matter of having a new job or a new phone number or even a new name.A fresh start requires a cleaning of the slate and that means paying off all that you owe and collecting all that you are due.
”
”
Amor Towles (The Lincoln Highway)
“
There's nothing worse than feeling miserable on a beautiful day. It was one of those days where the weather was so perfect it was almost painful, the sky a clean slate of blue, and the soft, warm breeze playing on my cheeks and through my hair as if to say, "Come on, it's not THAT bad.
”
”
Robert Haller (Another Life)
“
Great Benefactor! How absurd- to want pain! Can there be anyone who doesn't know that pain is a negative quality, and that if you add them up it reduces the sum we call happiness? so it follows...
But...nothing follows. The slate is clean. Naked.
”
”
Yevgeny Zamyatin (We)
“
The man thinks of multiverses, of splits, of the momentous moments when there is a new reality created. He wonders about retroactive continuity and reboots, the opportunity, in comic books, to start with clean slates, to write fresh, to correct the mistakes that were made. He feels now, looking at the new Shopwise, that it cannot offer the same kind of happiness as Fiesta Carnival, that the rifts and tears in his reality are things he must accept, and that he is happy with the girl, in another multiverse.
”
”
Carljoe Javier (The Kobayashi Maru of Love)
“
...diverting one's attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something.
”
”
Richard Russo (Empire Falls)
“
They had fought and starved and even died in pursuit of mankind's oldest dream, but they hadn't known that Tear's vision was flawed. Too easy. Utopia was not the clean slate Tear had imagined, but an evolution. Humanity would have to work for that society, and work hard, dedicating themselves to an unending vigilance against the mistakes of the past. It would take generations, countless generations perhaps, but--
”
”
Erika Johansen (The Fate of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling, #3))
“
I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
And this makes me cry even harder. All those nights she had no idea that I went to bed angry at her. Or if she had known, she has forgotten. Because dogs live in the present. Because dogs don’t hold grudges. Because dogs let go of all of their anger daily, hourly, and never let it fester. They absolve and forgive with each passing minute. Every turn of a corner is the opportunity for a clean slate. Every bounce of a ball brings joy and the promise of a fresh chase. She
”
”
Steven Rowley (Lily and the Octopus)
“
Like—getting a new start doesn’t mean you have to wipe the slate clean. Just pick up the pieces. Begin again.
”
”
Emma Lord (Begin Again)
“
Now here we are, smiling, all that stuff behind us, slates clean, fresh air, ready to laugh over new jokes.
”
”
Gabe Durham (Fun Camp)
“
You will be cleaned by your own focus, by not being seduced into self-indulgence.
”
”
Jenny Slate (Little Weirds)
“
Once you’ve truly forgiven someone, wipe the slate clean. So often we form judgments about people and then, no matter what they do, we see them through the lens of that judgment. Which means we’re just waiting for them to piss us off again. Which means we’re still in the Forvginess-lite stage; we’re pretending we’re cool but we’re really still holding on to some resentment. Release all expectations, let everyone off the hook, treat people as a blank slate over and over again, expect only the best from them regardless of what they’ve done in the past
”
”
Jen Sincero (You Are a Badass®: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life)
“
The undermining of Christian faith, systematically pursued by Western cultural and political elites, does not lead to some sort of secular Utopia with its own “neutral” morality, but to the rise of religious beliefs other than Christianity, which will bring their own – often opposite - moral values.
On the clean slate of atheism anything can be written, even sharia law.
”
”
Giorgio Roversi (The Amorality of Atheism)
“
If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied.
”
”
Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature)
“
There was no gradual, consensual, conflict-free evolution toward greater equality. In the twentieth century it was war, and not harmonious democratic or economic rationality, that erased the past and enabled society to begin anew with a clean slate. What
”
”
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
“
People are just the ashes of Dead Stars. We are just a collection of atoms that come together for a brief period of time and then we just fall apart. When all this is over and we are dispersed into nothingness we have a clean slate like all of your sins whipped away.
”
”
Krystal Sutherland (Our Chemical Hearts)
“
The poet Mary Oliver did this in one of her poems, brazenly asking, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” If you’re afraid you’ve come to this question too late, you are wrong. Ask your Stargazer self. It will tell you what my fallen-noble friend Marianna told me in one of my darker hours: that the world is re-created in every instant of time, and this moment is always your life’s beginning. No matter how many years have been stolen from you by your own ignorance, by cruel fate, or by the acts of others, you have a clean, broad slate before you. In this instant—this one now—you can begin steering by starlight, and if you do, the rest of creation will conspire to guide, teach, and help you.
”
”
Martha N. Beck (Steering by Starlight: The Science and Magic of Finding Your Destiny)
“
Truth in theatre is always on the move. As you read this book, it is already moving out of date. it is for me an exercise, now frozen on the page. but unlike a book, the theatre has one special characteristic. It is always possible to start again. In life this is myth, we ourselves can never go back on anything. New leaves never turn, clocks never go back, we can never have a second chance. In the theatre, the slate is wiped clean all the time.
In everyday life, "if" is a fiction, in the theatre "if" is an experiment. In everyday life, "if" is an evasion, in the theatre "if" is the truth. When we are persuaded to believe in this truth then the theatre and life are one. This is a high aim. It sounds like hard work. To plays needs much work. But when we experiences the work as play, then it is not work anymore. A play is play.
”
”
Peter Brook
“
Jaeshawn!” I screamed. My hips bucked off the bed, as the sucking grew more intense. I could feel a tightening sensation in my stomach that sent tingles to the ends of my toes. He stopped sucking and roughly dragged his tongue over my love button, over and over again, until I felt like I was going to explode. "Jaeeee!” I screamed as I started to ride his tongue.
”
”
Jaguar Jonez (Dem Country Girls Love Hard: Everybody Starts Off With A Clean Slate (Country Girl #1))
“
Fatally, the term 'barbarian' is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century. It refers to the despiser of achievement, the vandal, the status denier, the iconoclast, who refuses to acknowledge any ranking rules or hierarchy. Whoever wishes to understand the twentieth century must always keep the barbaric factor in view. Precisely in more recent modernity, it was and still is typical to allow an alliance between barbarism and success before a large audience, initially more in the form of insensitive imperialism, and today in the costumes of that invasive vulgarity which advances into virtually all areas through the vehicle of popular culture. That the barbaric position in twentieth-century Europe was even considered the way forward among the purveyors of high culture for a time, extending to a messianism of uneducatedness, indeed the utopia of a new beginning on the clean slate of ignorance, illustrates the extent of the civilizatory crisis this continent has gone through in the last century and a half - including the cultural revolution downwards, which runs through the twentieth century in our climes and casts its shadow ahead onto the twenty-first.
”
”
Peter Sloterdijk
“
Even an elderly person can decide to wipe the slate clean and reinvent themselves, because they, too, have their whole life ahead of them. What matters isn’t how many more years we might live but what we will do with the time we have left.
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Héctor García (The Book of Ichigo Ichie: The Art of Making the Most of Every Moment, the Japanese Way)
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Thoughts that you do not let go leave an imprint on your mind. That imprint is the residue. Meditation is the process of washing away that residue. It is the cleaning of your slate and keeping it that way. When we fail to abandon our thoughts, they assume different forms. They can become desires, expectations or emotions.
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Om Swami (A Million Thoughts)
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Now I just needed to get fake married to my real husband and clean the slate of assassins.
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Tate James (Kate (Madison Kate, #4))
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You need to forgive yourself. The Lord has already wiped the slate clean. Don’t doubt His good judgment.
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Ruth Logan Herne (Running on Empty)
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You see, God has given us all the clues we need in a complex mystery, and we just need to figure it out. Along the way, we learn, and we become better people
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Amelia C. Adams (A Clean Slate (Kansas Crossroads, #4))
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Life after parents is like a clean slate."
"But at such a high cost.
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Katy Hays (The Cloisters)
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Sorry does not turn back the clock. It allows a rewind for a clean slate for a fresh start.
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Self-Help Psychology Guides
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With the Internet, Facebook, YouTube, there's no such thing as an unbiased jury anymore. No clean slate.
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Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl)
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Learn to travel light. Do anything necessary to start each new relationship with a clean slate.
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Annette Vaillancourt (How to Manifest Your SoulMate with EFT: Relationship as a Spiritual Path)
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We are all born with a clean slate, and what happens afterward depends on people that surround us.
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Mary Ting (From Gods (Descendant Prophecies, #1))
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Anyway, I wanted to get rid of it all & start a new life in Tokyo with a clean slate as a brand-new person. Try out the new possibilities of a new me.
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Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
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I want to start over. I want a clean slate. I can’t bear it. Everything that makes me happy hurts someone.
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C.D. Reiss (Forbidden (Songs of Perdition, #1-3))
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The universe provides us with a clean slate in every moment; God's creation holds nothing against us.
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Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles")
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clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.
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Joseph Conrad (Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad)
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an instant apart, and every meeting is a fresh start. A clean slate.
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Victoria Schwab (The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue)
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The lovely thing about money is that it really doesn't discriminate. Each and every day starts with a clean slate.
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Richard Templar (The Rules of Wealth: A Personal Code for Prosperity (The Rules Series) by Richard Templar (2006-12-08))
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We write one thing we're going to leave behind in the old season and then we burn it. We start off every year with a clean slate.
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Trish Lundy (The One That Got Away with Murder)
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All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.” —Anatole France
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Megan Thomason (Clean Slate Complex (Daynight, #1.5))
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We stood by and allowed what happened to the Great Plains a century ago, the destruction of one of the ecological wonders of the world. In modern America, we need to see this with clear eyes, and soberly, so that we understand well that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate wiped almost clean of its original figures.
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Dan Flores (American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains)
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Have you ever experienced a shattering in your own personal life? Where death, divorce, financial loss, failure, or disaster changed your world to such an extent that you weren’t sure how to rebuild again? Clearing the debris from the aftermath is a great first step. It enables you to start with a clean slate so you can rebuild exactly what you desire. Where can you begin?
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Susan C. Young
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Our goodness, our badness all develop from social experience, the company we keep, the things we're taught when we're young. We start with a clean slate. It's everyone else who fucks us up.
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S. Walden
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But right now, I’m going to beg you to give me another shot. Before? That was a false start. This? This is a clean slate. I want all your right nows. All your tomorrows. I want it all with you.
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Elsie Silver (A False Start (Gold Rush Ranch, #4))
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Outside there's a chill in the air that reminds me autumn is on the way, even though it's still only September. This time of year is my absolute favourite; the leaves start to turn golden and wither away after their summer of hard work, and the sun seems to shine a lot more clearly as the mist from the summer heat disappears. Everything just seems a little brighter and fresher--a clean slate. That's exactly what I need.
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Zoe Sugg (Girl Online: Going Solo (Girl Online, #3))
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Any beginning is a time of special power for habit creation, and at certain times we experience a clean slate, in which circumstances change in a way that makes a fresh start possible—if we’re alert for the opportunity.
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Gretchen Rubin (Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives)
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He knew that when someone loves someone this much that they forgive everything. They will not even be aware that forgiveness is needed because they see you as perfect in all that you are and in all that you do. They live their lives in total love for themselves and for you, so that nothing you do can hurt or harm them because their love is stronger than anything that can happen. This level of love wipes every slate clean and becomes the basis of a love that will grow and grow until it is bigger and stronger than anything that could ever threaten to destroy it.
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Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan's - The Lizard from Rainbow Bridge: A True Tale of an Animal Spirit Angel (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Series Book 2))
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This was the clean slate he had thought about on the boat coming over from America. This was the real annihilation of his past and of himself, Tom Ripley, who was made up of that past, and his rebirth as a completely new person.
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Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1))
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Hello? Tonight I am going to the Restaurant, where I will eat a killed and burned-up bird and drink old purple grapes and also I will gulp clear water that used to have bugs and poop and poison in it but has been cleaned up so that it doesn’t make us blow chunks. Oh Joy I am going to the Restaurant and I am just drooling at the thought of the killed and burned bird and I want to sip the grape gunk and so I put skin-colored paint all over my face and I dab pasty red pigment on my lips and swish peachy powder on my cheeks and I take a pencil and draw an eye-shaped line around my eye so that people know where my blinkers are.
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Jenny Slate (Little Weirds)
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We’re starting out with a clean slate. Both of us. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. But in our home, in our bed, it’s just you and me for as long as you want me.” He places his hand on my heart. “No more yesterdays. Only right now and the future. Together.
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Willow Aster (Whore)
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But the benefit of starting from rock bottom is that you've basically been handed a gift: a clean slate. Your pride's been demolished, your ego is pulverized, your fear of failure has been realized in its most brutal forms, you are...free.
Suddenly you're able to shake the judgment of others in a way you never could before, because you no longer give a shit what they think! You've entered a primal survival stage, one you didn't even realize existed. Now all your energy must be reserved for action, for making things happen.
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Sarah Centrella (#FutureBoards: Learn How to Create a Vision Board to Get Exactly the Life You Want)
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Ratzinger was afraid to intervene on a deadlocked Roman Curia, with reformers on one side, and the money changers on the other,” wrote author Gianluigi Nuzzi. “So he decided to create a clean slate by bowing out and paving the way for the election of a strong Pope.”34
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Gerald Posner (God's Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican)
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People who have never canoed a wild river, or who have done so only with a guide in the stern, are apt to assume that novelty, plus healthful exercise, account for the value of the trip. I thought so too, until I met the two college boys on the Flambeau.
Supper dishes washed, we sat on the bank watching a buck dunking for water plants on the far shore. Soon the buck raised his head, cocked his ears upstream, and then bounded for cover.
Around the bend now came the cause of his alarm: two boys in a canoe. Spying us, they edged in to pass the time of day.
‘What time is it?’ was their first question. They explained that their watches had run down, and for the first time in their lives there was no clock, whistle, or radio to set watches by. For two days they had lived by ‘sun-time,’ and were getting a thrill out of it. No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke.
Before our young adventurers pushed off downstream, we learned that both were slated for the Army upon the conclusion of their trip. Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were ‘on their own’ in this particular sense.
Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.
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Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac; with essays on conservation from Round River)
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You can be born again and have your slate wiped clean of lying, stealing, even murder. And if you do these things again later but honestly apologize to God, your sin is again forgiven. But sex outside of marriage is the only "sin" that I have ever heard described as changing you.
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Linda Kay Klein (Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free)
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But then there are those moments, Colton, when you watch your child do something and are so damn proud of them you are left speechless. And those moments take every single doubt and fear and heartache and moment of insanity you’ve ever had and wipe the slate clean. That’s how I felt watching you go to see your dad. That’s how I feel knowing you and Ry are going to adopt Zander. That’s how I feel watching you be a father. Hell, son, when you stepped up to the plate after Rylee got sick and swung it out of the goddamn park by taking care of Ace? I’ve never been prouder.
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K. Bromberg (Aced (Driven, #4))
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Do we identify with a criminal in that we too secretly long to be judged? Popularly, being ‘judgemental’ is ill thought of and resented. But what if we want our deeds, our natures, our very souls to be summed up and evaluated? A line to be drawn under our acts to date? A punishment declared, amends made, the slate wiped clean? A born-again Christian, trying to explain his new sense of freedom, once said to me, "All my debts are paid".
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Helen Garner (Joe Cinque's Consolation: A True Story of Death, Grief and the Law)
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Suburbs are about the leisurely conquest of space, an alternative to the uncomfortable density of the city. They seem to run free from history itself, offering a sense that nothing was there before. But the illusion of tranquility frays at the edges: the neurosis required to maintain so neatly manicured a lawn, the pristine sidewalks that nobody walks on, the holy wars fought to keep one municipality from oozing into the next. Suburbs suggest stability and conformity, yet they are rarely beholden to tradition. Rather, they are slates that can be wiped clean to accommodate new aspirations.
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Hua Hsu (Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner))
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Same day, 11 o'clock p. m..—Oh, but I am tired! If it were not that I had made my diary a duty I should not open it tonight. We had a lovely walk. Lucy, after a while, was in gay spirits, owing, I think, to some dear cows who came nosing towards us in a field close to the lighthouse, and frightened the wits out of us. I believe we forgot everything, except of course, personal fear, and it seemed to wipe the slate clean and give us a fresh start. We had a capital `severe tea' at Robin Hood's Bay in a sweet little oldfashioned inn, with a bow window right over the seaweedcovered rocks of the strand. I believe we should have shocked the `New Woman' with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them! Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest, and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls.
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Bram Stoker (Dracula)
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Learn to forgive yourself. You graduated with debt and that had you stepping out into the world without a clean slate. That plus the influences around you may now have caused you to think less of yourself.
Have your low moments, but please don't stew in them the way your OG's have. Remember you only did what you thought was best at the time. You didn't know better. You thought it would be better after you got out. The system, as it is designed now, is set up for your failure. You don't want to sound like one of those sad statistics, but you are in the same boat. Forgive yourself for that. Do what you can and pay what you can and allow yourself a little joy in the meantime.
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Michael Arceneaux (I Don't Want to Die Poor: Essays)
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I wish we could start over. I wish we were meeting for the first time. Clean slate.’
Haley considers this. It’s such a little-kid term. ‘Do-over!’ they’d shriek on the four-square court. The kickball field. Back when there was no mistake you couldn’t fix, no hurt you couldn’t heal with Band-Aids, hugs, and snacks. She’d love a do-over as well.
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Maria Padian (Wrecked)
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Don't give yourself the opportunity to regret
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Isabella Poretsis
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Fine, fine.” Slate waved her hands. “God forbid our suicide mission take precedence over clean underwear…
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T. Kingfisher (The Wonder Engine (Clocktaur War, #2))
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In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” —Confucius
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Megan Thomason (Clean Slate Complex (Daynight, #1.5))
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They can go about collecting every material thing of worldly value, but they’re missing everything that truly counts. When you’ve got nothing else, family means everything to you.
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Megan Thomason (Clean Slate Complex (Daynight, #1.5))
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People love to do that, to point to some single phenomenon, assign it all the blame, and wipe the slate clean, like when overeaters sue McDonald’s for making them fat pigs.
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Jonathan Tropper (This is Where I Leave You)
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You need to be willing to wipe the slate clean and admit that you may not know everything about running. This is the best advice I can give for staying injury-free
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Michael Sandler (Barefoot Running: How to Run Light and Free by Getting in Touch with the Earth)
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He’d returned to this world with his mind wiped clean. The proverbial blank slate.
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Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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Whatever the mistakes or faults of the past have been, I feel that on New Years and birthdays, and even on Mondays, I can clean off the slate, so to speak, and start all over.
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Grace May North (Meg of Mystery Mountain)
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Time had wiped the slate clean.
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Patrick Modiano (The Black Notebook)
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Utopia was not the clean slate Tear had imagined, but an evolution. Humanity would have to work for that society, and work hard, dedicating themselves to an unending vigilance against the mistakes of the past. It would take generations, countless generations perhaps, but— “We could get there,” Kelsea murmured. “And even if not, we should always be growing closer.
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Erika Johansen (The Fate of the Tearling (The Queen of the Tearling, #3))
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Okay, someone’s been smoking the wacky tobacky. And keep your hands to yourself!” She smacked at his roving fingers, fighting the shivers following his touch. "I agreed to let you accompany me because, well...maybe you're right. We should try and put the animosity between our families-stop that!" She gripped his fingers and tried to twist them, but he easily pulled out of her grip.
Alessandro laughed. “Darling, I haven’t laughed in ages like I do when I’m with you. I propose a clean slate, eh?” He sighed and sat back against the seat. “Brianna. I’m not going to give up until you are mine. You could make this so much easier if you just accept the inevitable.” He lifted his hand to cup the side of her face. “We belong to each other, and you know it.
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E. Jamie (The Vendetta (Blood Vows, #1))
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Quitting is actually incredibly empowering. It’s a reminder that you control the situation and can leave whenever you like. You don’t have to be your own prison guard, keeping yourself locked up in a place that isn’t working. But that doesn’t mean quitting is easy. I’ve quit jobs that were a bad match and abandoned failing projects, and in each case it was terribly difficult. We’re taught that quitting is a sign of weakness, although in many circumstances, it’s just the opposite. Sometimes quitting is the bravest alternative, because it requires you to face your failures and announce them publicly. The great news is that quitting allows you to start over with a clean slate. And, if you take the time to evaluate what happened, quitting can be an invaluable learning experience.
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Tina Seelig (What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20)
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Remember that you shed your tired skin every twenty-seven days. You were not made to hold your past within you, you were not made to carry it all on your back. You physically let go of every bad thing that has ever touched you, of every pair of foreign hands that unbuttoned your shirt but never your demons; you let go of every regret, of every insecurity. You are always gifted a clean slate.
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Bianca Sparacino (A Gentle Reminder)
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I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t want to remember any of it—it was so pathetic. The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a few good memories—I did. A handful of happy experiences. But if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea). Anyway, I wanted to get rid of it all and start a new life in Tokyo with a clean slate as a brand-new person. Try out the new possibilities of a new me.
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Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
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I had a plan for when I saw Sutton. That plan was to meet her at the door–which I accomplished by waiting in the parking lot for her–and tell her she looked beautiful. Then I was going to open the door for her and say I wanted to start over and ask for a clean slate. But when I saw her standing there I just couldn’t help but tease her. Something about seeing her brown eyes narrow at me gets my blood pumping.
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Annah Conwell (The Golden Goal (More Than a Game, #1))
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We stared at each other in silence until she looked away. I won. I always won, because I had my daddy’s eyes and she could only stare for so long, without looking away. I had my own ways of getting to Baby-Sweet.
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Jaguar Jonez (Dem Country Girls Love Hard: Everybody Starts Off With A Clean Slate (Country Girl #1))
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The God who always wants to clean the slate is hard to believe. Yet the truth about God is that God is too good to be true. And whenever human beings bump into something too good to be true, we decide it’s not true.
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Gregory Boyle (Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship)
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If you have had an unfortunate experience, forget it. If you have made a failure in speech, your song, your book, your article, if you have been placed in an embarrassing position, if you have fallen and hurt yourself by a false step, if you have been slandered and abused, do not dwell upon it. There is not a single redeeming feature in these memories, and the presence of their ghosts will rob you of many a happy hour. There is nothing in it. Drop them. Forget them. Wipe them out of your mind forever. If you have been indiscreet, imprudent, if you have been talked about, if your reputation has been injured so that you fear you can never outgrow it or redeem it, do not drag the hideous shadows, the rattling skeletons about with you, Rub them off from the shite of memory. Wipe them out. Forget them. Start with a clean slate and spend all your energies in keeping it clean for the future.
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Orison Swett Marden (Masterful Personality)
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Christian Reconstruction is essentially a Biblical epistemology (the way we approach knowledge). The humanist believes he begins with an intellectual "clean slate" and then tries to "construct" his knowledge and worldview himself.
The faithful Christian, on the other hand, begins with the fact that he already knows God, and after salvation, is "reconstructing" his thoughts to follow after God's. He then goes out to apply that same knowledge to every area of life and thought.
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Chalcedon
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Although I had grown significantly, my spiritual growth was as imperceptible on a daily basis as is the physical growth of a child. I was aware, however, that my reception into the Catholic Church was absolutely necessary to my continued progress. My first confession had cleansed me of my sins, enabling me to move forward with a clean slate, and my regular reception of the Blessed Sacrament supplied the very bread of my life, nourishing me with grace and enabling me to grow healthier. Although
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Joseph Pearce (Race With the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love)
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I never much cared for prophecies and destinies myself. I prefer a clean slate in life, a woman's fate up to herself, not the sayings of old men and dusty scrolls. Besides, prophecies always have a way of going wrong, don't they? They promise you a savior, but that savior ends up eating babies or kicking puppies or something, and the poor gull who's the prophesied one always ends up dead. Besides... Prophecies are a breeding ground for opportunists. An excuse for bad behavior. Can't trust them.
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Rebecca Roanhorse (Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1))
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Blood stains are not easy to remove. Yes, and they will enter the rooms and see my bedding. Perhaps a young girl will fit into my daughter’s clothes. Or it’ll all be a waste because they too lost a young daughter in the vadda raula. These clothes will haunt them. They will want to go back. How crazy! I don’t want to be here and they don’t want to be there. They can’t be here and I can’t be there. How absurd! It is like someone just did it in jest. What value does my life have? Zilch. Nobody thought of this? They live with my nightmares, I live with theirs. And then learn to ignore these sounds I hear from the crevices of the new house. Each night I plug my ears and shut my eyes. A new story over my story. The slate has been wiped clean. With blood.
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Sakoon Singh (In The Land of The Lovers)
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This is the practice of cleaning the slate. The ability to create as an artist and experience the work as a first-time viewer, dropping baggage from the past of what you thought you wanted the work to be. The mission is to be in the present moment with the work.
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Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
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Your patterns of thought, existing bodies of knowledge, beliefs, predispositions, etc. are the 'stuff of your mental universe'. We are always subject to the power of our mental inertia. The waves in our mental oceans can never be magically stilled, and are therefore always impacting our new beliefs, even when we become scrutinizing adults. It is simply impossible to 'wipe the slate clean' and start over. These effects remain with us throughout our entire lives. Even the beliefs that we later discard are difficult to completely negate, and leave their own residual effects.
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Daniel Ionson (And the Truth Shall Make You Flee)
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It seems silly to worry about the arbitrary moment some person long dead declared to be the end of one year and the beginning of another, as if our attempts to divide time into meaningful chunks actually mean anything. People wait for the countdown to tell them that it’s okay to believe in themselves again. They end each year with failure, but hope that when the clock strikes twelve, they can begin the new year with a clean slate. They tell themselves that this is the year things will happen, never realizing that things are always happening; they’re just happening without them.
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Shaun David Hutchinson (We Are the Ants)
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So, I'm going to see a therapist! Which could be weird, but it could be a laugh, too. I've always thought that it might be fun to be Catholic, to be able to go to the confessional and unburden yourself and have someone tell you that they forgive you, to take all the sin away, wipe the slate clean.
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Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train)
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Religious leaders liberate themselves from their history of repeated anti-queer actions every time there is a new debate on queer rights. They get a clean slate even thought their hands are muddied with a history of hatred against people like me.
Why do we treat the voice of church leaders as thought they have the same level of understanding of pseudoscientific practices as medical professionals do? While all medical bodies oppose conversion therapy, call it unethical and support banning it, the churches are being treated as though their view could somehow disprove the findings of the medical professionals.
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Shaneel Lal (One of Them)
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We all agree that those in Washington aren’t serving the will of either side. Let’s set aside our differences for the moment, agree that those in power are scoundrels, if not outright traitors, throw the bastards out, and then, once we have a clean, honest slate, start squabbling about the small stuff again.
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Joseph Befumo (The Republicrat Junta: How Two Corrupt Parties, in Collusion with Corporate Criminals, have Subverted Democracy, Deceived the People, and Hijacked Our Constitutional Government)
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The trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past.
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William Cronon
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I’m tired of trying to be Ember. And before you say it,” I hold up my hand, because his mouth is already open, “I know I’m Ember. But I don’t feel like that person. I don’t know that person. I might not ever be the Ember you remember. It’s been months, and yes…I’ve had memories here and there. Maybe this is it. I might just get bits and pieces of my past here and there for the rest of my life. But I think I want to stop trying to remember and just move forward with a new life. I don’t want to be Ember who has amnesia or Ember who used to do this or that. I just want a clean slate without the ghost of Ember following me around.
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Carian Cole (Asher (Ashes & Embers, #6))
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Elder Tad R. Callister said, “The Atonement was designed to do more than restore us to the ‘starting line’—more than just wipe the slate clean. [Its] crowning purpose [is] to endow us with power so that we might overcome each of our weaknesses and acquire the divine traits that would make us like God” (“How Can I Lead a More Saintly Life?” 89).
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Brad Wilcox (The Continuous Atonement)
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But “knowing the truth” does not come with redemption as a guarantee, nor does a feeling of redemption guarantee an end to a cycle of wrongdoing. Some would even say it is key to maintaining it, insofar as it can work as a reset button—a purge that cleans the slate, without any guarantee of change at the root. Placing all one’s eggs in “the logic of exposure,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has put it (in Touching Feeling), may also simply further the logic of paranoia. “Paranoia places its faith in exposure,” Sedgwick observes—which is to say that the exposure of a disturbing fact or situation does not necessarily alter it, but in fact may further the circular conviction that one can never be paranoid enough.
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Maggie Nelson (The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning)
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You're just different from the other boys I've brought home.
Different in what way?
Well, you're not exactly a boy.
I'm old, you mean?
No, not old. But you're, you know, a man.
I hate that there've been others, said Jude, and I was so surprised at the fact of his jealousy that I apologized. Why would he be jealous, I thought, when I had never loved or been loved this way before?
It wasn't like this, I said. It wasn't ever like this.
Tell me that you've never had anyone else. I want you to pretend.
Okay, I said, laughing. I've never been with anyone else. Happy?
Tell me I'm your first, he said, his voice low and his hands moving across my blouse. Tell me that you've never been touched.
I'm untouched. Chaste, a clean slate.
But you want it.
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Madelaine Lucas (Thirst for Salt)
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Take a second to think about these utopian algorithms — dividing people from one another and from their natural allies, is right at the head of the list, but all require wiping the slate as clean of close emotional ties — even ties to yourself! — as possible. Family, deep friendships, church, culture, tradition, anything which might contradict the voice of authority, is suspect.
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John Taylor Gatto (Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling)
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Religion used to provide a generally accepted understanding of our place in the universe. That surely has been one of the major objectives of myth and legend, philosophy and religion, as long as there have been human beings. But the mutual confrontation of differing religions and of religion with science has eroded those traditional views, at least in the minds of many.* The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves—without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?
”
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Carl Sagan (Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science)
“
The Sanskrit texts make it clear that a cataclysm on this scale, though a relatively rare event, is expected to wash away all traces of the former world and that the slate will be wiped clean again for the new age of the earth to begin. In order to ensure that the Vedas can be repromulgated for future mankind after each pralaya the gods have therefore designed an institution to preserve them -- the institution of the Seven Sages, a brotherhood of adepts possessed of unerring memories and supernatural powers, practitioners of yoga, performers of the ancient rituals and sacrifices, ascetics, spiritual visionaries, vigilant in the battle against evil, great teachers, knowledgeable beyond all imagining, who reincarnate from age to age as the guides of civilization and the guardians of cosmic justice.
”
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Graham Hancock (Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization)
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I’m sorry,” she said, wishing she could say something more meaningful.
“I’m not. If he’d been a good uncle, I’d have stayed in Boston. Never would have found my way to San Francisco,” he said.
Camille knew where the rest of his story led and grinned.
“And you never would have rescued my father from a pickpocket,” she added.
He started to laugh, a quiet, almost personal chuckle, like he was thinking about some funny memory. Camille caught the bug of laughter and wanted to join in.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Your father didn’t need a rescuer. He caught the pickpocket himself,” Oscar answered, a hand on his abdomen from all his laughter. “And then he invited him inside for dinner.”
Her smile fell flat. She stared at him, trying to comprehend what he’d just said.
“You?” she asked, dumbfounded. “You were the pickpocket?”
Oscar nodded, scratching the back of his head. “Yeah. I wasn’t very good at it.”
Her father could have had him arrested or shooed him away without thinking twice. But he’d invited Oscar inside. He gave him work, food…a real chance.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” she asked, feeling like she’d been duped once again. All the lies her father had woven to cover up his secrets had become so frayed, Camille wondered if she had truly known him at all.
“To give me a clean slate with everyone. Even you.” Oscar moved toward her in cautious, deliberate steps. “We’re alone. We should talk.”
The pantry was cramped and dismal despite the oil lamp, and Camille had a sudden urge to flee.
“About what?” she asked, her ears burning. She still reeled with the knowledge that the pickpocket story hadn’t been real, just like her mother’s story hadn’t been real. Oscar stopped within a few inches from her and reached a hand around her waist.
“About our night together, Camille,” he answered, his dimples forming. “There’s a lot to say.
”
”
Angie Frazier (Everlasting (Everlasting, #1))
“
You are each born with the conscious knowledge of what has come before. Your brain is far from an empty slate, waiting for the first imprint of experience; it is already equipped with complete "equations", telling you who you are and where you have come from. Nor do you wipe that slate clean, symbolically speaking, before you write your life upon it. Instead, you draw upon what has gone before: the experiences of your ancestors, back through time immemorial.
”
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Jane Roberts (The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (A Seth Book))
“
My cousin lifted the latch, and my nephew came in, nodding a greeting at me. ‘I came back from a Self-Criticism Meeting in the market-place. The cow farmer got denounced by the butcher.’ ‘What for?’ ‘Who cares? Any crap will do! Truth is, the butcher owed him money. This is a handy way to wipe clean the slate. That’s nothing, though. Three villages down the Valley a tinker got his knob cut off, just because his grandfather served with the Kuomintang against the Japanese.
”
”
David Mitchell (Ghostwritten)
“
their records. Then you killed an orderly and got away. You said I’m not going back, because you knew as soon as you arrived anywhere somebody would realize you weren’t Hobie. They’d find out who you were, and you’d be back in the shit. So you just disappeared. A new life, a new name. A clean slate. You want to deny anything yet?” Allen tightened his grip on Jodie. “It’s all bullshit" he said. Reacher shook his head. Pain flashed in his eye like a camera. “No, it’s all true" he said. “Nash Newman just identified Victor Hobie’s skeleton. It’s lying in a casket in Hawaii with your dog tags around its neck.” “Bullshit" Allen said again. “It was the teeth" Reacher said. “Mr. and Mrs. Hobie sent their boy to the dentist thirty-five times, to give him perfect teeth. Newman says they’re definitive. He spent an hour with the X rays, programming the computer. Then he recognized the exact same skull when he walked back past the casket. Definitive match.” Allen
”
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Lee Child (Tripwire (Jack Reacher, #3))
“
There he was, sipping tea from a dainty bulb, seated on a fresh-grown mat woven in the traditional style, with his hypnotic Warlock formulation-rod to one side, and his slate in reading mode on the other, tuned to the proper subchannels and ready with the proper routines, ready to undertake a thorough neural investigation, cleaning, and reconstitution.
A tea-bulb, a mat, a rod, a brain interface. All the simple and basic necessities of life. He was beginning to feel like a civilized man again.
”
”
John C. Wright (The Phoenix Exultant (Golden Age, #2))
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If you fulfil the pattern that is peculiar to yourself, you have loved yourself, you have accumulated and have abundance; you bestow virtue then because you have luster. You radiate; from your abundance something overflows. But if you hate and despise yourself-if you have not accepted your pattern-then there are hungry animals (prowling cats and other beasts and vermin) in your constitution which get at your neighbors like flies in order to satisfy the appetites which you have failed to satisfy. [...]
The Catholic practice of confession and repentance and absolution is just that: you repent and then you tell about it and are given absolution. You are washed of your sin, and then you can do it again-you are a clean slate so you can write on it once more. That is the reason the Reformation did away with confession, in one way fortunately, in another unfortunately, because people cannot get rid of their sins. And that is the reason entre autres for the success of the Oxford Movement, where you can hand over your sin to other people and they run away with it. But that is bad. The Protestant must be alone with his sin. He may confess it but he knows that doesn't give him absolution; even if he confesses ten thousand times, he can only familiarize himself with the fact that he should never lose sight of what he has done. That is good for him. He should arrive at a level where he can say, "Yes, I have done that thing, and I must curse myself for it." But I cannot be nice to a man who has given offence to me if I am not nice with myself. I must agree with my brother for my worst brother is myself. So I have to be patient, and I have to be very Christian inside. If I fulfil my pattern, then I can even accept my sinfulness and can say, "It is too bad, but it is so — l have to agree with it." And then I am fulfilled, then the gold begins to glow. You see, people who can agree with themselves are like gold. They taste very good. All the flies are after them.
Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 801-803).
”
”
C.G. Jung (Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939 C.G. Jung)
“
He did it for us. He took the form of man, took all our sins upon Himself, and died on a Roman cross two thousand years ago.” Sally examined the passage again. “So tell me: did it work?” Bernice leaned forward and said, “You be the judge. The Bible says that the penalty for sin is death, but after Jesus paid that penalty He rose from the dead on the third day, so something was different. He conquered sin, so He was able to conquer sin’s penalty. Sure, it worked. It always works. Jesus satisfied divine justice on that Cross. He bore the punishment in full, and God never had to bend the rules. That’s why we call Jesus our Savior. He shed His own blood in our place, and died, and then rose from the grave to prove He’d won over sin and could set us free.” Now Bernice started getting excited. “And you know what thrills me about that? It means we’re special to Him; He really does love us, and we . . . we mean something, we’re here for a reason! And you know what else? No matter what our sins are, no matter where we are or what condition we’re in, we can be forgiven, free and clear, a clean slate!
”
”
Frank E. Peretti (Piercing the Darkness)
“
It is important in building up Zion and preparing for Paradise to keep an eye on Babylon, because the saints have always had a habit of subsiding into the ways of Babylon... Brigham Young said exactly the same thing in language just as strong when the Saints got to the Valley: "Have we not brought Babylon with us? Are we not promoting Babylon here in our midst? Are we not fostering the spirit of Babylon that is now abroad on the face of the whole earth? I ask myself this question, and I answer, Yes, yes... we have too much of Babylon in our midst." It is hard for us to envisage the concept of Zion, let alone Paradise, when we have been so long accustomed to living in Babylon. We are disquieted by vague images of people wandering around in gardens apparently with nothing to do. Far more appealing to us are the vigor and give-and-take and drama of the marketplace... The world today is about as different from Zion as any world possibly can be. In face, it has reached the point, the Lord has told us in emphatic terms, where he is about to remove the whole thing-- sweep the slate clean, that Zion may be established.
”
”
Nibley, Hugh
“
The efficient orgasm is the most productive moment of the day, because, apocalyptically, it has wiped the slate clean, and no one will ever know about it. What are you going to do now? Most of the time you could go back to reading. Some of the time you fantasize about a ragtag group of strangers thrown together by circumstance who go on a quest for some orgasm big enough to leave them wanting something different than they wanted before.
Like what? Gross food? Ugly stuff? Feeling like crap? Not understanding anything?
All you do is lie in bed with no underwear, trying to think of something bigger and better.
”
”
Lucy Corin (One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses)
“
Well, forgive the fuck out of me for being shocked senseless when I realized he wasn’t dead. Why didn’t you tell me he was the beast, Ryodan? Why did we have to kill him? I know it’s not because he can’t control himself when he’s the beast. He controlled himself last night when he rescued me from the Book. He can change at will, can’t he? What happened in the Silvers? Does the place have some kind of effect on you, make you uncontrollable?”
I almost slapped myself in the forehead. Barrons had told me that the reason he tattooed himself with black and red protection runes was because using dark magic called a price due, unless you took measures to protect yourself against the backlash. Did using IYD require the blackest kind of magic to make it work? Would it grant his demand to magically transport him to me no matter where I was but devolve him into the darkest, most savage version of himself as the price?
“It was because of how he got there, wasn’t it?” I said. “The spell you two worked sent him to me like was it was supposed to, but the cost was that it turned him into the lowest common denominator of himself. An insane killing machine. Which he figured was all right, because if I was dying, I’d probably need a killing machine around. A champion to show up and decimate all my enemies. That was it, wasn’t it?”
Ryodan had gone completely still. Not a muscle twitched. I wasn’t sure he was breathing.
“He knew what would happen if I pressed IYD, and he made plans with you to handle it.” That was Barrons, always thinking, always managing risks where I was concerned. “He tattooed me so he would sense his mark on me and not kill me. And you were supposed to track him—that’s why you both wear those cuffs, so you can find each other—and kill him so he’d come back as the man form of himself, and I’d never be any wiser. I’d get rescues and have no clue it was Barrons who’d done it or that he sometimes turns into a beast. But you screwed up. And that’s what he was mad at you about this morning on the phone. It was your failure to kill him that let the cat out of the bag.”
A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw. He was pissed. I was definitely right.
“He can always circumvent the price of black magic,” I marveled. “When you kill him, he comes back exactly the same as before, doesn’t he? He could tattoo his whole body with protection runes and, when he ran out of skin, kill himself so he could come back with a clean slate, to start all over.” That was why his tattoos weren’t always the same. “Talk about your ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card! And if you hadn’t botched the plan, I would never have known. It’s your fault I know, Ryodan. I think that means it’s not me you should kill, it’s yourself. Oh, gee, wait,” I said sarcastically, “that wouldn’t work, would it?
”
”
Karen Marie Moning (Shadowfever (Fever, #5))
“
Some people say, “God is good, and God has a plan for you.” I believe that God is good but also that God is too busy loving me to have a plan for me. Like a caring parent, God receives our childlike painting of a tree—usually an unrecognizable mess—and delights in it. God doesn’t hand it back and say, “Come back when it looks more like a tree” or tell us how to improve it. God simply delights in us. Like the kid at probation camp after confession: “You mean you just sealed my record?” The God who always wants to clean the slate is hard to believe. Yet the truth about God is that God is too good to be true. And whenever human beings bump into something too good to be true, we decide it’s not true.
”
”
Gregory Boyle (Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship)
“
Earth Belongs to The Natives (Sonnet 2401)
We cannot abolish systemic persecution
without dismantling systemic privilege.
You cannot wipe the slate clean, but you can
take the responsibility and stand to heal.
Colonizers are the second class citizens,
every land first belongs to the indigenous.
Landback is the mother of all movements,
it contains the plight of all First Humans.
Women are indigenous to their own body,
Palestinians are indigenous to palestine;
uncultured crowns and criminal uncles
have no jurisdiction over our Earthright.
Earth belongs to the Natives, settlers are
welcome, but as participant, not head of state.
Somos indígenas, somos indomables -
you can make us houseless, but never homeless.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Sonnets From The Mountaintop)
“
Please include in this supplication the spirit and soul of … (if a specific soul is being addressed at the moment, then recite its name, so and so, son/daughter of so and so). G-d, full of mercy, please show them Your grace, ease their rightful punishments, for You are the Master of mercy and forgiveness. Although they have sinned before You, intentionally and unintentionally, blemishing the worlds above and even the sources of their souls and spirits, there is still nothing that can stop You from rectifying their blemishes in your great mercy and pure grace. Wipe clean their slates of reckoning and cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. Hear our prayers. Blessed are You who hears the prayers of everyone.
”
”
Ariel Bar Tzadok (Protection from Evil - E-Book Edition)
“
Hello,” she says. “My name is Amanda Ritter. In this file I will tell you only what you need to know. I am the leader of an organization fighting for justice and peace. This fight has become increasingly more important--and consequently, nearly impossible--in the past few decades. That is because of this.”
Images flash across the wall, almost too fast for me to see. A man on his knees with a gun pressed to his forehead. The woman pointing it at him, her face emotionless.
From a distance, a small person hanging by the neck from a telephone pole.
A hole in the ground the size of a house, full of bodies.
And there are other images too, but they move faster, so I get only impressions of blood and bone and death and cruelty, empty faces, soulless eyes, terrified eyes.
Just when I have had enough, when I feel like I am going to scream if I see any more, the woman reappears on the screen, behind her desk.
“You do not remember any of that,” she says. “But if you are thinking these are the actions of a terrorist group or a tyrannical government regime, you are only partially correct. Half of the people in those pictures, committing those terrible acts, were your neighbors. Your relatives. Your coworkers. The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature itself--or at least what it has become.”
This is what Jeanine was willing to enslave minds and murder people for--to keep us all from knowing. To keep us all ignorant and safe and inside the fence.
There is a part of me that understands.
“That is why you are so important,” Amanda says. “Our struggle against violence and cruelty is only treating the symptoms of a disease, not curing it. You are the cure.
“In order to keep you safe, we devised a way for you to be separated from us. From our water supply. From our technology. From our societal structure. We have formed your society in a particular way in the hope that you will rediscover the moral sense most of us have lost. Over time, we hope that you will begin to change as most of us cannot.
“The reason I am leaving this footage for you is so that you will know when it’s time to help us. You will know that it is time when there are many among you whose minds appear to be more flexible than the others. The name you should give those people is Divergent. Once they become abundant among you, your leaders should give the command for Amity to unlock the gate forever, so that you may emerge from your isolation.”
And that is what my parents wanted to do: to take what we had learned and use it to help others. Abnegation to the end.
“The information in this video is to be restricted to those in government only,” Amanda says. “You are to be a clean slate. But do not forget us.”
She smiles a little.
“I am about to join your number,” she says. “Like the rest of you, I will voluntarily forget my name, my family, and my home. I will take on a new identity, with false memories and a false history. But so that you know the information I have provided you with is accurate, I will tell you the name I am about to take as my own.”
Her smile broadens, and for a moment, I feel that I recognize her.
“My name will be Edith Prior,” she says. “And there is much I am happy to forget.”
Prior.
The video stops. The projector glows blue against the wall. I clutch Tobias’s hand, and there is a moment of silence like a withheld breath.
Then the shouting begins.
”
”
Veronica Roth (Insurgent (Divergent, #2))
“
Every ritual repetition of the cosmogony is preceded by a symbolic retrogression to Chaos. In order to be created anew, the old world must first be annihilated. The various rites performed in connection with the New Year can be put in two chief categories: (I) those that signify the return to Chaos (e.g., extinguishing fires, expelling 'evil' and sins, reversal of habitual behavior, orgies, return of the dead); (2) those that symbolize the cosmogony (e.g., lighting new fires, departure of the dead, repetition of the acts by which the Gods created the world, solemn prediction of the weather for the ensuing year). In the scenario of initiatory rites, 'death' corresponds to the temporary return to Chaos; hence it is the paradigmatic expression of the end of a mode of being the mode of ignorance and of the child's irresponsibility. Initiatory death provides the clean slate on which will be written the successive revelations whose end is the formation of a new man. We shall later describe the different modalities of birth to a new, spiritual life. But now we must note that this new life is conceived as the true human existence, for it is open to the values of spirit. What is understood by the generic term 'culture,' comprising all the values of spirit, is accessible only to those who have been initiated. Hence participation in spiritual life is made possible by virtue of the religious experiences released during initiation.
All the rites of rebirth or resurrection, and the symbols that they imply, indicate that the novice has attained to another mode of existence, inaccessible to those who have not undergone the initiatory ordeals, who have not tasted death. We must note this characteristic of the archaic mentality: the belief that a state cannot be changed without first being annihilated-in the present instance, without the child's dying to childhood. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this obsession with beginnings, which, in sum, is the obsession with the absolute beginning, the cosmogony. For a thing to be well done, it must be done as it was done the first time. But the first time, the thing-this class of objects, this animal, this particular behavior-did not exist: when, in the beginning, this object, this animal, this institution, came into existence, it was as if, through the power of the Gods, being arose from nonbeing.
Initiatory death is indispensable for the beginning of spiritual life. Its function must be understood in relation to what it prepares: birth to a higher mode of being. As we shall see farther on, initiatory death is often symbolized, for example, by darkness, by cosmic night, by the telluric womb, the hut, the belly of a monster. All these images express regression to a preformal state, to a latent mode of being (complementary to the precosmogonic Chaos), rather than total annihilation (in the sense in which, for example, a member of the modern societies conceives death). These images and symbols of ritual death are inextricably connected with germination, with embryology; they already indicate a new life in course of preparation. Obviously, as we shall show later, there are other valuations of initiatory death-for example, joining the company of the dead and the Ancestors. But here again we can discern the same symbolism of the beginning: the beginning of spiritual life, made possible in this case by a meeting with spirits.
For archaic thought, then, man is made-he does not make himself all by himself. It is the old initiates, the spiritual masters, who make him. But these masters apply what was revealed to them at the beginning of Time by the Supernatural Beings. They are only the representatives of those Beings; indeed, in many cases they incarnate them. This is as much as to say that in order to become a man, it is necessary to resemble a mythical model.
”
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Mircea Eliade (Rites and Symbols of Initiation)
“
He had worked damn hard and prospered. Now it was time to live. He even thought he might get it up tonight and surprise his gorgeous Maggie; then it was Israel and the Pharaohs. Stopping at his front door he took a deep intake of the free English air and smiled contentedly; England was home and so was he, this time for good. He went in the front door and called out for her as he had done so many times before, 'Maggie . . . I'm home sweetheart!' He closed the door and hesitated for a moment, she was usually in his arms by now, planting a sweet little kiss on his expectant, eager lips. She had not been her best lately, complaining of headaches and spending a lot of time down at the library; but today was different, it was retirement day. Aha! This could be a surprise, he thought hanging up his coat. Calling out again, he rubbed his hands together and started to climb the stairs to wash up before tea. This is definitely a surprise . . . no smell of any grub! His whistling stopped abruptly half way up when he saw a darkened figure appear on the landing, pointing a gun at him. A finger tightened and the weapon jolted, sending screeching Belarusian memories echoing across his subconscious. The blast lifted him off his feet sending him to the floor below. The last image of Cedric Boban's life on earth was the flash of a sawn-off shotgun; which fired from a few feet, took his life and most of his upper torso away. The slate was clean, the screeching culled. His assailant moved halfway down before jumping over the banister to avoid the bloody mess on the stairs. Maggie walked steadily into the hall from the living room. She gave a little smile and took the small sawn-off shotgun from the gloved hands of the assassin,
”
”
Anthony Vincent Bruno (SAS: Body Count (The Wicked Will Perish, #1))
“
New Beginnings – New Moon Spiritually: New moon is representative of a woman’s menstrual cycle and throughout history, women lived away from other people during this time. Don’t think about the new moon as a fresh start but a time to retreat. During this time you can start over and renew your strength. Clean slates, fresh starts, and new beginnings surround the new moon. You need to use this time to “reboot.” Imagine your “battery” getting recharged under the new moon’s energy. Throw all your unwanted junk and thoughts away. In order to do this, you have to unplug yourself and take some time alone. You might begin to feel introverted and anti-social. Watch for these feelings and just embrace them. When the moon turns her dark side toward us, turn away from other people’s draining energy and turn inward. Never feel bad if you have to cancel plans, you don’t want to answer phone calls, or be around other people. Turning off and tuning out is the best way to make it through a new moon. Scientifically: The new moon begins when the moon and sun are both on the exact same side of the Earth. Since the sun isn’t facing the moon, from our view on Earth, it looks as if the moon’s dark side is facing us.
”
”
Harmony Magick (Wicca 2nd Edition: A Book of Shadows to Learn the Secrets of Witchcraft with Wiccan Spells, Moon Rituals, and Tools Like Runes, and Tarots. Become a Witch by Mastering Crystal, Candle, Herbal Magic)
“
Besides institutional and philosophical foundations for the Paris School, it is important to consider a major political factor—the French Revolution. A general feature of the revolution was that it provided an opportunity to wipe the slate clean of established authorities. In the field of medicine, this meant the demolition of medieval medical corporations and the reconstruction of the profession.
”
”
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
“
Sometimes,” my mother went on, “I think of white dresses as a way of starting over. They’re sort of a way of wiping the whole slate clean. Just like what happens in the wintertime when the snow comes. It wipes away everything in preparation for a new year, a new spring.
”
”
Mary Pflum Peterson (White Dresses: A Memoir of Love and Secrets, Mothers and Daughters)
“
They are totally free from their past actions. Every day is a clean slate.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1))
“
What characterizes real speculators like Soros from the rest is that their activities are devoid of path dependence. They are totally free from their past actions. Every day is a clean slate.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto, #1))
“
To not accept a rebuke is poor character. To make excuses is impudent,’ he told me. ‘To accept a minor accusation and to admit fault—whether deserved or not—shows good character. To Japanese people, an apology is accepted as sincere. And the slate is wiped clean. Knowing this, then to take responsibility whether just or not, face is kept. Americans don’t know this.’” My buddy’s advice to me—that if it was for anything less than a UCMJ offense—accept the rebuke. Apologize if it’s appropriate. Only explain if someone demands an explanation. And according to him, if I knew that pearl, then the world would be my oyster
”
”
Doc Spears (Warlord: A Green Beret Conquers Mars)
“
Around the time of my first world tour for Oops!, I was able to build my mom a house and settle my father’s debts. I wanted to give them a clean slate.
”
”
Britney Spears (The Woman in Me)
“
He watches the amber, iridescent light of the streetlamp above him as it shines down upon the old, grey sidewalk. Pinkish, brown bubble-gum circles decorate the grey slate. The rain falls incessantly down and the glow around the streetlight grows larger and larger. Rivulets run down the slight incline toward the deep, dark throat of the city. All the pain, suffering, and sins are being washed into the cesspool down under. For a while, the city will have a clean gleaming look to it, until the persistent stench of humankind smother and taint it again.
”
”
Rosaline Saul (Lucias the Fallen)
“
While Lisa prepared lunch, I took it upon myself to smell each and every truffle we'd found that morning. Some were sweet and firm, and some smelled more of vinegar--- maybe they were under-ripe. Some were grassy, herblike. There were mineral elements--- quartz and slate. As I went through the pile, the associations mounted. Did I smell pine needles? Blueberries? The more I sniffed, the weirder it became. What did that sweet starchy smell remind me of? That's it--- the beginning of a good rice pudding.
Lisa was cleaning the truffles with what looked like a boot brush, and as she massaged gently, the chocolate-colored soil gave way to cratered geological black; the truffle looked like a tiny meteor.
”
”
Elizabeth Bard (Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes)
“
Tomorrow when I awaken, the slate will be clean, and a new day will stretch before me.
”
”
Lori Hatcher
“
Dear Karma,
I am always being struck by the lighting and shaken by the thunder. Why is that? I was born into this world cursed. How is that fair to my brother or me? We should have been born with a clean slate. It is not fair that we have to carry the karma from our past lives or our family fuck-ups.
We do not deserve that. We deserve to walk on our own path and make our own mistakes, not cleaning up other people’s shit from their past or the choices they made. Kace and I do not know how to clean up a mess that we didn’t make. However, for some reason, we are paying the price. Yeah, we are paying the price—a high price at that. When will it be over? Will it extend in another life as well? Karma, if you are the only thing that can change Kace’s and my fate—then what are you waiting for? Do you not think we’ve suffered enough?
We do not deserve this shit.
”
”
Charlena E. Jackson (Pinwheels and Dandelions)
“
When a conversation was turning to conflict, my mother used to gesture wiping a slate clean and say, “Erase and start again!
”
”
Joanna Faber (How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen: A Survival Guide to Life with Children Ages 2-7 (The How To Talk Series))
“
David confirms this principle when he speaks of the blessedness of the one who discovers God’s approval without any reference to something specific that they had done to qualify themselves. 4:7 Oh what 1happy progress one makes with the weight of sin and guilt removed and one’s slate wiped clean! (The Aramaic/Hebrew word 1ashar, אשׁר blessed, means to advance, to make progress. [See Ps 41:2 and Psalm 72:12].) 4:8 “How blessed is the one who receives a 1receipt instead of an invoice for their sins.” (1logitzomai, to make a calculation to which there can only be one logical conclusion, to take an inventory.)
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François Du Toit (Mirror Study Bible)
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The first time I kissed you, everything before you ceased to exist. Your taste, your touch, your smell, eradicated it all. You erased me, turned me into a clean slate, a blank page that only you could fill in.
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J.L. Seegars (Revive Me, Part Two: The Affair (New Haven, #3))
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If you're in doubt about something that's not in your life, try it. Things are so different in practice versus in theory. The only way to know is to experience it yourself. ... Err on the side of yes. Try it. If it was a mistake, at least you’ll know first-hand, instead of always wondering.
If you're in doubt about something that's in your life already, get rid of it. Not just things, this goes for identities, habits, goals, relationships, technology, and anything else. Default to not having it, then see how you do without. ... Err on the side of no. Get rid of it. Start with a clean slate. If it was a mistake, you'll get it back with a renewed enthusiasm.
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Derek Sivers
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There are phrases by Nietzsche which hardly seem possible from Homais. For instance, when he claims that believing himself to be the son of God allows Christ a “Gefühl völliger Sündlosigkeit, völliger Unverantwortlichkeit” (feeling of complete sinlessness, complete irresponsibility), which today, he adds, anyone can obtain “durch die Wissenschaft” (through science). Such crude ignorance of the essential difference of moral stances can depend in such a noble soul as his only on special motives. Perhaps what Nietzsche seeks at that moment is the systematic and violent destruction of all value, a clean slate. Therefore, mere controversy is not enough; cruelty is necessary and even stupidity. No injustice then seems sufficient. To show how disgusting existing values fill us, mere negation does not satisfy our irritated sensibility, skepticism seems laughably moderate, and the crude dogmatism of science suits only our vengeance. Where everything is hollow and low, the worst baseness is just enough.
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Nicolás Gómez Dávila
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But it’s never as simple as that. Think of the last time you dated someone new and immediately searched for their name only to find a slate wiped clean, no digital footprint whatsoever. Did it make you feel safer? Or did it make you suspicious?
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Olivia Muenter (Such a Bad Influence)
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Clean Slate Services
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Clean Slate Sewer and Drain
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If a planned social order is better than the accidental, irrational deposit of historical practice, two conclusions follow. Only those who have the scientific knowledge to discern and create this superior social order are fit to rule in the new age. Further, those who through retrograde ignorance refuse to yield to the scientific plan need to be educated to its benefits or else swept aside. Strong versions of high modernism, such as those held by Lenin and Le Corbusier, cultivated an Olympian ruthlessness toward the subjects of their interventions. At its most radical, high modernism imagined wiping the slate utterly clean and beginning from zero.
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James C. Scott (Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Veritas Paperbacks))
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Is it so easy, then, to recover from our mistakes? To have a do-over? The idea heartens me. The little dog is alive. It's as if my choices from the past have been erased and I can begin with a clean slate.
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Claire Oshetsky (Chouette)
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Each of these parts has a different father and mother, but he assembled me.
The creature was given life eight years earlier in a charnel-house in Prague:
An abattoir and me its fruit, its marvellous boy...I was a clean slate, with no memory of what this brain had been, but I knew my condition. Living corruption, a crowd sewn together in one skin. Anarchy in every limb, and bones that ached to go to dust.
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Clive Barker
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This isn’t enough, Nadia. To repay you for the way you’ve brought me back? It will never be enough. I’ll spend the rest of my goddamn life repaying the favor, and I’ll do it with a smile. This place is yours whenever you want it. With me. Without me. No strings attached. I want you to have it. I want to see you spread your wings and soar. To see all your dreams come true.” I pause, sucking in a deep, centering breath, and then I forge ahead like I planned. “But right now, I’m going to beg you to give me another shot. Before? That was a false start. This? This is a clean slate. I want all your right nows. All your tomorrows. I want it all with you.
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Elsie Silver (A False Start (Gold Rush Ranch, #4))
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She wanted a clean slate and a life that didn't include me because she hated me for the mess that I got us into.
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Alissa DeRogatis (Call It What You Want)
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For such a large man, a rough biker, it was completely surprising. He cleaned my foot and then gestured for the other. Just as he was finishing up, there was a knock on the bathroom door and then a female head popped in.
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Emma Slate (Wreck & Ruin (Tarnished Angels Motorcycle Club, #1))