My Duplicate Quotes

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Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom.
Kahlil Gibran
Last night somebody broke into my apartment and replaced everything with exact duplicates... When I pointed it out to my roommate, he said, "Do I know you?
Steven Wright
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.
Isaac Asimov
I haven’t spent my time trying to duplicate my success. But only because I haven’t had any yet.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
You're right. Your decietfulness far exceeds my modest attempts at dishonesty. I bow-down to your superior duplicity.
Aleatha Romig (Truth (Consequences, #2))
This is it, isn't it? This is the peak of my existence.
Julez (Duplicity)
The next morning the sea was calm again, the sun was shining, and the water was so blue and innocent a man might never know that under it my brother floated, dead with all his men.
George R.R. Martin (Fire & Blood (A Targaryen History, #1))
These albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit with some plague.
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
Yes, such has been my lot since childhood. Everyone read signs of non-existent evil traits in my features. But since they were expected to be there, they did make their appearance. Because I was reserved, they said I was sly, so I grew reticent. I was keenly aware of good and evil, but instead of being indulged I was insulted and so I became spiteful. I was sulky while other children were merry and talkative, but though I felt superior to them I was considered inferior. So I grew envious. I was ready to love the whole world, but no one understood me, and I learned to hate. My cheerless youth passed in conflict with myself and society, and fearing ridicule I buried my finest feelings deep in my heart, and there they died. I spoke the truth, but nobody believed me, so I began to practice duplicity. Having come to know society and its mainsprings, I became versed in the art of living and saw how others were happy without that proficiency, enjoying for free the favors I had so painfully striven for. It was then that despair was born in my heart--not the despair that is cured with a pistol, but a cold, impotent desperation, concealed under a polite exterior and a good-natured smile. I became a moral cripple; I had lost one half of my soul, for it had shriveled, dried up and died, and I had cut it off and cast it away, while the other half stirred and lived, adapted to serve every comer. No one noticed this, because no one suspected there had been another half. Now, however, you have awakened memories of it in me, and what I have just done is to read its epitaph to you. Many regard all epitaphs as ridiculous, but I do not, particularly when I remember what rests beneath them.
Mikhail Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time)
I think I've been searching for you all of my life, without even knowing it.
Julez (Duplicity)
I woke up one morning, and all of my stuff had been stolen and replaced by exact duplicates".
Steven Wright
Pretending you're okay so everyone can lean on you for support doesn't last forever...” He wispers into my ear. “One day you'll have to stop hiding how you truly feel about life.
Julez (Duplicity)
Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.
Tennessee Williams
Mom had just gotten back from Sydney, and she had brought me an immense, surpassingly blue butterfly, Papilio ulysses, mounted in a frame filled with cotton. I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn't see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.
Audrey Niffenegger (The Time Traveler's Wife)
I’ll give you the key to my heart, if you promise not to make duplicates.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
In my most darkest and alone moments, I always wished someone would´ve been there to give me a hug
Julez (Duplicity [h.s])
We're plotting to steal time itself from you.... We're going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it's so still, we'll pull it out from under you--and send you spinning off around the galaxy's edge. We're planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets... so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we'll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate.
Samuel R. Delany (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand)
The life that I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt. Our lives are linked together. No man is an island. But there is another truth, the sister of this one, and it is that every man is an island. It is a truth that often the tolling of a silence reveals even more vividly than the tolling of a bell. We sit in silence with one another, each of us more or less reluctant to speak, for fear that if he does, he may sound life a fool. And beneath that there is of course the deeper fear, which is really a fear of the self rather than of the other, that maybe truth of it is that indeed he is a fool. The fear that the self that he reveals by speaking may be a self that the others will reject just as in a way he has himself rejected it. So either we do not speak, or we speak not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are, because words can be used either way of course. Instead of showing ourselves as we truly are, we show ourselves as we believe others want us to be. We wear masks, and with practice we do it better and better, and they serve us well –except that it gets very lonely inside the mask, because inside the mask that each of us wears there is a person who both longs to be known and fears to be known. In this sense every man is an island separated from every other man by fathoms of distrust and duplicity. Part of what it means to be is to be you and not me, between us the sea that we can never entirely cross even when we would. “My brethren are wholly estranged from me,” Job cries out. “I have become an alien in their eyes.” The paradox is that part of what binds us closest together as human beings and makes it true that no man is an island is the knowledge that in another way every man is an island. Because to know this is to know that not only deep in you is there a self that longs about all to be known and accepted, but that there is also such a self in me, in everyone else the world over. So when we meet as strangers, when even friends look like strangers, it is good to remember that we need each other greatly you and I, more than much of the time we dare to imagine, more than more of the time we dare to admit. Island calls to island across the silence, and once, in trust, the real words come, a bridge is built and love is done –not sentimental, emotional love, but love that is pontifex, bridge-builder. Love that speak the holy and healing word which is: God be with you, stranger who are no stranger. I wish you well. The islands become an archipelago, a continent, become a kingdom whose name is the Kingdom of God.
Frederick Buechner (The Hungering Dark)
my contacts must be soaked in absinthe.
Happydays1d (Duplicity [h.s])
Beckett Rush spotted in London Saturday. 'Tinseltown's It Boy reportedly had three dates with three different girls at La Trattoria... all over the course of six hours. Two ladies discovered the duplicity, and catfight broke out. Taylor Risdale broke up the fight before storming out. Beckett's camp could not be reached at the moment.'" Mr. Rush laughed. "You know what this means, right?" "That once again my name is trashed." "That your DVD sales will spike at least 5 percent.
Jenny B. Jones (There You'll Find Me)
Prince Humperdinck: First things first, to the death. Westley: No. To the pain. Prince Humperdinck: I don't think I'm quite familiar with that phrase. Westley: I'll explain and I'll use small words so that you'll be sure to understand, you warthog faced buffoon. Prince Humperdinck: That may be the first time in my life a man has dared insult me. Westley: It won't be the last. To the pain means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose. Prince Humperdinck: And then my tongue I suppose, I killed you too quickly the last time. A mistake I don't mean to duplicate tonight. Westley: I wasn't finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye followed by your right. Prince Humperdinck: And then my ears, I understand let's get on with it. Westley: WRONG. Your ears you keep and I'll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, "Dear God! What is that thing," will echo in your perfect ears. That is what to the pain means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever. Prince Humperdinck: I think you're bluffing. Westley: It's possible, Pig, I might be bluffing. It's conceivable, you miserable, vomitous mass, that I'm only lying here because I lack the strength to stand. But, then again... perhaps I have the strength after all. [slowly rises and points sword directly at the prince] Westley: DROP... YOUR... SWORD!
-Princess Bride
I don't care to duplicate the travels that others have taken
Holly Winter Huppert (Cheese for Breakfast: My Turkish Summer)
Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
The path of destiny pulls you forward. It exhumes you from a state of being and propels you towards the juncture you were created for. A new frontier that you are forced to tread with a cross on your back, heavy as a boulder. When you fall to your knees at the hands of your betrayer, you can only hope to find the one sent to carry you burden- shoulder the journey towards your final punishment. Sometimes duplicity and treason are markers of the ememy, and sometimes, the failed intention of a masterful ally. But, nevertheless, as they burden you with a vexing brand of love, they become nothing more than the kisdd of Judas, pressing a crown of thorns into your flesh. Seemingly with out reason- vastly disappointing, Although I am submerged in violent water, I will rise above. My enemies, my friends, are incapable of derailing me from destiny’s design. So, I press forward-move-rely on the hope of the future- create the possible out of the impossible as I weave into life’s grand tapestry. I believe in the things that wait for me- my enemies, my friends- most of all love. It is the finish line I hunger for, the promise of love in all of its glory. I can endure all things in the hold name of love. And I will.
Addison Moore (Vex (Celestra, #5))
The shades of difference between other people and me serve to make variety and prevent monotony, but that is all; broadly speaking, we are all alike; and so by studying myself carefully and comparing myself with other people, and noting the divergences, I have been enabled to acquire a knowledge of the human race which I perceive is more accurate and more comprehensive than that which has been acquired and revealed by any other member of our species. As a result, my private and concealed opinion of myself is not of a complimentary sort. It follows that my estimate of the human race is the duplicate of my estimate of myself.
Mark Twain (Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition (Autobiography of Mark Twain series))
He sat before a note book of blank pages, saying: I swallow my own words. I chew and chew everything until it deteriorates. Every thought or impulse I have is chewed into nothingness. I want to capture all my thoughts at once, but they run in all directions. If I could do this I would be capturing the nimblest of minds, like a shoal of minnows. I would reveal innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and cowardice and courage. I want to tell the whole truth, but I cannot tell the whole truth because I would have to write four pages at once, like four columns simultaneously, four pages to the present one, and so I do not write at all. I would have to write backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and overtones.
Anaïs Nin
She would tell me stories about the family or about the neighbors, but I'd never listen. I'd complain: Stop talking so much! I couldn't see that she spoke to ease the boredom, the precise duplication of hours and days that life with my father imposed upon her, and that for her, as it would be for me many years later, the telling of her life's story was the best remedy she could think of to help her bear the weight of her existence.
Édouard Louis (A Woman’s Battles and Transformations)
This kind of neighborhood did not please him; he had seen it a million times, duplicated throughout the face of the earth. It had been from such as this that he had fled, early in his life, to use his sixness as a method of getting out. And now he had come back. He did not object to the people: he saw them as trapped here, the ordinaries, who through no fault of their own had to remain. They had not invented it; they did not like it; they endured it, as he had not had to. In fact, he felt guilty, seeing their grim faces, their turned-down mouths. Jagged, unhappy mouths.
Philip K. Dick (Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said)
The path of destiny pulls you forward. It exhumes you from a state of being and propels you towards the juncture you were created for. A new frontier that you are forced to tread with a cross on your back, heavy as a boulder. When you fall to your knees at the hands of your betrayer, you can only hope to find the one sent to carry you burden- shoulder the journey towards your final punishment. Sometimes duplicity and treason are markers of the enemy and sometimes, the failed intention of a masterful ally. But, nevertheless, as they burden you with a vexing brand of love, they become nothing more than the kiss of Judas, pressing a crown of thorns into your flesh. Seemingly without reason— vastly disappointing. Although I am submerged in violent water, I will rise above. My enemies, my friends, are incapable of derailing me from destiny’s design. So, I press forward-move-rely on the hope of the future- create the possible out of the impossible as I weave into life’s grand tapestry. I believe in the things that wait for me- my enemies, my friends- most of all love. It is the finish line I hunger for, the promise of love in all of its glory. I can endure all things in the hold name of love. And I will.
Addison Moore (Vex (Celestra, #5))
What he confessed was this. He had not been serving God, after all, when he followed Allen Dulles. He had been on a satanic quest. These were some of James Jesus Angleton’s dying words. He delivered them between fits of calamitous coughing—lung-scraping seizures that still failed to break him of his cigarette habit—and soothing sips of tea. “Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars,” Angleton told Trento in an emotionless voice. “The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. I did things that, in looking back on my life, I regret. But I was part of it and loved being in it.” He invoked the names of the high eminences who had run the CIA in his day—Dulles, Helms, Wisner. These men were “the grand masters,” he said. “If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell.” Angleton took another slow sip from his steaming cup. “I guess I will see them there soon.
David Talbot (The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government)
In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasing rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming- and this is a leap of faith by me- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow. That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other place: unique and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century. For as long as possible, I want my girls to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend. And that the wild world has a lovely order and pattern and logic, even in the shouting, disorderly chaos of breaking-apart May and reassembling May. That if there can be a logic an order even in May, then there can be in all seasons and all things.
Rick Bass
Hold still baby girl. Hold still. I need you to do something for me,” he said quietly. I opened my mouth and said, “What?” but no words came out. I tried again. Nothing. He smiled. He continued to lick my hip bone. He kissed it and looked me in the eyes. “You listening?” he asked. As I squeezing the countertop with each hand, my arms beside my body, my hands beside my butt, I nodded. “Fuck my tongue. I want you to fuck my mouth, do you hear me?” I opened my mouth and squeaked. My eyes closed. I felt his tongue move from my hip to my clit. His palm slid slowly across my hip, and rested in the depression between my hip and my pussy. His thumb was positioned on the skin above my clit, and pushed upward, exposing my clit totally. As his tongue met my clit, I squirmed. I felt his lip on top of my clit, and his tongue on the bottom. He started a motion with his tongue and lip, with my clit in between. About three seconds into it, I was done…almost to climax. I felt myself begin to cum. No, not yet, not yet, please…make this last. He lifted his head, and looked me in the eye. He must have sensed I was going to cum. “No, don’t stop. Please, Erik, don’t fucking stop.” I begged. “Fuck my mouth. Grind your pussy on my face baby girl, do you hear me?” “Yes sir. Do it. Do that again. Exactly what you were doing, exactly,” I said, hoping he could duplicate what he was doing.
Scott Hildreth (Baby Girl (Erik Ead Trilogy, #1))
My mother's hands were sixty-four years old, weathered, beautiful. They were soft and hard and they held no duplicity of emotion. They didn't love and hate. They were not tender and violent. They never offered me the world and handed me hell. They were constant: I miss them purely.
Maggie MacKellar (When It Rains)
What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discover after all the others. However that may be, after prolonged research on myself, I brought out the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by peaceful means and eventually used to achieve, through disinterested means, everything I desired.
Albert Camus (The Fall)
If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other—while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity—then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do—even using so-called good human relations techniques—will be perceived as manipulative. It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success. Only basic goodness gives life to technique.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
Bad or good, movies nearly always have a strange diminishing effect on works of fantasy (of course there are exceptions; The Wizard of Oz is an example which springs immediately to mind). In discussions, people are willing to cast various parts endlessly. I've always thought Robert Duvall would make a splendid Randall Flagg, but I've heard people suggest such people as Clint Eastwood, Bruce Dern and Christopher Walken. They all sound good, just as Bruce Springsteen would seem to make an interesting Larry Underwood, if ever he chose to try acting (and, based on his videos, I think he would do very well ... although my personal choice would be Marshall Crenshaw). But in the end, I think it's best for Stu, Larry, Glen, Frannie, Ralph, Tom Cullen, Lloyd, and that dark fellow to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of the imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction - anyone who has ever seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and then reads Ken Kesey's novel will find it hard or impossible not to see Jack Nicholson's face on Randle Patrick McMurphy. That is not necessarily bad ... but it is limiting. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.
Stephen King (The Stand)
And all these existents which bustled about this tree came from nowhere and were going nowhere. Suddenly they existed, then suddenly they existed no longer: existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing—not even a memory. Existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence—which is limited only by existence. I sank down on the bench, stupefied, stunned by this profusion of beings without origin: everywhere blossomings, hatchings out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning. It was repugnant. But why, I thought, why so many existences, since they all look alike? What good are so many duplicates of trees? So many existences missed, obstinately begun again and again missed—like the awkward efforts of an insect fallen on its back? (I was one of those efforts.)
Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea)
I’ve never in my life felt anything like it – this intimacy, this feeling of belonging to someone so completely. This can’t be bought or bottled. It can’t be replicated, duplicated, or imitated. Being with Easton in any capacity is like trying to cling to a shooting star, and somewhere inside, I know that if I don’t relish this time with him, I’ll miss it as he burns his brightest.
Kate Stewart (Reverse (The Bittersweet Symphony Duet, #2))
Look, this island is an attempt to re-create a natural environment from the past. To make an isolated world where extinct creatures roam freely. Correct?” “Yes.” “But from my point of view, such an undertaking is impossible. The mathematics are so self-evident that they don’t need to be calculated. It’s rather like my asking you whether, on a billion dollars in income, you had to pay tax. You wouldn’t need to pull out your calculator to check. You’d know tax was owed. And, similarly, I know overwhelmingly that one cannot successfully duplicate nature in this way, or hope to isolate it.
Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park (Jurassic Park, #1))
Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word! Give me back my book and take my kiss instead. Was it my enemy or my friend I heard, "What a big book for such a little head!" Come, I will show you now my newest hat, And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink! Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that. I never again shall tell you what I think. I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly; You will not catch me reading any more: I shall be called a wife to pattern by; And some day when you knock and push the door, Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy, I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other—while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity—then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do—even using so-called good human relations techniques—will be perceived as manipulative.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
In the end, the record companies have the power to control the quality that is served online. Online service has been problematic in that it actively or discreetly promotes trading and duplication of music. It is not offensive to me that the MP3-quaility sound is traded around. It is, in my opinion, the new radio and serves a great purpose: making music lovers away of the content tat is out there to buy. If the consumers want it, let tham take it, whatever quality they prefer. Ultimately, nothing can stop absolute quality from making a big comeback. The stage is well set. I believe in what I am trying to do and that good Karma will come from it. It is just a matter of time.
Neil Young
The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the drawing nor the picture belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of sensing makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture, the actor's mimicry--these are not extras that I borrow from the real world in order to aim across them at prosaic things in their absence. The imaginary is much nearer to and much farther away from the actual. It is nearer because it is the diagram of the life of the actual in my body, its pulp and carnal obverse exposed to view for the first time...And the imaginary is much further away from the actual because the picture is an analogue only according to the body; because it does not offer to the mind an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things, but rather it offers to the gaze traces of the vision of the inside, in order that the gaze may espouse them; it offers to vision that which clothes vision internally, the imaginary texture of the real.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (L'Œil et l'Esprit)
Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself. And when one inhabits a city, even a city as rigorously and logically constructed as Manhattan, one starts by getting lost. Over time, you begin to develop a mental map, a collection of favoured destinations and preferred routes: a labyrinth no other person could ever precisely duplicate or reproduce. What I was building in those years, and what now follows, is a map of loneliness, built out of both need and interest, pieced together from my own experiences and those of others.
Olivia Laing (The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone)
I mentioned earlier that our sense of free will is very much about feeling we ‘could have done differently’. This counterfactual aspect of the experience of volition is particularly important for its future-oriented function. The feeling that I could have done differently does not mean that I actually could have done differently. Rather, the phenomenology of alternative possibilities is useful because in a future similar, but not identical, situation I might indeed do differently. If every circumstance is indeed identical on Tuesday as on Monday, then I can do no differently on Tuesday than on Monday. But this will never be the case. The physical world does not duplicate itself from day to day, not even from millisecond to millisecond. At the very least, the circumstances of my brain will have changed, because I’ve had an experience of volition on Monday and paid attention to its consequences. This, by itself, is enough to affect how my brain can control my many degrees of freedom when setting out to work again on Tuesday.‡ The usefulness of feeling ‘I could have done otherwise’ is that, next time, you might.
Anil Seth (Being You: A New Science of Consciousness)
For the benefit of your research people, I would like to mention (so as to avoid any duplication of labor): that the planet is very like Mars; that at least seventeen states have Pinedales; that the end of the top paragraph Galley 3 is an allusion to the famous "canals" (or, more correctly, "channels") of Schiaparelli (and Percival Lowell); that I have thoroughly studied the habits of chinchillas; that Charrete is old French and should have one "t"; that Boke's source on Galley 9 is accurate; that "Lancelotik" is not a Celtic diminutive but a Slavic one; that "Betelgeuze" is correctly spelled with a "z", not an "s" as some dictionaries have it; that the "Indigo" Knight is the result of some of my own research; that Sir Grummore, mentioned both in Le Morte Darthur ad in Amadis de Gaul, was a Scotsman; that L'Eau Grise is a scholarly pun; and that neither bludgeons nor blandishments will make me give up the word "hobnailnobbing".
Vladimir Nabokov
You were a wanted child, God knows, she would say at other moments, lingering over the photo albums in which she had me framed; these albums were thick with babies, but my replicas thinned out as I grew older, as if the population of my duplicates had been hit by some plague. She would say this a little regretfully, as though I hadn't turned out entirely as she'd expected. No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do badly by one another, we did as well as most. I wish she were here, so I could tell her I finally know this.
Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale)
The choice is yours.Either way, I will be faultless. So ask yourself, would you rather take credit for an eyesore or for a work of art?" His speech complete, he sank onto the sofa, stretching his arms out across its back, a grin spreading across his face. I had not thought this through, that much was evident, but now that I had commenced it, I would not give n to him. "You could change. More easily than could I." "True," he ackowledged with a chuckle. "But I look perfect." "Well,I'm sure you could look perfect in something else." "Oh,doubtless, but why duplicate what is perfect when one could improve what is not?" I wanted to kill him. I wanted to close that infuriatingly divine mouth once and for all, and if ending his life were the way to do it, I was willing to take that step.Instead, I took a deep breath and tried again. "If I change, my hair will be ruined." "You know,dear, something really should be done about your hair in any case. I told you to wear it down. And mind you switch tiaras." "We're almost last as it is," blustered, trying to keep my tone civil, thought inside I was burning. "You could change more quickly." "Not necessarily.You already know the gown into which you will change. I would have to search for something less elegant to match the dress you have on, but still formal enough for the occasion. And honestly,have you ever seen me in anything that might go with sky blue?" I fell silent, for as much as I hated to admit it, he had a valid argument. He generally wore dark or rich colors, nothing similar to my gown. I despised myself for what I was about to do. "I'll wait," Steldor said, accurately reading my expression.
Cayla Kluver (Allegiance (Legacy, #2))
My dear queen,” said he, “duplicity of any sort is exceedingly objectionable between married people of any rank, not to say kings and queens; and the most objectionable form duplicity can assume is that of punning.” MacDonald, George. The Light Princess: and Other Fairy Stories (Kindle Locations 193-195). Dancing Unicorn Books. Kindle Edition.
George MacDonald (The Light Princess)
One of the most surprisingly controversial presidential decisions I made was to return the Crown of Saint Stephen to the people of Hungary. It was said to have been given by the Pope in the year 1000 to Stephen, the first king of Hungary, as a symbol of political and religious authority and was worn by more than fifty kings when they were vested with power. A distinctive feature was that the cross on top was bent. As Soviet troops invaded Hungary, toward the end of the Second World War, some Hungarians delivered to American troops the crown and other royal regalia, which were subsequently stored in Fort Knox alongside our nation’s gold. The Soviets still dominated Hungary when I announced my decision to return the crown. There was a furor among Hungarian-Americans and others, and I was denounced as accepting the subservience of the occupied nation. I considered the crown to be a symbol of the freedom and sovereignty of the Hungarian people. I returned it in January 1978, stipulating that the crown and insignia must be controlled by Hungarians, carefully protected, and made available for public display as soon as practicable. A duplicate of the crown was brought to The Carter Center as a gift for me in March 1998 and is on display in our presidential museum. Rosalynn and I led volunteers to build Habitat houses in Vác, Hungary, in 1996, and we were treated as honored guests of the government and escorted to the Hungarian National Museum to see the crown and the stream of citizens who were going past it, many of them reciting a prayer as they did so. We were told that more than 3 million people pay homage to the crown each year. A few years later it was moved to its permanent home, in the Hungarian Parliament Building.
Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety)
That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man. Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
the only touchstone of merit seeming to me to be the way someone could be useful in connection with the one thing that seemed important—my love. Then, perhaps out of duplicity, or in a genuine surge of affection inspired by gratitude, by self-interest, and by all the physical features of Mme de Guermantes that nature had replicated in her nephew, I went on to add:
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3))
If you ask the other John and Peggy (my parents) how they’ve managed to stay married for well over half a century, they’ll credit an uncompromising level of honesty with each other. If you press them, though, you’ll learn that their commitment to the truth did not extend to their children. Indeed, when it came to raising three boys on a public school teachers salary, my parents lied like rugs./ It was a strange sort of snobbery to develop at such an early age - this sympathy for the more fortunate - but that’s precisely what my parents engendered. With duplicity and guile, they Turn envy to pity. By the time I was eleven, I felt nothing but compassion for classmates of mine who had been forced to wear the latest fashions. Sadly, they had no older cousins to provide them with a superior wardrobe of “softer, sturdier, broken-in alternatives.
Mike Rowe (The Way I Heard It)
the events of The Group were matters that I was not supposed to know about, or even be capable of understanding. The attention of our elders focused on sexual activity, but perhaps other elements were even more corrosive of the conventions: disappointment, infidelity, duplicity, hypocrisy. In all of those books, too, there was a sense of forbidden female license that translated, at some subconscious level, into female freedom.
Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)
A brick is a duplicate. It is a physical copy of the idea for a brick. And what’s the big idea? A brick represents unity, a notion of hey, let’s build something together. Like a house, for example. And after you help me build my house, I’ll use a leftover brick and smash you over the skull so that not only will I not have to pay you for your labor, but I won’t have to pay the butcher for meat, because with your sturdy body, I’m sure I’ll have enough food to feed my family for a year. 

Jarod Kintz (A brick and a blanket walk into a bar)
Letters from home have come too, which I have not yet had the courage to read, I feel so melancholy. Please ask M. Aurier not to write any more articles on my painting, insist upon this, that to begin with he is mistaken about me, since I am too overwhelmed with grief to be able to face publicity. Making pictures distracts me, but if I hear them spoken of, it pains me more than he knows. How is Bernard? As there are some canvases in duplicate, if you like you can exchange with him, for a good canvas by him would be a fine thing to have in your collection. I felt ill at the time I was doing the almond blossoms. If I had been able to go on working, you can judge from it that I would have done others of trees in blossom. Now the trees in blossom are almost over, really I have no luck. Yes, I must try to get out of here, but where to go? I do not think I could be more shut up and more of a prisoner in the homes where they do not pretend to leave you free, such as at Charenton or Montevergues.
Vincent van Gogh
What about the dissolution transporter?” suggested Ms. Minnian. “Is it still checked out?” “Let’s see.” Doc went over to a card file and flipped through it. “No, it’s back downstairs in the Chresto. Excellent idea.” “What’s a dissolution transporter?” I asked. “Sort of like a fax machine for objects,” said Dr. Rust. “What’s a fax machine, then?” “Oh, you young people!” said Ms. Minnian. “Never mind about the fax,” said Doc. “A dissolution transporter deconstructs an object—in this case, you—taking note of its exact structure and composition. Then it transfers that information to another location, where the object is reassembled from material there.” “Kind of like the transporter on Star Trek except it only works one way,” said Jaya. That sounded alarming. “But if we’re deconstructed here and reassembled someplace else, won’t we turn into other people?” “Technically, yes. But you’ll be other people with the exact same memories. And exact duplicates of your bodies, down to the last quark,” said Ms. Minnian. “Yes, but I’ll be dead! Just because someone else has my memories, that doesn’t mean it’s me!” I objected. “It’s okay, Leo,” said Jaya. “I’ve used the diss tran a zillion times and I still feel like myself.” “Of course you do. You have all of the original Jaya’s memories, so of course you think you’re her. That doesn’t mean you are.” “What makes you so sure you’re the same Leo who went to bed last night?” said Ms. Minnian. “Dissolution transportation is no more discontinuous than falling asleep and waking up again. But you don’t have to go if you’re afraid.
Polly Shulman (The Wells Bequest (The Grimm Legacy, #2))
In a private room down the hall, a tired but delighted Cecily was watching her husband with his brand-new son. Cecily had thought that the expression on Tate’s face at their wedding would never be duplicated. But when they placed the tiny little boy in his father’s gowned arms in the delivery room, and he saw his child for the first time, the look on his face was indescribable. Tears welled in his eyes. He’d taken the tiny little fist in his big, dark hand and smoothed over the perfect little fingers and then the tiny little face, seeking resemblances. “Generations of our families,” he said softly, “all there, in that face.” He’d looked down at his wife with unashamedly wet eyes. “In our son’s face.” She wiped her own tears away with a corner of the sheet and coaxed Tate’s head down so that she could do the same for him where they were, temporarily, by themselves. Now she was cleaned up, like their baby, and drowsy as she lay on clean white sheets and watched her husband get acquainted with his firstborn. “Isn’t he beautiful?” he murmured, still awed by the child. “Next time, we have to have a little girl,” he said with a tender smile, “so that she can look like you.” Her heart felt near to bursting as she stared up at that beloved face, above the equally beloved face of their firstborn. “My heart is happy when I see you,” she whispered in Lakota. He chuckled, having momentarily forgotten that he’d taught her how to say it. “Mine is equally happy when I see you,” he replied in English. She reached out and clasped his big hand with her small one. On the table beside her was a bouquet of roses, red and crisp with a delightful soft perfume. Her eyes traced them, and she remembered the first rose he’d ever given her, when she was seventeen: a beautiful red paper rose that he’d brought her from Japan. Now the roses were real, not imitation. Just as her love for him, and his for her, had become real enough to touch. He frowned slightly at her expression. “What is it?” he asked softly. “I was remembering the paper rose you brought me from Japan, just after I went to live with Leta.” She shrugged and smiled self-consciously. He smiled back. “And now you’re covered in real ones,” he discerned. She nodded, delighted to see that he understood exactly what she was talking about. But, then, they always had seemed to read each others’ thoughts-never more than now, with the baby who was a living, breathing manifestation of their love. “Yes,” she said contentedly. “The roses are real, now.” Outside the window, rain was coming down in torrents, silver droplets shattering on the bright green leaves of the bushes. In the room, no one noticed. The baby was sleeping and his parents were watching him, their eyes full of warm, soft dreams.
Diana Palmer (Paper Rose (Hutton & Co. #2))
In my university, copying machines are purchased by the Printing and Duplicating Center, then dispersed to the various departments. The copiers are purchased after a formal “request for proposals” has gone out to manufacturers and dealers of machines. The selection is almost always based solely on price, plus a consideration of the cost of maintenance. Usability? Not considered. The state of California requires by law that universities purchase things on a price basis; there are no legal requirements regarding understandability or usability of the product. That is one reason we get unusable copying machines and telephone systems.
Donald A. Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
Like Alan, Jep turned his life around after overcoming the struggles of alcohol and drugs. He came to work for Duck Commander and found his niche as a videographer. He films the footage for our Duckmen videos and works with Willie on the Buck Commander videos. Jep is with us on nearly every hunt, filming the action from a distance. He knows exactly what we’re looking for in the videos and films it, downloads it, edits it, and sends it to the duplicator, who produces and distributes our DVDs. Having worked with the crew of Duck Dynasty over the last few years, I’ve noticed that most people who work in the film industry are a little bit weird. And Jep, my youngest son, is a little strange. It’s his personality-he’s easygoing, likable, and a lot more reserved than his brothers. But he’s the only one who will come up to me and give me a bear hug. He’ll just walk up and say, “Daddy, I need a hug.” The good news for Jep is that as far as the Duck Commander crowd goes, one thing is for sure: weirdos are in! We covet weirdos; they can do things we can’t because they’re so strange. You have to have two or three weirdos in your company to make it work. It’s truly been a blessing to watch Jep grow and mature and become a loving husband and father. He and his wife, Jessica, have four beautiful children.
Phil Robertson (Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander)
I don’t know when I started to realize that my country’s past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i’d believed so trustworthy and predictable—the place I’d grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand—began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don’t write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that’s how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don’t know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound disagreement with that unpredictable reality. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez (La forma de las ruinas)
But I can cite ten other reasons for not being a father." "First of all, I don't like motherhood," said Jakub, and he broke off pensively. "Our century has already unmasked all myths. Childhood has long ceased to be an age of innocence. Freud discovered infant sexuality and told us all about Oedipus. Only Jocasta remains untouchable; no one dares tear off her veil. Motherhood is the last and greatest taboo, the one that harbors the most grievous curse. There is no stronger bond than the one that shackles mother to child. This bond cripples the child's soul forever and prepares for the mother, when her son has grown up, the most cruel of all the griefs of love. I say that motherhood is a curse, and I refuse to contribute to it." "Another reason I don't want to add to the number of mothers," said Jakub with some embarrassment, "is that I love the female body, and I am disgusted by the thought of my beloved's breast becoming a milk-bag." "The doctor here will certainly confirm that physicians and nurses treat women hospitalized after an aborted pregnancy more harshly than those who have given birth, and show some contempt toward them even though they themselves will, at least once in their lives, need a similar operation. But for them it's a reflex stronger than any kind of thought, because the cult of procreation is an imperative of nature. That's why it's useless to look for the slightest rational argument in natalist propaganda. Do you perhaps think it's the voice of Jesus you're hearing in the natalist morality of the church? Do you think it's the voice of Marx you're hearing in the natalist propaganda of the Communist state? Impelled merely by the desire to perpetuate the species, mankind will end up smothering itself on its small planet. But the natalist propaganda mill grinds on, and the public is moved to tears by pictures of nursing mothers and infants making faces. It disgusts me. It chills me to think that, along with millions of other enthusiasts, I could be bending over a cradle with a silly smile." "And of course I also have to ask myself what sort of world I'd be sending my child into. School soon takes him away to stuff his head with the falsehoods I've fought in vain against all my life. Should I see my son become a conformist fool? Or should I instill my own ideas into him and see him suffer because he'll be dragged into the same conflicts I was?" "And of course I also have to think of myself. In this country children pay for their parents' disobedience, and parents for their children's disobedience. How many young people have been denied education because their parents fell into disgrace? And how many parents have chosen permanent cowardice for the sole purpose of preventing harm to their children? Anyone who wants to preserve at least some freedom here shouldn't have children," Jakub said, and fell into silence. "The last reason carries so much weight that it counts for five," said Jakub. "Having a child is to show an absolute accord with mankind. If I have a child, it's as though I'm saying: I was born and have tasted life and declare it so good that it merits being duplicated." "And you have not found life to be good?" asked Bertlef. Jakub tried to be precise, and said cautiously: "All I know is that I could never say with complete conviction: Man is a wonderful being and I want to reproduce him.
Milan Kundera (Farewell Waltz)
How do you want this story to end? It seems to me that there are two paths from which you can choose, the first involving a softer landing than the second, though neither are without bumps and bruises, of course. These small injuries are simply a necessary consequence of this entire exercise, as I'm sure you must understand by now. Or have I overestimated you and you haven't guessed? No matter. My goal - which you will undoubtedly find utterly unacceptable - will be met regardless of your awareness. Freeing myself of the shackles of your judgement and your malfeasance will be a delightful result of your duplicity, a result you never intended. Because you only ever intended to serve your own needs and satisfy your own desires. I was never in the forefront of your mind, not even in the early days, even as I was told that you should always be at the forefront of mine.
Marie Benedict (The Mystery of Mrs. Christie)
I was having so much fear," the simulacrum said, kissing my eyelids and I couldn't help but think about the eyelid kissing, and how this is a thing Rema always liked to do, and though I understand that eye lid kissing is a fairly standard part of any amatory repertoire, I remember how it really needled me at the beginning, needled me for being a sort of learned behavior, which therefore pointed to that whole world that was Rema before I knew her, and pointed to all those people who were not me who had gone into the creation of her as she was, and-well, in that way she was like some alien sedentary rock forma tion, some meteor fallen to my planet, and it seemed a violation of me to have no choice but to love some charred castaway, with all its strata-I guess I am very jealous and possessive_I just found it very diffi cult those moments, like eyelid kissing, when I couldn't help but perceive her duplicity, her triplicity.
Rivka Galchen (Atmospheric Disturbances)
Gramps?” I stood still and listened. Quiet. He must have been out, I thought, but I found myself at the door of his study. I saw him. Couldn’t believe it but there he was at his desk. Cigarette smoldering in the crystal ashtray, pen in hand, staring blankly off. “Gramps?” “Not a good time.” His voice wasn’t even his voice. “Sorry,” I said, backing away. I found my way to the love seat. I wanted a lecture about anything. The correct name for a coffee establishment. The duplicity of nuns. The difference between carnal desire and the love for someone’s soul. I wanted to touch knees under the table. I wanted him to tell me about my mother. Night fell and he didn’t come out. He didn’t make dinner. I sat on the love seat, perfectly still, until my back got sore and my feet fell asleep and I had to stand to get the blood rushing again. I got ready for bed and then I went to my room in the front of the house, where nobody ever went but me.
Nina LaCour (We Are Okay)
The road to Epidaurus is like the road to creation. One stops searching. One grows silent, stilled by the hush of mysterious beginnings. If one could speak one would become melodious. There is nothing to be seized or reassured or cornered off here: there is only a breaking down of the walls which lock the spirit in. The landscape does not recede, it installs itself in the open places of the heart j it crowds in, accumulates, dispossesses. You are no longer riding through something—call it Nature, if you will—but participating in a rout, a rout of the forces of greed, malevolence, envy, selfishness, spite, intolerance, pride, arrogance, cunning, duplicity and so on. It is the morning of the first day of the great peace, the peace of the heart, which comes with surrender, I never knew the meaning of peace until I arrived at Epidaurus. Like everybody I had used the word all my life, without once realizing that I was using a counterfeit.
Henry Miller (The Colossus of Maroussi)
However that may be, after prolonged research on myself, I brought out the fundamental duplicity of the human being. Then I realized, as a result of delving in my memory, that modesty helped me to shine, humility to conquer, and virtue to oppress. I used to wage war by peaceful means and eventually used to achieve, through disinterested means, everything I desired. For instance, I never complained that my birthday was overlooked; people were even surprised, with a touch of admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself. Several days before the famous date (which I knew very well) I was on the alert, eager to let nothing slip that might arouse the attention and memory of those on whose lapse I was counting (didn’t I once go so far as to contemplate falsifying a friend’s calendar?). Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.
Albert Camus (The Fall)
HER FINGERS TOYED ABSENTLY WITH HER RINGS There are fallen angels in the way you look And great bridges over silent streams at your smile. Your gestures are a lonely princess dreaming over a book At a window over a lake, on some distant isle. If I were to stretch my hand and touch yours that would be Dawn behind the turrets of a city in some East. The words hidden in my gesture would be moonlight on the sea Of your being something in my soul like gaiety in a feast. Let your silence tell me of the numberless dreams that are you. Let the drooping of your eyelids prolong landscapes far away. The jets of water return on the listening of being untrue And this is the flower I pluck, with a sound, from what you unsay. Blossoms, blossoms, blossoms along the road of your going to speak. Eighteenth century gardens, so sad in the middle of our drearning them now, Are the way you are conscious of yourself on your eyelids, by your lips, through your cheek. A sick child sees the rain blur through the window of what you allow. Do not footfall the silence that is the palace where our consciousness Is living at seeing gardens our duplicate lives of one soul. What are we, in our dream of each other, but a picture which is The masterpiece of a painter that never painted at all? Fernando Pessoa, Poesia Inglesa (Organização e tradução de Luísa Freire. Prefácio de Teresa Rita Lopes.) Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1995.
Fernando Pessoa
When I was younger, I remember taking pride in people’s well-meaning remarks: “You’re so lucky that no one would ever know!” or “You don’t even look like a guy!” or “Wow! You’re prettier than most ‘natural’ women!” They were all backhanded compliments, acknowledging my beauty while also invalidating my identity as a woman. To this day, I’m told in subtle and obvious ways that I am not “real,” meaning that I am not, nor will I ever be, a cis woman; therefore, I am fake. These thoughts surrounding identity, gender, bodies, and how we view, judge, and objectify all women brings me to the subject of “passing,” a term based on an assumption that trans people are passing as something that we are not. It’s rooted in the idea that we are not really who we say we are, that we are holding a secret, that we are living false lives. Examples of people “passing” in media, whether through race (Imitation of Life and Nella Larsen’s novel Passing), class (Catch Me if You Can and the reality show Joe Millionaire), or gender (Boys Don’t Cry and The Crying Game), are often portrayed as leading a life of tragic duplicity and as deceivers who will be punished harshly by society when their true identity is uncovered. This is no different for trans people who “pass” as their gender or, more accurately, are assumed to be cis or blend in as cis, as if that is the standard or norm. This pervasive thinking frames trans people as illegitimate and unnatural. If a trans woman who knows herself and operates in the world as a woman is seen, perceived, treated, and viewed as a woman, isn’t she just being herself? She isn’t passing ; she is merely being.
Janet Mock (Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More)
The next day, I went into my dad’s shop, where he was boring barrels for duck calls. “Hey, you want to hear my duck call?” I asked him. I was a little bit nervous because I’d never blown a call in front of him before. “Yeah, let me hear it,” he said. I blew on the duck call. “You sound like a gadwall,” he said. A gadwall hen sounds like a mallard hen, except her cadence is a little shorter and sounds scratchier. But they’re pretty close. I didn’t know if he was complimenting me or criticizing me! “Hey, look on the bright side,” he said. “If the sperm count had been lower, you might have come out as a shoveler.” Shovelers are pretty much trash ducks and aren’t very good to eat. But after Phil told me I sounded like a gadwall, I’ve always had a special place for them in my heart. Several years later, I actually invented the first gadwall drake call. Gadwalls are unique in that the hen very rarely makes a sound. One day, we were working the ducks, and I had a mallard hen call in one hand and our six-in-one whistle in the other because we were working pintails. I blew the hen call and then the whistle. One time, I blew them at the same time and stopped. That sounds like a gadwall drake, I thought to myself. I started blowing them simultaneously so my dad could hear them. “Hey, you might be onto something,” he said. “Why don’t we try that? We’ll get the gadwall decoys and try it on ’em. If it gets them into the decoys, we’ll figure out a way to build them.” It was amazing how many gadwalls responded to my drake call. We ended up building the call, and no one has successfully duplicated it. It isn’t the prettiest of duck calls, but it’s effective.
Jase Robertson (Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl)
… But don't ever forget, young Master Paul. Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It's because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.” (P. 35-36) Then there's that word Joan dropped into our conversation like a concrete fence-post into a fishpool: practicality. Over my life I've seen friends fail to leave their marriages, fail to continue affairs, fail even to start them sometimes, all for the same expressed reason. 'It just isn't practical, they say wearily. The distances are too great, the train schedules unfavourable, the work hours mismatched; then there's the mortgage, and the children, and the dog, also, the joint ownership of things. 'I just couldn't face sorting out the record collection, a non-leaving wife once told me. In the first thrill of love, the couple had amalgamated their records, throwing away duplicates. How was it feasible to unpick all that? And so she stayed; and after a while the temptation to leave passed, and the record collection breathed a sigh of relief. Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love. (P. 73)
Julian Barnes (The Only Story)
I’ll never forget the time I went duck-hunting with my buddy Mike Williams; you’ll read a lot about our adventures and shenanigans in this book. Mike and I were hunting blue-winged teal ducks, which tend to move en masse, so typically you’ll either shoot your limit or not see a duck. In other words, there is a lot of idle time involved with teal hunting, so we usually bring along our fishing poles. After a hunt with Mike one morning, in which we had not seen a single teal, I hooked a four-pound bass. Almost simultaneously, one lone blue-winged teal flew over our heads. As I was reeling in the bass, I reached for my shotgun, raised it with only my left hand, and shot the duck. Now, I’m right-handed but left-eye dominant. It was the first duck I ever shot left-handed, but it would be the first of many. I eventually made the switch to shooting left-handed permanently. It was the hardest obstacle I’ve ever had to overcome in hunting, but it made me a better shot because I’m left-eye dominant. When Mike and I went back to my dad’s house and told him what happened, Phil didn’t believe us, even though we had the teal and bass as evidence. He’d told us about a similar feat many times before, when his friend Hookin’ Bull Thompson pulled in a fish with one hand and shot a duck with the other. I had heard the story many time, but only then did I realize it had now been duplicated. No matter how many times we told Phil about what I did, he didn’t believe us. He thought we made the entire story up because of the countless times he’d bragged about witnessing his buddy’s epic feat. Now, Mike is one of the most honest people you’ll meet, so he couldn’t believe Phil thought we were lying to him. “I’m going to sign an affidavit about what you did,” Mike told me. “Maybe then he’ll believe us.” “Oh, drop it,” I said. “That’s just how my family rolls.
Jase Robertson (Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl)
Islam tells us that on the unappealable Day of Judgment, all who have perpetrated images of living things will reawaken with their works, and will be ordered to blow life into them, and they will fail, and they and their works will be cast into the fires of punishment. As a child, I knew that horror of the spectral duplication or multiplication of reality, but mine would come as I stood before large mirrors. As soon as it began to grow dark outside, the constant, infallible functioning of mirrors, the way they followed my every movement, their cosmic pantomime, would seem eerie to me. One of my insistent pleas to God and my guardian angel was that I not dream of mirrors; I recall clearly that I would keep one eye on them uneasily. I feared sometimes that they would begin to veer off from reality; other times, that I would see my face in them disfigured by strange misfortunes. I have learned that this horror is monstrously abroad in the world again. The story is quite simple, and terribly unpleasant. In 1927, I met a grave young woman, first by telephone (because Julia began as a voice without a name or face) and then on a corner at nightfall. Her eyes were alarmingly large, her hair jet black and straight, her figure severe. She was the granddaughter and greatgranddaughter of Federalists, as I was the grandson and great-grandson of Unitarians,* but that ancient discord between our lineages was, for us, a bond, a fuller possession of our homeland. She lived with her family in a big run-down high-ceiling'd house, in the resentment and savorlessness of genteel poverty. In the afternoons— only very rarely at night—we would go out walking through her neighbor-hood, which was Balvanera.* We would stroll along beside the high blank wall of the railway yard; once we walked down Sarmien to all the way to the cleared grounds of the Parque Centenario.*Between us there was neither love itself nor the fiction of love; I sensed in her an intensity that was utterly unlike the intensity of eroticism, and I feared it. In order to forge an intimacy with women, one often tells them about true or apocryphal things that happened in one's youth; I must have told her at some point about my horror of mirrors, and so in 1928 I must have planted the hallucination that was to flower in 1931. Now I have just learned that she has gone insane, and that in her room all the mirrors are covered, because she sees my reflection in them— usurping her own—and she trembles and cannot speak, and says that I am magically following her, watching her, stalking her. What dreadful bondage, the bondage of my face—or one of my former faces. Its odious fate makes me odious as well, but I don't care anymore.
Jorge Luis Borges
And then it sends a signal to turn off the system.” “So the universe with the wallet in the chamber waiting to be sent still exists,” added Allen. “But the universe from which it is actually sent never does.”  “That is just so messed up,” said Blake in exasperation, and Jenna, Walsh, and Soyer nodded their agreement. “Here is my advice to all of you,” said Cargill. “The best thing to do is ignore time travel, and don’t think about the paradoxes too hard. If you do, your head really will explode,” he added with a wry smile. “Just think of it as duplication and teleportation. But always keep in mind that the universe seems to go out of its way to ensure that infinite alternate timelines aren’t allowed. So no matter what, we only ever get this one universe.” He sighed. “So we’d better make sure we don’t screw it up.”     48   Brian Hamilton hated Cheyenne Mountain. Sure, it was one of the most interesting places in the world to visit, but living there only worked if you were a bat. The Palomar facility had also been underground, but nothing like this. It had a much larger security perimeter, so trips to the surface were easier to make happen. Not that it really mattered. Soon enough he would be traveling on another assignment anyway, living in a hotel room somewhere. But what he really wanted was to work side by side with Edgar Knight, toward their common goal. He was tired of being Knight’s designated spy, having to watch Lee Cargill squander Q5’s vast resources and capabilities. Watching him crawl like a wounded baby when he could be soaring. Cargill was an idiot. He could transform the world, but he was too weak to do it. He could wipe out the asshole terrorists who wanted nothing more than to butcher the helpless. If you have the ultimate cure for cancer, you use it to wipe out the disease once and for all. You don’t wield your cure only as a last resort, when the cancer has all but choked the life out of you. Edgar Knight, on the other hand, was a man with vision. He was able to make the tough decisions. If you were captain of a life raft with a maximum capacity of ten people, choosing to take five passengers of a sinking ship on board was an easy decision, not a heroic one. But what about when there were fifty passengers? Was it heroic to take them all, dooming everyone to death? Or was the heroic move using force, if necessary, to limit this number, to ensure some would survive? Sure, from the outside this looked coldhearted, while the converse seemed compassionate. But watching the world circle the drain because you were too much of a pussy to make the hard decisions was the real crime. Survival of the fittest was harsh reality. In the animal kingdom it was eat or be eaten. If you saw a group of fuck-nuts just itching to nuke the world back into the Dark Ages—who believed the Messiah equivalent, the twelfth Imam, would only come out to play when Israel was destroyed, and worldwide Armageddon unleashed—you wiped them out. To a man. Or else they’d do the same to you. It had been three days since Cargill had reported that he was on the verge of acquiring Jenna Morrison and Aaron Blake.
Douglas E. Richards (Split Second (Split Second, #1))
I had, therefore, to resign myself to commissioning a duplicate from a jeweller in Madrid. They did the work very nicely. The claws are curiously shaped, but the true marvel is the stone; it is so very limpid and weighs many carats, but notice also how it is hollowed out! You see that drop of green oil which takes the place of the internal tear? It is a drop of poison, an Indian toxin which strikes so rapidly and so corrosively that it only requires to come into momentary contact with one of a man's mucous membranes to rob him of his senses and induce rigour mortis. 'It is instant death, certain but painless suicide, that I carry in this emerald. One bite' - and Ethal made as if to raise the ring to his lips - 'and with a single bound one has quit the mundane world of base instincts and crude works, to enter eternity. 'Look upon the truest of friends: a deus ex machina which defies public opinion and cheats the police of their prey...' He laughed briefly. 'After all, we live in difficult times, and today's magistrates are so very meticulous. Salute as I do, my dear friend, the poison which saves and delivers. It is at your service, if ever the day should come when you are weary of life!
Jean Lorrain (Monsieur de Phocas)
To pack a healthy lunch, my children follow simple packing guidelines. They combine, and not duplicate, ingredients from each of the following categories. All are available in either loose or unpackaged form, and when possible, we buy organic. In order of importance (i.e. amount), they pick: 1. Grain (favor whole wheat when possible): Baguette, focaccia, buns, bagels, pasta, rice, couscous 2. Vegetable: Lettuce, tomato, pickles, avocado, cucumber, broccoli, carrots, bell pepper, celery, snap peas 3. Protein: Deli cuts, leftover meat or fish, shrimp, eggs, tofu, nuts, nut butters, beans, peas 4. Calcium: Yogurt, cheese, dark leafy greens 5. Fruit: Preferably raw fruit or berries, homemade apple sauce, or dried fruit 6. Optional Snacks: Whole or dried fruit, yogurt, homemade popcorn or cookie, nuts, granola, or any interesting snack from the bulk aisle
Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
But yet another piece of my stupidly good mood, I realized, was because of the effects of being in the company of Kraunauer himself. His aura was almost tangible. There was something about him that impressed me, which all by itself was impressive enough. I had always considered myself the Master of Duplicity, the Paradigm of Synthetic Behavior. No one else had ever come close—until now. Kraunauer left me in the dust. He was the most highly polished faker I had ever met, and I could do nothing but watch and admire every time he favored me with one of his completely artificial smiles. And he had not merely one fake grin; I’d already seen at least seven, each with its own very specific application, each so perfect as to leave me breathless with admiration. Aside from my appreciation for someone who was better than me at something I held dear, there was an unspoken assumption of command in his bearing. And it worked. Just being near him made me want to please him. It should have been deeply unsettling, but somehow it wasn’t.
Jeff Lindsay (Dexter Is Dead (Dexter, #8))
All my quotes are original because I don't have duplicates.
Amit Abraham
You are overheated, my lady,” her new partner said severely. “It will be a pleasure to escort you outside for fresh air.” She opened her mouth to protest such forwardness, but then the man opened his mouth slightly so that she could glimpse his fangs. “Clayton cannot touch you here, no matter how much he may pretend otherwise.” Blinking in astonishment, she nodded and allowed him to lead her off the dance floor. Clayton glared at the vampire with such malice that she was reassured this was an ally. Her fear reduced, she followed him out the French doors. Once outside, the vampire frowned at her and shook his head. “Honestly, for a countess, you are shockingly inept at duplicity.” “And who are you?” she asked faintly. The vampire bowed. “I am Aldric Cadell, Viscount Thornton and Lord of Blackpool. I have come to assist with the war.” Cassandra curtsied. “Rafael and I are grateful for your assistance.” Rafe burst out the French doors, eyeing Blackpool suspiciously. “I would greatly appreciate it if you would inform me before absconding with my fiancée.” “I was not absconding with her,” Blackpool replied calmly. “I was rescuing her from Edmondson. Did you not notice his odious presence?” Rafe snarled. “I did. But I should have gotten her away from him. It is my duty to protect her.” “You couldn’t have left the dance without shaming yourself and her as well,” Blackpool retorted. “As your ally, it is my duty to provide aid when it is required.” Rafe rubbed his temples. “You are right. I apologize, and thank you for taking her away from our enemy.
Brooklyn Ann (Bite at First Sight (Scandals with Bite, #3))
WHENEVER YOU ARE FEELING SAD, I want you to anticipate feeling joyful again. This takes the sting out of your sorrow because you know it is only temporary. Sadness tends to duplicate itself along the timeline—convincing you that you’ll always be unhappy. But this is a lie! The truth is, all My followers have infinite Joy ahead of them, guaranteed throughout eternity! No one can take this away from you. Your path through this world has many ups and downs. Your down times are difficult, but they serve an important purpose. Pain and struggle help you change and grow stronger when you trust Me in the midst of adversity. Your troubles are comparable to a woman enduring labor pains. Her suffering is very real, and she may wonder how much longer she can bear the pain. However, this arduous struggle produces a wonderful result—a newborn baby. While you labor through your earthly struggles, keep your eyes on the promised reward: boundless Joy in heaven! Even now you can grow in awareness of My Presence, where there is fullness of Joy. “Therefore you now have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart will rejoice, and your joy no one will take from you.”—JOHN 16:22 NKJV
Sarah Young (Jesus Always, with Scripture References, with Bonus Content: Embracing Joy in His Presence (A 365-Day Devotional))
They hold the piece of clothing close to their noses and inhale a mixture of fabric, wind, soil, damp and the stiffening that comes from textures hanging outdoors in minus-degree temperatures. This aroma is by far the most popular fragrance among the Russian consumers I interviewed, and it explained the slow sales of a flowery-smelling laundry detergent. Floral scents not only had no emotional relevance to Russians, they made Russian men feel self-conscious. Ultimately, I convinced the laundry detergent manufacturer to get rid of the smell entirely. We then rebuilt the fragrance to duplicate the scent of cold air, soil and the outdoors, and the detergent began selling again. My
Martin Lindstrom (Small Data: The Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends)
To the pain means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose. And then my tongue I suppose, I killed you too quickly the last time. A mistake I don’t mean to duplicate tonight. I wasn’t finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye followed by your right. And then my ears, I understand let’s get on with it. Wrong! Your ears you keep and I’ll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, “Dear God! What is that thing,” will echo in your perfect ears. That is what to the pain means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
If you come to bring a swift justice to me for my disobedience, assure me please that you will do your utmost to destroy a spirit which has been my companion since I was a child. This creature, a duplicate of me who has grown with me since before I can remember, now poses a danger to humans as well as myself.
Anne Rice (Blood And Gold (The Vampire Chronicles, #8))
I’m standing in the main chamber. Facing myself. This is a very simple simulation. I didn’t change my clothes or my hair or even the room’s carpeted floors. I didn’t do anything at all except create a duplicate of myself and hand him a gun. He won’t stop staring at me. One. He cocks his head. “Are you ready?” A pause. “Are you scared?” My heart kicks into gear. He lifts his arm. Smiles a little. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It’s almost over now.” Two. “Just a little longer and I’ll leave,” he says, pointing the gun directly at my forehead. My palms are sweating. My pulse is racing. “You’ll be all right,” he lies. “I promise.” Three. Boom.
Tahereh Mafi (Destroy Me (Shatter Me, #1.5))
Ordinary does not define your individuality. When you live from within, you activate your uniqueness. Your brokenness transcends into your extraordinary greatness. Your essence cannot be bought or duplicated. Aspire from the ashes to embrace your authenticity with courage and no longer be embarrassed about who you are. You do not fit in because you do not fit
Raquel McKenzie (My Healing Journal: From Once Broken to I AM)
she accompanied me in wonder, embraced me every ten paces, and her happiness made me proud and rich in a way I had never felt before, a duplicated man from whose body a woman had been taken who belonged inseparably with him and would never again disappear from his life.
Connie Palmen (Your Story, My Story)
When you’re doing your own online research, you have to take note when your sources are copying other sources. When you find the wholesale lifting of texts, you should be worried, since it suggests that the research underlying the document hasn’t been checked carefully. Copying like that is the mark of a lazy researcher; don’t trust that article (but perhaps look around for the original). As I do my research, I’ll sometimes notice when particular phrases (especially clever and curious turns of language) keep reappearing as I read. Those are the sentences (or sentence fragments) you want to double check. One hint is to look for those repeated phrases. As you check for duplication, you don’t want to check for duplicate titles. But a well-chosen phrase (that is, one that’s central to the argument, and long enough to be unlikely to happen by accident) can be a useful way to see how far that article has spread. People often choose to copy rather than rewrite the central idea of an article.
Daniel M. Russell (The Joy of Search: A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics (Mit Press))
From another desk drawer, I removed a Smith & Wesson .38 police special, clicked off the safety, thumbed a cartridge up into the empty chamber, slipped the safety back on, and dropped the heavy weapon in my jacket pocket. I left the living room, leaving the rent collection ledger and the duplicate
Dan J. Marlowe (Vengeance Man)
If I try to use human influence strategies and tactics of how to get other people to do what I want, to work better, to be more motivated, to like me and each other—while my character is fundamentally flawed, marked by duplicity and insincerity—then, in the long run, I cannot be successful. My duplicity will breed distrust, and everything I do—even using so-called good human relations techniques—will be perceived as manipulative. It simply makes no difference how good the rhetoric is or even how good the intentions are; if there is little or no trust, there is no foundation for permanent success.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Revised and Updated: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
My gaze trailed back to Javier, who stared back at me in challenge as if to say, “Just try to be upset with me.” I rolled my eyes. He never made me any promises of confidentiality, so I couldn’t entirely blame him, but I would remember his duplicity. I’d also remember my father’s generosity and the respect he showed me in letting me live my life. His actions gave me the confidence to consider being more forthright in the future. If I had faith in his ability not to overreact, maybe we could forge a bond worthy of a father-daughter relationship. If there was anything that would test that theory, it was Kane. My hands clutched each other in my lap. “How long have you known about Kane?” Dad raised a brow. “Javier came to me after you gave him those plates to run. He kept me informed on your little … charade.” He glanced down momentarily before meeting my gaze. “I have to say, I’m not sure I’ve ever been so fucking proud.” My dad, the consummate businessman, nearly lost his voice with emotion. Tears flooded my eyes. “I wanted to tell you, but I was scared you’d hurt him.
Jill Ramsower (Perfect Enemies (The Five Families, #6))
There was no use denying it anymore. The dreams that both of us had shared, the killing calm that had overtaken me when I’d learned of Conreth’s duplicity, the deep knowing that had settled in my chest when I looked at Prisca. She was my mate.
Stacia Stark (A Kingdom This Cursed and Empty (Kingdom of Lies, #2))
Elf explained to me that she was exactly like this guy she'd read about in the paper, a guy who was blind from birth and then at the age of 40-something he had a corneal operation and could suddenly see, and although he was told that life would be amazing for him then, after the operation it was awful. The world depressed him, its flaws, its duplicity, its rot and grime and sadness, everything hideous now made manifest, everything drab and flaking. He sank into a depression and quickly died. That's me! Elf had said. I reminded her that she had her sight, she could see, she'd always been able to see but she told me she'd never adjusted to the light, she'd just never developed a tolerance for the world, her inoculation hadn't taken. Reality was a rusty like trap.
Miriam Toews (All My Puny Sorrows)
I simply can't face the idea of swinging open the door to my heart. It's already been cracked, just a little, by his eyes, by his voice. I didn't even know he had the key. I threw it away a few years ago and I never made a duplicate. I
Angie Martin (The Three O'Clock in the Morning Sessions)
My life is not lonely so much as unadorned. On the ocean there is no duplicity. I row. I eat. I sleep. I fix things. Insincerity began to fade when my communications system went out. I save my food wrappers but toss all pretense of special virtue overboard.
Tori Murden McClure (A Pearl In the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean)
I've made a complete duplicate of my files. Technically, they're not supposed to leave my office, but I would be very grateful if you'd take them to Old Earth with you. I'd feel much happier with someone I know is clean in possession of my data in case-" The colonel broke off with a crooked smile, and Keita nodded soberly. "I will-and I'm honored by your trust." "Thank you. And with your permission, Sir, I'll arrange a periodic security download to you. One outside my normal channels." "Do you have a feeling?" Keita's eyes were suddenly intent, and the colonel shrugged. "I … don't know. It's just that I suspect we've been penetrated even more deeply than we've guessed. I don't want to sound paranoid, but these people have certainly demonstrated they're not shy about killing people. If I get too close to their mole … Well, accidents happen, Sir Arthur.
David Weber (In Fury Born (1) (Fury Series))
GM will provide CarPlay or Android Car for no additional cost. Although this might cause some drivers to shun MyLink, GM believes that ultimately giving buyers the choice will help it sell more cars, said Saejin Park, the company's director of innovation and portfolio planning. Mark Boyadjis, senior analyst for infotainment at IHS Automotive, said the decision doesn't necessarily mean the death of MyLink, Ford's Sync and other systems. The automakers' systems have specific information about the car that Apple or Google can't duplicate - engine diagnostics, heating and air conditioning controls or even the ability to set up service appointments with dealerships, Boyadjis said.
Anonymous
As the weeks progressed, I developed a morbid fascination with the enormity of all he didn’t know. I reminded myself incessantly that the happiness I heard in his voice when we spoke each night was predicated upon a trust and faith and mutual understanding that I had already betrayed countless times in countless different ways, ways that would make him scream, were he to glimpse them. The thought tortured me. I felt like a poisoner sprinkling arsenic on Hansen’s food while he wasn’t looking, watching him eat it bite by bite. I wished he would guess, but I did everything in my power to keep him from guessing, and it was easy. I sounded the same! He had no reason to doubt me! He believed that I loved him, and he was right! I was made for this treachery! Each night, as I reported to him the jobs I was on hold for, the church I’d wandered into, the croque monsieur I’d had for lunch, I would imagine rescuing him from his ignorance and my duplicity by telling him everything. This fantasy of absolution so enthralled me that at times I completely lost track of our conversation. To say it and have him know, to close the gap between us. I couldn’t do it. And yet I knew that it couldn’t go on this way, either, that sooner or later I would have to choose between Hansen and everyone else. A lifetime of deceiving a good man was more than even I could stomach. So I left.
Jennifer Egan (Look at Me)
The one thing I have that nobody else has or can duplicate is my sound. The sound of my voice. The sound of my life. Others may say similar things but they can’t say them like I do.
Suzette R. Hinton
All you who draw near to serve God in prayer, learn to be like Him, meek, humble, and true of heart; do not let there be any deceitfulness or duplicity nor coldness in your soul.
John of Kronstadt (My Life in Christ)