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A Short Alternative Medical Dictionary
Definitions courtesy of Dr Lemuel Pillmeister (also known as Lemmy)
Addiction - When you can give up something any time, as long as it's next Tuesday.
Cocaine - Peruvian Marching Powder. A stimulant that has the extraordinary effect that the more you do, the more you laugh out of context.
Depression - When everything you laugh at is miserable and you can't seem to stop.
Heroin - A drug that helps you to escape reality, while making it much harder to cope when you are recaptured.
Psychosis - When everybody turns into tiny dolls and they have needles in their mouths and they hate you and you don't care because you have THE KNIFE! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
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Nikki Sixx (The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star)
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Amy: Pond and her boys . . . my poncho boys. If we're going to die, let's die looking like a peruvian folk band.
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Simon Nye
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I have gone into town to buy a few last things we need for the expedition: Peruvian wasp repellent, toothbrushes, canned peaches, and a fireproof canoe. It will take a while to find the peaches, so don't expect me back until dinnertime.
Stephano, Gustav's replacement, will arrive today by taxi. Please make him feel welcome. As you know, it is only two days until the expedition, so please work very hard today.
Your giddy uncle,
Monty
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Lemony Snicket (The Reptile Room (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #2))
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All of Nature follows perfectly geometric laws. The Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Peruvian, Mayan, and Chinese cultures were well aware of this, as Phi—known as the Golden Ratio or Golden Mean—was used in the constructions of their sculptures and architecture.
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Joseph P. Kauffman (The Answer Is YOU: A Guide to Mental, Emotional, and Spiritual Freedom)
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I know how lucky I am to have had such wonderful first and second acts in my career. I'm still not sure what my third act will turn out to be (Sexy Baking Competition Hostess? Flamboyant Peruvian Bingo Caller?), but if you happen to run into Betty White, tell her thank you.
I'd like to be her one day.
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Lauren Graham (Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls, and Everything in Between)
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The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehearsed.
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Kate Braverman (Small Craft Warnings: Stories (Western Literature and Fiction Series))
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For the D-Day spies were, without question, one of the oddest military units ever assembled. They included a bisexual Peruvian playgirl, a tiny Polish fighter pilot, a mercurial Frenchwoman, a Serbian seducer, and a deeply eccentric Spaniard with a diploma in chicken farming.
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Ben Macintyre (Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies)
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The sun's descent marks not just the end of another day, but a symbolic passage—a reminder that life, like the sun, moves in cycles, each ending giving birth to a new beginning.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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Che abandoned his first wife, Hilda, a Peruvian woman of Indian extraction, for a taller, blonder trophy wife (also named Aleida). Their 1959 wedding in Havana was the social event of the year and featured Raul Castro as "best man." After he married Aleida, Che would continue to "upgrade" his women, taking the worldly Tamara "Tania" Bunke, born of German parents in Argentina, as his mistress.
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Humberto Fontova (Exposing the Real Che Guevara: And the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him)
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It was a sad moment in Magnus Bane’s life when he was banned from Peru by the High Council of Peruvian warlocks. It was not just because the posters with a picture of him that were passed around Downworld in Peru were so wildly unflattering. It was because Peru was one of his favorite places. He had had many adventures there, and had many wonderful memories, starting with the time in 1791 when he had invited Ragnor Fell to join him for a festive sightseeing escape in Lima. 1791
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Cassandra Clare (The Bane Chronicles (The Bane Chronicles))
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Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.
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Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
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The pre-Socratics frequently wrote their treatises in verse; the ancient Peruvian language had a single word-hamavec-for poet and inventor.
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Arthur Koestler (The Act of Creation)
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Here, in the vast expanse of nothingness, one confronts the depths of their own existence, unburdened by the trappings of modern life.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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Of all the evils which escaped from Pandora’s Box, the institution of priesthoods was the worst. Priests have been the curse of the world...Look at China, the festival of Juggernaut, the Crusades, the massacres of St. Bartholomew, of the Mexicans, and of the Peruvians, the fires of the Inquisition, of Mary, Cranmer, Calvin...look ever where and you will see the priests reeking with gore. They have converted, and are converting, populous and happy nations into deserts, and have made our beautiful world into a slaughter-house drenched with blood and tears – Godfrey Higgins (Celtic Druids)
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Michael Tsarion (The Irish Origins of Civilization, Volume One: The Servants of Truth: Druidic Traditions & Influence Explored)
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But what do I do? I end up torturing myself with all this overthinking. I am trapping my consciousness in both the future and the past alike instead of relishing the present. No wonder the desert cries at night, in light of such thoughts.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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The sun sets and it is another reminder of the sheer fragility of time, a reminder that death and decay are always closer than we think
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Can I propose a toast to the fragility of life and the weight of mortality?
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Long ago I thought I knew myself, now my knowledge about myself is nothing but a empty shell…
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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The night sky, a cosmic abyss, holds the promise of mystery and adventure, beckoning wanderers like me to explore its depths.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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Of relevant interest, an 1859 issue of California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences offers a recipe* for a nutritional extract made from Peruvian seabird guano.
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Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
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Happier than a cat in a Peruvian fish market.
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Coriander Woodruff
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The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies.
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Geoffrey Blainey (A Short History of the World)
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The Incas, although an authoritarian monarchy, had succeeded nevertheless during their short reign not only in creating a massive empire, but perhaps more importantly in guaranteeing all of the empire's millions of inhabitants the basic necessities of life: adequate food, water, and shelter. It was an achievement that no subsequent government -- Spanish or Peruvian -- has attained since
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Kim MacQuarrie (The Last Days of the Incas)
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The evidence that much of what divides us is rooted in our biology was compiled by the evolutionary anthropologist (and Peruvian political adviser) Avi Tuschman, in his transdisciplinary work Our Political Nature, in which he identifies three primary and relatively permanent personality traits running throughout political beliefs: tribalism, tolerance for inequality, and one’s view of human nature.
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Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
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For example, Fujimori took office amid hyperinflation and a mounting guerrilla insurgency, so when he justified his 1992 presidential coup as a necessary evil, most Peruvians agreed with him. Fujimori’s approval rating shot up to 81 percent after the coup.
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Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die)
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Here it is wished, as elsewhere, that women possess merit and virtue. But nature would have had to make them thus, for the upbringing they are given is in such opposition to the goal proposed that it appears to me to be the great masterpiece of French inconsequence.
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Françoise de Graffigny (Letters Written by a Peruvian Princess: Translated From the French (Classic Reprint))
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All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom to be expected where the personages are supernatural. The Greek historians have no advantage over the Peruvian, but in the beauty of their language, or from that language being more familiar to us. Mango Capac, the son of the sun, is as authentic a founder of a royal race, as the progenitor of the Heraclidae. What truth indeed could be expected, when even the identity of person is uncertain? The actions of one were ascribed to many, and of many to one. It is not known whether there was a single Hercules or twenty.
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Horace Walpole (Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third)
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Peruvian Amazon Company had committed virtual genocide in attempting to pacify and enslave the native population: it castrated and beheaded Indians, poured gasoline on them and lit them afire, crucified them upside down, beat them, mutilated them, starved them, drowned them, and fed them to dogs. The company’s henchmen also raped women and girls and smashed children’s heads open. “In some sections such an odour of putrefying flesh arises from the numerous bodies of the victims that the places must be temporarily abandoned,” said an engineer who visited the area, which was dubbed the “devil’s paradise.
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David Grann (The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon)
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Ancient Spanish ranching techniques were adopted—and adapted—all over the American continent and took slightly different forms, spawning different vocabulary, from place to place. Argentines call cowboys gauchos; Peruvians, chaláns; Ecuadorians, chagras; Venezuelans and Colombians, llaneros; and Chileans, huasos.
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Jean-Benoît Nadeau (The Story of Spanish)
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deep-sea-fishing boat, which they would buy, man themselves, and rent to vacationers—this though neither had ever skippered a canoe or hooked a guppy. Then, too, there was quick money to be made chauffeuring stolen cars across South American borders. (“You get paid five hundred bucks a trip,” or so Perry had read somewhere.) But of the many replies he might have made, he chose to remind Dick of the fortune awaiting them on Cocos Island, a land speck off the coast of Costa Rica. “No fooling, Dick,” Perry said. “This is authentic. I’ve got a map. I’ve got the whole history. It was buried there back in 1821—Peruvian bullion, jewelry. Sixty million dollars—that’s what they
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Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
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We all have to die one day, we might as well die with some obscure meaning attached to it.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Death is what gives our lives urgency, an awareness that time isn't infinite.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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I realised how terrible it must be to be at home everywhere for it means to be at home nowhere!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Little by little one walks far.
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Peruvian proverb
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Like a moth is drawn to the light we are drawn to melancholy, we succumb to it.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Some scars never fade, but gradually we learn to navigate life's journey.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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After all we all are prisoners. Of our memories, our desires, our limitations, our disappointments… in the end we are terribly tragic creatures.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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IF YOU HAD to select the least convivial scientific field trip of all time, you could certainly do worse than the French Royal Academy of Sciences’ Peruvian expedition of 1735. Led by a hydrologist named Pierre Bouguer and a soldier-mathematician named Charles Marie de La Condamine, it was a party of scientists and adventurers who traveled to Peru with the purpose of triangulating distances through the Andes.
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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The euphoria born of surmounting challenges compels one to celebrate the very act of conquering. True enlightenment awaits beyond the confines of familiarity, but such wisdom is realised only in retrospect.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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The young comte thought nothing worthy his attention except what tended to give his country two chamber government. He left Mathilde, who was the prettiest person at the ball, with alacrity, because he saw a Peruvian general come in. Desparing of Europe such as M. de Metternich had arranged it, poor Altamira had been reduced to thinking that when the States of South America had become strong and powerful they could restore to Europe the liberty which Mirabeau has given it.
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Stendhal (The Red and the Black)
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Dragon’s blood, an extremely potent magical material, surely ranks among the Top 20 most popular spell-casting ingredients. No need to emulate Saint George, dragon’s blood is the resin from Dracaena draco, an Indonesian tree. Unlike most resins it’s red, hence the name. If you burn it, it does indeed bear a resemblance to blood. (There is also another dragon’s blood, used in Peruvian magic. This one, too, is a botanical substance, although completely distinct from the Indonesian resin.)
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Judika Illes (Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells: The Ultimate Reference Book for the Magical Arts, Exploring Folklore, Myth, and Magic from Every Corner of the Earth and Across Millennia (Witchcraft & Spells))
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Sounds of the river and wind, the tickling of the butterflies, the ice cold water and the company of some of my closest friends, what else would one want in life, whether fictional or not?
Ah, to be as light, beautiful and carefree as this elegant winged creature!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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The pleasure of being - a forgotten pleasure not even known to so many blind humans - that thought so sweet, that happiness so pure, "I am, I live, I exist," could bring happiness all by itself if one remembered it, if one enjoyed it, if one treasured it as befits its worth.
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Françoise de Graffigny (Letters Written by a Peruvian Princess: Translated From the French (Classic Reprint))
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The Andes, guardians of this untamed land, seem to inhale deeply, exhaling a breath that whispers of secrets hidden within their mighty peaks. And I, a mere witness to this grand theater of nature, stand on the precipice, my soul intoxicated by the sheer majesty of the Andean sunset.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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the firing of nerves in the amygdala, thereby dampening fear. Laughter, then, can help to temper negative emotions. And while all this might seem of purely academic interest, it could prove helpful when your partner breaks his leg at 19,000 feet in a blizzard on a Peruvian mountain. It is not a lack of fear that separates elite performers from the rest of us. They’re afraid, too, but they’re not overwhelmed by it. They manage fear. They use it to focus on taking correct action. Mike Tyson’s trainer, Cus D’Amato, said, “Fear is like fire. It can cook for you. It can heat your
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Laurence Gonzales (Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why)
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We could start by considering what the English have given the world. And here is the first problem. For the greatest legacy the English have bequeathed the rest of humanity is their language. When an Icelander meets a Peruvian, each reaches for his English. Even in the Second World War, when the foundations were being laid for the Axis pact between Germany, Japan and Italy, Yosuke Matsuoka was negotiating for the Emperor in English. It is the medium of technology, science, travel and international politics. Three quarters of the world’s mail is written in English, four fifths of all data stored on computers is in English and the language is used by two thirds of the world’s scientists.
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Jeremy Paxman (The English: A Portrait of a People)
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TAWANTINSUYU In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. “If
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Charles C. Mann (1491: The Americas Before Columbus)
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My characters push the limits of the envelope when it comes to passion, love, and lust. They can be as elegant and distinguished as Lizzie's Darcy, or as wild and unrelenting as Cathy's Heathcliff; sometimes all in one bold personality. I also believe there is a wider universal mosaic on our planet than mere black and white. My contemporary healer/surgeon in the novel 'Hobble' is half Native American (Mayan Mexican + Peruvian, plus Scottish) and his lover is African American (African + European + American Indian). My people see the world differently; they're often mixed race or of a race, color, or nationality not normally associated with nor depicted in romantic and erotic novels or films as central, positively sexual, and realistic.
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Neale Sourna (Hobble)
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It is often said, as an excuse for the slaughter of animals, that it is better for them to live and to be butchered than not to live at all. … In fact, if we once admit that it is an advantage to an animal to be brought into the world, there is hardly any treatment that cannot be justified by the supposed terms of such a contract. Also, the argument must apply to mankind. It has, in fact, been the plea of the slave-breeder; and it is logically just as good an excuse for slave-holding as for flesh-eating. It would justify parents in almost any treatment of their children, who owe them, for the great boon of life, a debt of gratitude which no subsequent services can repay. We could hardly deny the same merit to cannibals, if they were to breed their human victims for the table, as the early Peruvians are said to have done.
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Henry Stephens Salt
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Sometimes we humans are like brainless chickens, we run around aimlessly and to no avail, we seem to be looking for something that we don't even know what it is, some sort of missing piece, which isn't even there. Why don't most of us realise that life isn't about looking for the missing piece, but actually to learn live with the fact that one might never find it and still have a happy and fulfilled life nonetheless?
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Partisanship had grown so fierce even treatments for the disease became politicized. There were now “Republican” and “Federalist” cures. Jeffersonian Benjamin Rush, acknowledged the finest doctor in town if not the country, used the time-honored if incorrect practices of bleeding and purging. Alexander Hamilton and his family were stricken just when an old friend from Nevis, Dr. Edward Stevens, was visiting. A veteran of “Yellow Jack” outbreaks in the Caribbean, Stevens administered large doses of “Peruvian bark”—quinine—laced with burnt cinnamon and a nightcap of laudanum. The treatment worked, but Rush, an ardent Republican, dismissed it and went right on bleeding patients, which Stevens believed medieval. Rush’s backyard was soon so drenched with blood that he indirectly began to breed countless flies, while his property gave off a “sickening sweet stench” to passersby.
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Tim McGrath (James Monroe: A Life)
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I keep to the light and look through the windows of restaurants and pubs. I climb up the stairs of a theater and see people inside standing around in little groups on a red carpet and talking. There are tall tables some stand around with bowls of sharing food on top---nuts and crisps and dips and olives. I keep walking, past an Italian bistro in which people are eating seafood pasta; in another restaurant, two people have a huge plate of oysters between them; a man and a woman are talking animatedly about something they have on their table---a thick wad of paper that has text on it and notes written in pen---while they share food in a Peruvian restaurant. "Have you tried the scallops?" someone says. "Have you had time to look at the menu?" says another person. Two women, all in black, with instrument cases, are sharing a bottle of wine outside. A waiter comes out with a platter of sushi.
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Claire Kohda (Woman, Eating)
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What I find hilarious is that these people looking for ego death, who want to become so enlightened are usually those with the most enormous egos. The huge egos seeking the egolessness, in order to show off how enlightened they are, all they want is to post on social media or write books about their journey. They actually want to find in it a way to seem selfless while still getting some selfish pleasure out of it. And then they have the guts to lecture you on selflessness!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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I came very close to burning the document you have just read. They search outgoing parolees almost as carefully as they search incoming “new fish.” And beyond containing enough dynamite to assure me of a quick turnaround and another six or eight years inside, my “memoirs” contained something else: the name of the town where I believe Andy Dufresne to be. Mexican police gladly cooperate with the American police, and I didn’t want my freedom—or my unwillingness to give up the story I’d worked so long and hard to write—to cost Andy his. Then I remembered how Andy had brought in his five hundred dollars back in 1948, and I took out my story of him the same way. Just to be on the safe side, I carefully rewrote each page which mentioned Zihuatanejo. If the papers had been found during my “outside search,” as they call it at The Shank, I would have gone back in on turnaround . . . but the cops would have been looking for Andy in a Peruvian sea-coast town named Las Intrudres.
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Stephen King (Different Seasons: Four Novellas)
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Wil shook his head. “He really had you hooked.” “What do you mean?” “You should have seen your energy field. It was flowing almost totally into his.” “I don’t understand.” “Think back to Sarah’s argument with the scientist at Viciente.… If you had witnessed one of them winning, convincing the other that he was correct, then you would have seen the loser’s energy flowing into the winner’s, leaving the loser feeling drained and weak and somewhat confused—the way the girl in the Peruvian family appeared and the way,” he smiled, “that you look now.” “You saw that happening to me?” I asked. “Yes,” he replied. “And it was extremely difficult for you to stop his control of you and to pull yourself away. I thought for a minute you weren’t going to do it.” “Jesus,” I said. “That guy must really be evil.” “Not really,” he said. “He’s probably only half aware of what he’s doing. He thinks he’s right to control the situation, and no doubt he learned a long time ago that he could control successfully by following a certain strategy. He first pretends to be your friend, then he finds something wrong with what you’re doing, in your case that you were in danger. In effect, he subtly undermines your confidence in your own path until you begin to identify with him. As soon as that happens, he has you.” Wil looked directly at me. “This is only one of many strategies people use to con others out of their energy.
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James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy (Celestine Prophecy, #1))
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The first and better known is Mesoamerica, where half a dozen societies, the Olmec first among them, rose in the centuries before Christ. The second is the Peruvian littoral, home of a much older civilization that has come to light only in the twenty-first century.* Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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Walled off from wet air by both the Andes and the Humboldt Current, the Peruvian littoral is astonishingly dry: the average annual precipitation is about two inches. The Atacama Desert, just south of Peru on the Chilean shore, is the driest place on earth—in some places rain has literally never been recorded
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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Unfortunately, poverty in Lima had grown exponentially throughout the 1980s while the Peruvian economy plummeted in what the press described as a “free fall.” Industrial and agricultural production declined; unemployment and underemployment mushroomed to encompass 80 percent of the workforce; hyperinflation galloped at 400 percent a year; and real wages were halved. Malnutrition and hunger spread widely, and the incidence of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and gastroenteritis spiked.
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Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
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Conditions were also starkly worsened by ongoing guerrilla warfare, which was stoked by the economic crisis. The war, conducted amidst paroxysms of violence on both sides, was waged by the Peruvian Army against two well-organized but mutually antagonistic revolutionary forces—the Maoist party Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), founded in 1980, and the pro-Russian movement named after the last Incan monarch, Túpac Amaru. As many as twenty thousand people died in the conflict, and the lack of security in the countryside decimated agricultural production and drove migration to cities that were already overcrowded.
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Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
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For example, the Chinese invented gunpowder. But for some reason these perennial warriors and kung-fu fighters weren’t savvy enough to use their invention as a weapon of war. The ancient Indians are widely credited with inventing the numerical system we currently use. But they certainly didn’t invent calculus like Newton and Leibniz did. Most uncomfortable for egalitarians and their ilk is that there are vast landmasses—sometimes entire continents—where the indigenous inhabitants have invented virtually nothing. Sub-Saharan Africans are not known for contributing much to rocket science, and black Americans are so underrepresented as inventors that everyone has heard a gorillion times about the mulatto who improved blood-storage methods and George Washington Carver’s wondrous dalliances with the magical peanut. The so-called “Native Americans” are credited with inventing the spinning top, which somehow proved incapable of defending them against the white man and his guns. And Australia’s aborigines? Well, let’s not talk about them, because they’d be embarrassed. Peruvians can take pride in developing the art of potato cultivation. And I’ve already covered the Mexicans and their nachos.
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Jim Goad (Whiteness: The Original Sin)
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In Lima, the only birds you’ll hear singing are the cars honking.
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Zidrou (The Adoption)
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In the 1600s, the Peruvian Inquisition targeted wise Quechua and Aymara women, who kept the indigenous religion alive and often acted to empower their communities and protect them from colonial heads and officials. In 1591, the Brazilian Inquisition prosecuted the Portuguese witch Maria Gonçalves (also known as Burn-tail) for sexual witchcraft and for making powders from forest herbs. She challenged the bishop, saying that, if he preached from the pulpit, she preached from the cadeira (priestess chair).
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Laurence Galian (Alien Parasites: 40 Gnostic Truths to Defeat the Archon Invasion!)
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Indians might have bred the modern peach palm by hybridizing palms from several areas, including the Peruvian Amazon. Whatever the origin, people domesticated the species thousands of years ago and then spread it rapidly, first through Amazonia and then up into the Caribbean and Central America.
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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The desert, a cathedral of solitude, invites introspection and self-discovery. It is a sanctuary for those seeking solace from the cacophony of the world, a place where the distractions of civilisation dissipate, leaving behind a stark clarity.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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The night holds its mysteries, my friends, and tomorrow presents us with another opportunity for adventure!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Days)
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Friar Toribio’s writings show something else central to our story: Christian missionaries are relentless. Whether in Anglo-Saxon Kent around 600 CE, the Aztec Empire in 1530, or the Peruvian Amazon in 1995, they never stop and never give up; when proselytizing preachers fail or get themselves killed, they are soon replaced by fresh recruits who continue to push the Church’s package of supernatural beliefs, rituals, and family practices.
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Joseph Henrich (The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous)
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Minister and favorite of the Emperor Augustus. He was distinguished for the wisdom of his counsels, and his rare abilities as a statesman. Although himself an indifferent poet, he was still a patron of literature and literary men; Virgil, Horace, Ovid and other celebrated writers of the Augustan age, were among his most intimate friends. Such was the care with which Mæcenas sought out and rewarded every species of merit, that his name is proverbially used to denote a generous patron.
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Catherine Ann White (The Student's Mythology A Compendium of Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Hindoo, Chinese, Thibetian, Scandinavian, Celtic, Aztec, and Peruvian Mythologies)
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Perhaps the single most popular work of this genre, published in 1747, was Letters of a Peruvian Woman by the prominent saloniste Madame de Graffigny, which viewed French society through the eyes of an imaginary kidnapped Inca princess. The book is considered a feminist landmark, in that it may well be the first European novel about a woman which does not end with the protagonist either marrying or dying.
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David Graeber (The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity)
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The use of Peruvian bark radiated outward from Seville and Rome in the second half of the seventeenth century, but its efficacy was controversial, and its association with Catholicism slowed its uptake in Protestant Europe.
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Kyle Harper (Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History)
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Convergence is ubiquitous and not limited just to the external appearance or morphology of animals. It is also widely observed and documented in animal behavior and in plants, fungi, and even bacteria. Let’s start with behavior. What do you think these four species—a cobra, a stickleback fish, an octopus, and a spider—share? There is no convergence in body form here, unlike the Caribbean anoles. But a behavior has converged among them that has led to the success of each of their species: the females of the species guard their eggs. One of the best examples of convergent behavior is observed in humans and—hold your breath—ants! And I have witnessed this convergence with my own eyes. When I was on a family vacation in the stunningly beautiful Peruvian Amazon, I stumbled upon the tiny creatures that had beaten our human ancestors to the discovery of agriculture by many millions of years: the leafcutter ants. I had waited years to witness the miracle, and there it was in its full linear glory. A long single column of thousands of large green leaves appeared to be miraculously moving in perfect synchrony of their own volition on the forest floor. Each large leaf was being carried by a single tiny ant, who purposefully disappeared underground to pass on the booty to her specialist sisters. These ants chew the leaves to grow a fungus garden used for food for the entire colony. Not unlike human farmers, these ants produce fertilizers (amino acids and enzymes) to aid the fungal growth, remove contaminants that can hinder the agricultural output, are highly selective in what they grow, and continuously tend to their enormous gardens.8
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Pulak Prasad (What I Learned About Investing from Darwin)
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Ebbene, guardando questi ragazzi con le cuffie peruviane che abbracciano gli alberi, mi chiedo anche: come mai gli accenti di verità, il peso dell’esperienza e perfino il godimento estetico sono con tanta evidenza dalla parte di Orwell e non da quella di Ram Dass né di nessuna delle autoproclamatesi guide spirituali che recitano i loro sempiterni discorsi sull’espansione della coscienza, sul potere del qui e ora e sulla pace interiore? Perché i loro pensieri mancano a tal punto di gravitas? Perché nessuno di loro supera la prova della bellezza? Perché i loro libri dalle copertine rosa o azzurre, che in ogni libreria new age balzano agli occhi come l’incenso alle narici, sono così brutti, così stupidi?
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Emmanuel Carrère (Yoga (Italian Edition))
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the perplexing fact that when Europeans came into contact with American Indians, the transfer of deadly germs was all one way (with the possible exception of syphilis).12 There were no domesticated animals in the New World (other than the Peruvian llama), which meant humans there had no opportunity to evolve genetic resistance to particular diseases that originated in such animals before circulating among people.
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Nicholas A. Christakis (Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live)
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much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy—vertical socialism, it has been called—should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu “managed to eradicate hunger,” the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though no fan of the Inka, he conceded that “only a very small number of empires throughout the whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat.
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Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
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Legend has it that when the Inka Mayta Capac led his army through a valley surrounded by three volcanoes, many members of his escort pleaded to settle there because they fell in love with the beauty of the place. The Inka replied in Quechua, "Ari Qhipay", in English, "Yes, stay". Those words, apparently, gave birth to the name of the Peruvian city of Arequipa.
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Víctor Manuel Lozada Andrade (Yes, stay: Voices from Arequipa’s past and present)
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Have Peruvian Instant Dark Powder? or Have a Quick Quote Quill?
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Heidi Bee (Would You Rather... The Harry Potter Fan Edition! : An unofficial HP game book filled with over 140 funny, clever, and thoughtful Harry Potter prompts ... (Would You Rather ... Book Series!))
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only took that Peruvian rugby team that crashed in the Andes in the early 1970s nine days without food before they were so desperate with hunger they resorted to eating the dead bodies of their friends to survive.
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J. Micha-el Thomas Hays (Rise of the New World Order: Book Series Update and Urgent Status Report: Vol. 5 (Rise of the New World Order Status Report))
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And don't forget some vital truth Ian… Points of view can go both ways, it is like a double edged sword, it can cut both ways. Thus it is crucial to stay focused on one’s point of view, otherwise one can get lost in the viewpoints of others, even be engulfed by them and losing ones own path in life. Be careful when you assume someone else’s point of view, it might end up destroying your own and you end up lost in their mind, without a compass back to your own mind!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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In the world of international finance, power is concentrated in the hands of a few, the gatekeepers of capital who hold the keys to the world's resources. Their decisions, shrouded in secrecy, have the ability to shape the destiny of nations, redefine the distribution of wealth and power.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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We live in strange times, being bombarded with information 24/7, having a hard time to distinguish between reality and hyperreality, between what is fake and what is real. I guess having strange dreams might be the most normal thing we can experience nowadays. As paradoxically as that sounds
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Hope has then also effectively been automated and even been digitalised.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Ah, the Pacific, the silent witness to Lima's relentless evolution since its founding, what are your secrets, will you ever tell us?
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Melancholy seems to be running strong among us right now, bypassing our safeguards and infiltrate our well guarded fortresses, our most sacred places, our hearts and minds.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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All we do is disguise our weak politics behind a powerful bureaucracy and disguise our powerful bureaucracy behind weak political decision making.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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The empires of steel are gone, replaced by empires of silicone.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Another abyss that we have cross, another abyss that we have to stare into in the hope it won't stare back to us.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Watching as the water moves along I am once again reminded of the endless passing of time, the cruelty of it, how curial and amazing is it that no moment can last forever, and thus we have to learn to live with our mortality,
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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On the other side of the shore the lighthouse starts up again, illuminating the night and the river delta, casting its deep yellow light over the immediate surroundings. I once agin shiver despite the tropical heat. Another Peruvian night has dawned and with it another shot at hope is gone.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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The name itself, Carcosa, sounds like a secret code or something…
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Well, faced with our mortality, we create stories of immortality. We strive to leave behind echoes of ourselves, reaching for infinity, eternity, on a finite, terminally ill planet!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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At times I want to scream, scream at this illogical shit, at this wanton terror! Every comedy seems to end as a bad joke, no actually it ends as a horror story! An illogical one at that!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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As Carcosa crumbled away, it was like the end of an era. That mysterious glow around it faded, leaving just traces of what used to be. It felt like a story within the story. The name Carcosa, which used to sound like some secret code, now just hangs in the air like a faint memory.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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A man stares at himself in the mirror and peels away all the layers. But the person he sees doesn't feels like someone he knows. He feels like he is looking at a total stranger.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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After all when writing your story, only you should yield your pen, no one else! Don't let any one else but yourself control your own narrative!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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How much we regret, how much we hold on dearly for our lives for the very past that is now gone, all these events that once had such an enormous sway over us and are now so very insignificant. But how we hold on to these memories for our dear life. It seems to be all we have. The interesting question now is, are memories something we should cherish given how much joy they can provide or something we should better let go of, considering how much anguish they can cause?
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Before my heart stops beating all I can do is admire the beauty of the seemly endless mortal stars that are decorating the night sky above me, illuminating my path to my next destination.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Love, a deadly dance with a promise that we might not end up keeping!
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Humanity, forever walking the incredible thin line between kindness and cruelty.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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It occurred to me that losing one thing is way more difficult than losing everything, you noticed?
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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Our lives, reduced to mere hours, minutes, seconds, how cruel.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))
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What remains of the world at the end?” She asked him.
“The noise of machines, newspapers, bombs, the craziness in the big cities, all of this will be forgotten tomorrow. And then, what remains? What remains, my dear, will never be the world, but only the gods.
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Ryan Gelpke (Peruvian Nights (Peruvian Duality))