Sins Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Sins. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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I am good, but not an angel. I do sin, but I am not the devil. I am just a small girl in a big world trying to find someone to love.
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Marilyn Monroe
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The Seven Social Sins are: Wealth without work. Pleasure without conscience. Knowledge without character. Commerce without morality. Science without humanity. Worship without sacrifice. Politics without principle. From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925.
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Frederick Lewis Donaldson
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Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins, but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes.
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Anonymous (Holy Bible: New International Version)
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Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.
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John Green (The Fault in Our Stars)
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Hate the sin, love the sinner.
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Mahatma Gandhi
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But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
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Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
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There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.
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John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)
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When I am dead, I hope it may be said: "His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.
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Hilaire Belloc
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There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someones right to the truth.
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Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)
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Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.
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David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames)
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Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
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SΓΈren Kierkegaard (The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin)
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Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Not only will we have to repent for the sins of bad people; but we also will have to repent for the appalling silence of good people.
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Martin Luther King Jr.
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Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
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Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
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Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.
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Γ‰mile Zola
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There is no sin except stupidity.
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Oscar Wilde (The Critic As Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything (Green Integer))
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Teach the ignorant as much as you can; society is culpable in not providing a free education for all and it must answer for the night which it produces. If the soul is left in darkness sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.
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Victor Hugo (Les MisΓ©rables)
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In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
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Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
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I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.
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Genghis Khan
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You collect scars because you want proof that you are paying for whatever sins you've committed. And I know this because I've been doing the same damn thing for two hundred years. Tell me, do you think you will go to some blessed Afterworld, or do you expect a burning hell? You're hoping for hell--because how could you face them in the Afterworld? Better to suffer, to be damned for eternity and--
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Sarah J. Maas (Heir of Fire (Throne of Glass, #3))
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No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.
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Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead (Ender's Saga, #2))
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All sins are attempts to fill voids.
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Simone Weil
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Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)
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AndΓ‘bamos sin buscarnos, pero sabiendo que andΓ‘bamos para encontrarnos
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Julio CortΓ‘zar (Rayuela)
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I felt like an animal, and animals don’t know sin, do they?
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Jess C. Scott (Wicked Lovely)
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To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd!
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William Shakespeare (Hamlet)
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For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realize that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien)
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Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense.
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Robert A. Heinlein
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Curiosity is not a sin.... But we should exercise caution with our curiosity... yes, indeed.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))
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Black for hunting through the night For death and mourning the color's white Gold for a bride in her wedding gown And red to call the enchantment down White silk when our bodies burn Blue banners when the lost return Flame for the birth of a Nephilim And to wash away our sins. Gray for the knowledge best untold Bone for those who don't grow old Saffron lights the victory march Green to mend our broken hearts Silver for the demon towers And bronze to summon wicked powers -Shadowhunter children's rhyme
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Cassandra Clare (City of Heavenly Fire (The Mortal Instruments, #6))
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There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
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Mark Twain
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Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?
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Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor)
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Adam was but humanβ€”this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
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Mark Twain (Pudd'nhead Wilson (Bantam Classics))
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Dear God," she prayed, "let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry...have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere - be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.
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Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)
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Do you know what punishments I've endured for my crimes, my sins? None. I am proof of the absurdity of men's most treasured abstractions. A just universe wouldn't tolerate my existence.
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Brent Weeks (The Way of Shadows (Night Angel, #1))
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Atticus said to Jem one day, "I’d rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you’ll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit β€˜em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father’s right," she said. "Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.
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Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
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The difference between my darkness and your darkness is that I can look at my own badness in the face and accept its existence while you are busy covering your mirror with a white linen sheet. The difference between my sins and your sins is that when I sin I know I'm sinning while you have actually fallen prey to your own fabricated illusions. I am a siren, a mermaid; I know that I am beautiful while basking on the ocean's waves and I know that I can eat flesh and bones at the bottom of the sea. You are a white witch, a wizard; your spells are manipulations and your cauldron from hell yet you wrap yourself in white and wear a silver wig.
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C. JoyBell C.
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I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.
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Nelson Mandela
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So when the devil throws your sins in your face and declares that you deserve death and hell, tell him this: "I admit that I deserve death and hell, what of it? For I know One who suffered and made satisfaction on my behalf. His name is Jesus Christ, Son of God, and where He is there I shall be also!
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Martin Luther
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Neither love nor evil conquers all, but evil cheats more.
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Laurell K. Hamilton (Cerulean Sins (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #11))
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The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)
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Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
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Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
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Just give me a second. Attempting to give a fuck...Attempting harder to give a fuck...Sorry, there was an error; fuck not given.
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Suzanne Wright (Feral Sins (The Phoenix Pack, #1))
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I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!
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Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire)
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A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. -The Last Seance (from The Hound of Death and Other Stories, also Double Sin and Other Stories)
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Agatha Christie (The Hound of Death and Other Stories)
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To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.
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Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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Black as night, sweet as sin.
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Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys)
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Almost every sinful action ever committed can be traced back to a selfish motive. It is a trait we hate in other people but justify in ourselves.
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Stephen Kendrick (The Love Dare)
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To err is human - but it feels divine.
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Mae West
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I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
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Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass: The Death-Bed Edition)
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I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.
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Billy Joel
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Enter, stranger, but take heed Of what awaits the sin of greed, For those who take, but do not earn, Must pay most dearly in their turn, So if you seek beneath our floors A treasure that was never yours, Thief, you have been warned, beware Of finding more than treasure there.
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J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, #1))
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It's silly not to hope. It's a sin he thought.
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Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea)
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That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!
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Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
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He looked good, like sin in a suit.
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Melissa Marr (Wicked Lovely (Wicked Lovely, #1))
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If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
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Charles Darwin (Voyage of the Beagle)
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He grinned. β€œI was trying to remember all the deadly sins the other day,” he said. β€œGreed,envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry…” β€œI’m pretty sure irony isn’t a deadly sin.” β€œI’m pretty sure it is.” β€œLust,” she said. β€œLust is a deadly sin.” β€œAnd spanking.” β€œI think that falls under lust.” β€œI think it should have its own category,” said Jace. β€œGreed, envy, gluttony, irony, pedantry, lust, and spanking.
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Cassandra Clare (City of Lost Souls (The Mortal Instruments, #5))
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If a woman sleeps alone it puts a shame on all men. God has a very big heart, but there is one sin He will not forgive. If a woman calls a man to her bed and he will not go.
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Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek)
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Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.
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Eric Metaxas (Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy)
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No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
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George Eliot (Daniel Deronda)
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Let me tell ya. You gotta pay attention to signs. When life reaches out with a moment like this it's a sin if you don't reach back... I'm telling you.
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Matthew Quick (The Silver Linings Playbook)
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Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face. It cannot be concealed.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.
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Terry Pratchett (Carpe Jugulum (Discworld, #23; Witches, #6))
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My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning, and may be many; but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.
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Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
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Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
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Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
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Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
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G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
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Wouldn’t you like to slip into something more comfortable though? Perhaps a coma?
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Suzanne Wright (Feral Sins (The Phoenix Pack, #1))
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Hypocrites get offended by the truth.
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Jess C. Scott (Bad Romance: Seven Deadly Sins Anthology)
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There is no such thing as a good influence. Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtures are not real to him. His sins, if there are such thing as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
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Kat laughed. 'Who wants to live forever?' Kish put his hand up. 'For the record, I do.' Sin scowled at him. 'Then why do you irritate me so often?' Suicidal tendencies are inherent in my species?
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Devil May Cry (Dark-Hunter, #11))
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Jem is my greatest sin.
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Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2))
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The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.
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Timothy J. Keller (The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God)
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We bear the consequences for what we have done to ourselves, and for the sin that rules this world. Jesus forgave the thief, but he didn't take him down off the cross.
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Francine Rivers (A Voice in the Wind (Mark of the Lion, #1))
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If it was a sin for you to choose me . . . then I would go to the Devil himself and bless him for tempting ye to it.
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Diana Gabaldon (Dragonfly in Amber (Outlander, #2))
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Love is giving someone the power to completely destroy you, and hoping that they won’t
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Suzanne Wright (Feral Sins (The Phoenix Pack, #1))
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So the day became one of waiting, which was, he knew, a sin: moments were to be experienced; waiting was a sin against both the time that was still to come and the moments one was currently disregarding.
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Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere (London Below, #1))
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Stupidityβ€”The top of the list for Satanic Sins. The Cardinal Sin of Satanism. It’s too bad that stupidity isn’t painful. Ignorance is one thing, but our society thrives increasingly on stupidity. It depends on people going along with whatever they are told. The media promotes a cultivated stupidity as a posture that is not only acceptable but laudable. Satanists must learn to see through the tricks and cannot afford to be stupid.
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Anton Szandor LaVey
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Any game plan? Xypher asked Sin. Don't die. I like it. Simple, bold. Impossible. Works for me. Kat scoffed at his sarcasm. What are you bitching about, Xypher? You're already dead. He laughed. You know, for once, it's good to be me.
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Sherrilyn Kenyon (Devil May Cry (Dark-Hunter, #11))
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the only mortal sin is giving up.
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Stephen King
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I want to protect innocent people from sin by locking them in cages, where the evil can't get to them.
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Jarod Kintz (There are Two Typos of People in This World: Those Who Can Edit and Those Who Can't)
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Doubt as sin. β€” Christianity has done its utmost to close the circle and declared even doubt to be sin. One is supposed to be cast into belief without reason, by a miracle, and from then on to swim in it as in the brightest and least ambiguous of elements: even a glance towards land, even the thought that one perhaps exists for something else as well as swimming, even the slightest impulse of our amphibious nature β€” is sin! And notice that all this means that the foundation of belief and all reflection on its origin is likewise excluded as sinful. What is wanted are blindness and intoxication and an eternal song over the waves in which reason has drowned.
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Friedrich Nietzsche (Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality)
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Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly -- that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to oneself. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion -- these are the two things that govern us.
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Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Stories)
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there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life... you steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a ather. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness... there is no act more wretched than stealing.
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Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner)
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And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans--and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused--and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.
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Sigrid Undset
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I thought, β€œI want to die. I want to die more than ever before. There’s no chance now of a recovery. No matter what sort of thing I do, no matter what I do, it’s sure to be a failure, just a final coating applied to my shame. That dream of going on bicycles to see a waterfall framed in summer leavesβ€”it was not for the likes of me. All that can happen now is that one foul, humiliating sin will be piled on another, and my sufferings will become only the more acute. I want to die. I must die. Living itself is the source of sin.
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Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human)
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I'm rightly tired of the pain I hear and feel, boss. I'm tired of bein on the road, lonely as a robin in the rain. Not never havin no buddy to go on with or tell me where we's comin from or goin to or why. I'm tired of people bein ugly to each other. It feels like pieces of glass in my head. I'm tired of all the times I've wanted to help and couldn't. I'm tired of bein in the dark. Mostly it's the pain. There's too much. If I could end it, I would. But I can't.
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Stephen King (The Green Mile)
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there is a God, there always has been. I see him here, in the eyes of the people in this [hospital] corridor of desperation. This is the real house of God, this is where those who have lost God will find Him... there is a God, there has to be, and now I will pray, I will pray that He will forgive that I have neglected Him all of these years, forgive that I have betrayed, lied, and sinned with impunity only to turn to Him now in my hour of need. I pray that He is as merciful, benevolent, and gracious as His book says He is.
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Khaled Hosseini
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This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.
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Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)
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He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
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William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying)
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People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That's not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn't understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you're given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further.
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Pema ChΓΆdrΓΆn
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If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss. Juliet: Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this; For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss. Romeo: Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? Juliet: Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer. Romeo: O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do; They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. Juliet: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake. Romeo: Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take. Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged. Juliet: Then have my lips the sin that they have took. Romeo: Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again. Juliet: You kiss by the book.
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William Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet)
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Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him....Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness....And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.
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Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place)
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I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. 32. I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self-contained, I stand and look at them and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition. They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins. They do not make me sick discussiong their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth. 52. The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.
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Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)
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Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice. I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.
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Stephen Fry
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Shall I tell you a story? A new and terrible one? A ghost story? Are you ready? Shall I begin? Once upon a time there were four girls. One was pretty. One was clever. One charming, and one...one was mysterious. But they were all damaged, you see. Something not right about the lot of them. Bad blood. Big dreams. Oh, I left that part out. Sorry, that should have come before. They were all dreamers, these girls. One by one, night after night, the girls came together. And they sinned. Do you know what that sin was? No one? Pippa? Ann? Their sin was that they believed. Believed they could be different. Special. They believed they could change what they were--damaged, unloved. Cast-off things. They would be alive, adored, needed. Necessary. But it wasn't true. This is a ghost story remember? A tragedy. They were misled. Betrayed by their own stupid hopes. Things couldn't be different for them, because they weren't special after all. So life took them, led them, and they went along, you see? They faded before their own eyes, till they were nothing more than living ghosts, haunting each other with what could be. With what can't be. There, now. Isn't that the scariest story you've ever heard?
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Libba Bray (A Great and Terrible Beauty (Gemma Doyle, #1))
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I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. ...I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life -- namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.
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C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)
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Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete beastiality, and it all comes from lying continually to others and himself. A man who lies to himself is often the first to take offense. it sometimes feels very good to take offense, doesn't it? And surely he knows that no one has offended him, and that he himself has invented the offense and told lies just for the beauty of it, that he has exaggerated for the sake of effect, that he has picked up on a word and made a mountain out of a pea--he knows all of that, and still he is the first to take offense, he likes feeling offended, it gives him great pleasure, and thus he reaches the point of real hostility...
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
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The letter had been crumpled up and tossed onto the grate. It had burned all around the edges, so the names at the top and bottom had gone up in smoke. But there was enough of the bold black scrawl to reveal that it had indeed been a love letter. And as Hannah read the singed and half-destroyed parchment, she was forced to turn away to hide the trembling of her hand. β€”should warn you that this letter will not be eloquent. However, it will be sincere, especially in light of the fact that you will never read it. I have felt these words like a weight in my chest, until I find myself amazed that a heart can go on beating under such a burden. I love you. I love you desperately, violently, tenderly, completely. I want you in ways that I know you would find shocking. My love, you don't belong with a man like me. In the past I've done things you wouldn't approve of, and I've done them ten times over. I have led a life of immoderate sin. As it turns out, I'm just as immoderate in love. Worse, in fact. I want to kiss every soft place of you, make you blush and faint, pleasure you until you weep, and dry every tear with my lips. If you only knew how I crave the taste of you. I want to take you in my hands and mouth and feast on you. I want to drink wine and honey from you. I want you under me. On your back. I'm sorry. You deserve more respect than that. But I can't stop thinking of it. Your arms and legs around me. Your mouth, open for my kisses. I need too much of you. A lifetime of nights spent between your thighs wouldn't be enough. I want to talk with you forever. I remember every word you've ever said to me. If only I could visit you as a foreigner goes into a new country, learn the language of you, wander past all borders into every private and secret place, I would stay forever. I would become a citizen of you. You would say it's too soon to feel this way. You would ask how I could be so certain. But some things can't be measured by time. Ask me an hour from now. Ask me a month from now. A year, ten years, a lifetime. The way I love you will outlast every calendar, clock, and every toll of every bell that will ever be cast. If only youβ€” And there it stopped.
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Lisa Kleypas (A Wallflower Christmas (Wallflowers, #4.5))
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Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruitβ€”and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.
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Jeff VanderMeer (Annihilation (Southern Reach, #1))