Undone Quotes

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

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By you, I am forever undone.
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Holly Black (The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air, #3))
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Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone
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Pablo Picasso
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Mock me all you like. Whatever I imagined then, now it is I who would beg and grovel for a kind word from your lips." His eyes are black with desire. "By you, I am forever undone.
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Holly Black (The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air, #3))
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What's done cannot be undone.
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William Shakespeare (Macbeth)
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He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless. And as I walked back to give Takumi’s note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.
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John Green (Looking for Alaska)
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A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone.
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Emily BrontΓ« (Wuthering Heights)
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Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone.
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Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns)
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The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (Little Foxes; or, The Insignificant Little Habits Which Mar Domestic Happiness)
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Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
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Lin Yutang (The Importance of Living)
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What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.
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Alexander Pope (Essay on Man and Other Poems (Dover Thrift Editions: Poetry))
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He's naked except for those soft ripped jeans, top button casually undone. Jeez, he looks so freaking hot. My subconscious is frantically fanning herself, and my inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.
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E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey (Fifty Shades, #1))
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For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.
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Cynthia Occelli
β€œ
Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.
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Pema ChΓΆdrΓΆn
β€œ
Say something in Mandarin,” said Tessa, with a smile. Jem said something that sounded like a lot of breathy vowels and consonants run together, his voice rising and falling melodically: β€œNi hen piao liang.” β€œWhat did you say?” Tessa was curious. β€œI said your hair is coming undone β€” here,” he said, and reached out and tucked an escaping curl back behind her ear. Tessa felt the blood spill hot up into her face, and was glad for the dimness of the carriage. β€œYou have to be careful with it,” he said, taking his hand back, slowly, his fingers lingering against her cheek.
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Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Prince (The Infernal Devices, #2))
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This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don't get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can't do anything, don't get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it's ready to come undone. You have to realize it's going to be a long process and that you'll work on things slowly, one at a time.
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Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)
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Villain, what hast thou done? Aaron: That which thou canst not undo. Chiron: Thou hast undone our mother. Aaron: Villain, I have done thy mother.
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William Shakespeare (Titus Andronicus)
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We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.
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Jonathan Tropper (This is Where I Leave You)
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By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.
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Virginia Woolf (Orlando)
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I have tried to dismantle you, Gideon Nav! The Ninth House poisoned you, we trod you underfootβ€”I took you to this killing field as my slaveβ€”you refuse to die, and you pity me! Strike me down. You’ve won. I’ve lived my whole wretched life at your mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand. You are my only friend. I am undone without you.
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Tamsyn Muir (Gideon the Ninth (The Locked Tomb, #1))
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The moment you first called me a prick, my fate was sealed. O, fathers of my bloodline! O, ye kings of olde! Take this crown from me, bury me in my ancestral soil. If only you had known the mighty work of thine loins would be undone by a gay heir who likes it when American boys with chin dimples are mean to him.
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Casey McQuiston (Red, White & Royal Blue)
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Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. --From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954
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Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems)
β€œ
Accept what people offer. Drink their milkshakes. Take their love.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
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Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching: Book of the Way)
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The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy))
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They wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone. These women could be undone; or not. They seemed to be able to choose.
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Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale (The Handmaid's Tale, #1))
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I felt something loosen in me, that shouldn't have loosened. A stitch come undone.
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Gillian Flynn (Dark Places)
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I am coming unraveled. I am coming undone.
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Holly Black (The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air, #1))
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It's always been this way...We bear the unbearable. We endure the unendurable. We do what must be done until we ourselves are undone.
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Rick Yancey (The Last Star (The 5th Wave, #3))
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I think... the secret is to just settle for the shape of your life takes...Instead of you know, always waiting and wishing for what might make you happy.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants: demagogues can persecute writers and tell them what to write as much as they like, but they cannot vanish what has been written in the past, though they try often enough...People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
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Doris Lessing
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Good evening, Mrs. Grey," Christian says softly. He's standing by the piano, dressed in a tight black T-shirt, and jeans...those jeans- the ones he wore in the playroom. Oh my. They are over washed pale-blue denim, snug, ripped at the knee and hot. He saunters over to me, his feet bare, the top button of the jeans undone, his smoldering eyes never leaving mine. "Good to have you home. I've been waiting for you.
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E.L. James (Fifty Shades Freed (Fifty Shades, #3))
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Hope knows that if great trials are avoided great deeds remain undone and the possibility of growth into greatness of soul is aborted.
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Brennan Manning (Abba's Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging)
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You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
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Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
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As so often happens, the thing left undone tires you most of all, you only feel rested when it has been accomplished.
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JosΓ© Saramago
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You're reaching out And no one hears you cry You're freaking out again 'Cause all your fears Remind you another dream has come undone You feel so small and lost like you're the only one You wanna scream 'cause you're Desperate You want somebody, just anybody To lay their hands on your soul tonight You want a reason to keep believin' That someday you're gonna see the light You're in the dark There's no one left to call And sleep's your only friend Well even sleep Can't hide you from all those tears And all the pain and all the days You wasted pushin' them away It's your life, it's time you face it
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David Archuleta
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Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches
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Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God)
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There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
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John Green (Looking for Alaska)
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Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.
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Confucius
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I know it's a crock of shit. I ain't offering you happily-ever-after. I'm offering you... happily-maybe-sometimes-ever-after. Sort of. You know, with warts and shit." -Thayer
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live aloneβ€” to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink β€” greetings!
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George Orwell (1984)
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What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it happening again.
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Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl)
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Find one thing. One thing that's beautiful. Anything. Anything that shows you you're not one of them." His eyes were back on me studying my face silently. Panic raced through me. It wasn't working. I couldn't do this. We were going to have to get out of here, regardless of whatever state he was in. I knew he'd leave, too. If i had learned anything, it was that Dimitri's warrior instincts were still working. If I said danger was coming, he would respond instantly, no matter the self-torment he felt. I didn't want him to leave in despair. I wanted him to leave here one step closer to being the man I knew he could be. I wanted him to have one less nightmare. It was beyond my abilities, though. I was no therapist. I was about to tell him we had to get out of there, about to make his soldier reflexes kick in, when he suddenly spoke. His voice was barley a whisper. "Your hair." "What?" for a second, I wondered if it was on fire or somthing. I touched a stray lock. No, nothing was wrong exept that it was a mess. I'd bound it up for battle to prevent the strgoi from using it as a handhold, like Angeline had. Much of it had come undone in the struggle, though. "Your hair," repeated Dimitri. His eyes were wide, almost awestruck. "your hair is beautiful.
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Richelle Mead (Last Sacrifice (Vampire Academy, #6))
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Listen, I'm bossy. I can't help it. It's who I am and what I do. I'm pushy and I like to take over. But I'm going to work really hard not to do so much and your going to try and accept me the way I am. Flaws and all. Because I'm good in bed and I can carry heavy things and reach all the high shelves.
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Lauren Dane (Coming Undone (Brown Family, #2))
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The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone
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Oswald Chambers
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A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something.
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Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
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What are you thinking?" he asks. I know Gage hates it when I cry - he is completely undone by the sight of tears - so I blink hard against the sting. "I'm thinking how thankful I am for everything," I say, "even the bad stuff. Every sleepless night, every second of being lonely, every time the car broke down, every wad of gum on my shoe, every late bill and losing lottery ticket and bruise and broken dish and piece of burnt toast." His voice is soft. "Why, darlin'?" "Because it all led me here to you.
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Lisa Kleypas (Sugar Daddy (Travises, #1))
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Evil, however powerful it seemed, could be undone by its own appetite.
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Clive Barker (The Thief of Always)
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I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.
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Wally Lamb
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Suddenly evil isn’t punching people or even hating them. Suddenly it’s all that stuff you’ve left undone. All the kindness you could have given. All the excuses you gave instead.
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Daniel Nayeri (Everything Sad Is Untrue)
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I've got a mind to turn you over my knee and spank the spoiled hell out of you
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Larissa Ione (Sin Undone (Demonica, #5))
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Magic made everything feel so impermanent, it was easy to forget that some things, once changed, could never be undone. That not everything was either changeable or infinite. Some roads kept going, and others had an end.
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Victoria E. Schwab (A Conjuring of Light (Shades of Magic, #3))
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If we are talking about choice and regret, what has happened cannot be undone. And dwelling on the past changes nothing. You will only drive yourself to insanity if you do.
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Julie Kagawa (The Forever Song (Blood of Eden, #3))
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Look not to the faults of others, nor to their omissions and commissions. But rather look to your own acts, to what you have done and left undone.
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Gautama Buddha
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Just because we mess up doesn’t mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect.
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Jonathan Van Ness (Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love)
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If you want your prayers answered, get up off your knees and do something about them.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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In all the institutions I try to be present and accountable for all I do and leave undone. I know that eventually I shall have to be present and accountable n the presence of God. I do not wish to be found wanting.
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Maya Angelou (Letter to My Daughter)
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Soviet-style communism failed, not because it was intrinsically evil, but because it was flawed. It allowed too few people to usurp too much power. Twenty-first century market capitalism, American-style, will fail for the same reasons. Both are edifices constructed by human intelligence, undone by human nature.
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Arundhati Roy
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Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.
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Judith Butler (Undoing Gender)
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It was a matter of perspective, I began to see. The whole world was crazy; I'd flattered myself by assuming I was a semifinalist." -- Dolores Price
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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He presses his mouth to the pulse point of my wrist, racing in time with my heart. β€œMock me all you like. Whatever I imagined then, now it is I who would beg and grovel for a kind word from your lips.” His eyes are black with desire. β€œBy you, I am forever undone.
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Holly Black (The Queen of Nothing (The Folk of the Air, #3))
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Life seemed nearest to acceptable at four A.M.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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Considering what Pauline's been through . . ." Will began, then stopped himself. "She's not very nice." "She's a cold-blooded bitch." "I'm surprised I haven't fallen in love with her.
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Karin Slaughter (Undone (Will Trent, #3))
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Falling for someone is like pulling a loose thread. It happens stitch by stitch. You feel whole most of the time even while the seams pop, the knots loosen, everything that holds you together coming undone. It feels incredible, this opening of yourself to the world. Not like the unraveling it is. Only afterward do you glance down at the tangle of string around your feet that used to be a person who was whole and self-contained and realize that love is not a thing that we create. It's an undoing.
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Leah Raeder (Black Iris)
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I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' --or else not.
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C.S. Lewis (The Great Divorce)
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Sin Fever," Wraith chimed in with a little too much enjoyment. Sin Fever? They'd named the fucking disease after her? Bastards.
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Larissa Ione (Sin Undone (Demonica, #5))
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Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, β€˜No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night thinking, β€˜Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.
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BrenΓ© Brown (The Gifts of Imperfection)
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This was what could happen to you: you could end up this far from where you thought you were going.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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I usually learn more from the situations I hate than the ones I love.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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We do not always remember the things that do no credit to us. We justify them, cover them in bright lies or with the thick dust of forgetfulness. All of the things that Shadow had done in his life of which he was not proud, all the things he wished he had done otherwise or left undone, came at him then in a swirling storm of guilt and regret and shame, and he had nowhere to hide from them. He was as naked and as open as a corpse on a table, and dark Anubis the jackal god was his prosector and his prosecutor and his persecutor.
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Neil Gaiman (American Gods (American Gods, #1))
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God loves us. He's watching us, he wants us to succeed, and we'll know someday that he has not left one thing undone for the eternal welfare of each of us. If we only knew it, there are heavenly hosts pulling for us -- friends in heaven that we can't rememer now, who yearn for our victory.
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Ezra Taft Benson
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The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the needβ€”not all the time, surely, but from time to timeβ€”to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Rememberβ€”the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.
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Frederick Buechner (A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces)
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I thought about how love was always the thing that did that - smashed into you, left you raw. The deeper you loved, the deeper it hurt.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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Everything he had ever done that had been better left undone. Every lie he had told β€” told to himself, or told to others. Every little hurt, and all the great hurts. Each one was pulled out of him, detail by detail, inch by inch. The demon stripped away the cover of forgetfulness, stripped everything down to truth, and it hurt more than anything.
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Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders)
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We had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at that time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.
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John Green (Looking for Alaska)
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If I should die, and leave you here awhile Be not like others sore undone, who keep Long vigils by the silent dust and weep. For my sake, turn again to life, and smile, Nerving thy heart and trembling hand to do Something to comfort weaker hearts than thine. Complete these dear unfinished tasks of mine, And I, perchance, may therein comfort you!
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Mary Lee Hall
β€œ
Like I need to play on the Wii when you're there willing to f*** me. Video games are what men invented to fill the sex void. Any man who chooses video games over sex deserves to live in his mother's basement with his mint-condition, in box Star Wars figurines and his real doll.
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Lauren Dane (Coming Undone (Brown Family, #2))
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He's splitting me open, I thought. He'll break me and then I'll die.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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Here is a girl who is pretty in a quiet way. I bet she's had a very sad life.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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All the dead bolts, pulled shades and hidden knives in the world couldn't protect you from the truth.
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Wally Lamb (She’s Come Undone)
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You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.
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Karin Slaughter (Undone (Will Trent, #3))
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Time is not measured by the years that you live But by the deeds that you do and the joy that you give- And each day as it comes brings a chance to each one To love to the fullest, leaving nothing undone That would brighten the life or lighten the load Of some weary traveler lost on Life's Road- So what does it matter how long we may live If as long as we live we unselfishly give.
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Helen Steiner Rice
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The entire hospital seemed to go still, watching and waiting, and what the hell was up with Sin and guys on horses anyway? "Well, who is he?" "War." Con stared at her. "War. Just...War. What kind of name is that?" Nope, not jealous at all of muscle-bound handsome guy. "Yeah, you know, the original War. Second Horseman of the Apocalypse?" Con nearly swallowed his fucking tongue. Everyone else in the ER scrambled backward. Even Eidolon backed up a step as the guy swung down from the horse. Christ, standing, the guy was damned near seven feet tall. "Sin," he said in an impossibly deep voice. He approached her, bent to kiss her cheek, and Con bristled. "Big horse," Con ground out. "Compensating much?
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Larissa Ione (Sin Undone (Demonica, #5))
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Wow." Sin said, her high-heeled boots clacking on the floor as she approached. " I didn't expect a party or anything, but I figured you might be able to handle a hi." "I'm serious" , he gritted. "Get out." "Well, you know what ?" She tied her hair up in a knot. "I would, except that you fucking bonded me to you or something, and I need to borrow your dick for a minute.
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Larissa Ione (Sin Undone (Demonica, #5))
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I've become a collector of stories about unlikely returns: the sudden reappearance of the long-lost son, the father found, the lovers reunited after forty years. Once in awhile, a letter does fall behind a post office desk and lie there for years before it's finally discovered and delivered to the rightful address. The seemingly brain-dead sometimes wake up and start talking. I'm always on the lookout for proof that what is done can sometimes be undone.
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Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles)
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So many humans. So many colours. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. There are skies manufactured by people, punctured and leaking, and there are soft, coal-coloured clouds, beating, like black hearts. And then. There is death. Making his way through all of it. On the surface: unflappable, unwavering. Below: unnerved, untied, and undone.
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Markus Zusak (The Book Thief)
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We have undoubtedly achieved Pakistan, and that too without bloody war, practically peacefully, by moral and intellectual force, and with the power of the pen, which is no less mighty than that of the sword and so our righteous cause has triumphed. Are we now going to besmear and tarnish this greatest achievement for which there is no parallel in the history of the world? Pakistan is now a fait accompli and it can never be undone, besides, it was the only just, honourable, and practical solution of the most complex constitutional problem of this great subcontinent. Let us now plan to build and reconstruct and regenerate our great nation...
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Muhammad Ali Jinnah
β€œ
I feel these forbidden thoughts creep in sometimes without warning. Slow thoughts that always start quietly, like whispers you're not even sure you're hearing. And then they get louder and louder until they become every sound in the entire world. Thoughts that can't be undone. Would anyone care? Would anyone even fucking notice? What if one day I just wasn't here anymore? What if one day it all just stopped? What if? What if? What if?
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Amber Smith (The Way I Used to Be (The Way I Used to Be, #1))
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song of elli (old age) "What is plucked will grow again, What is slain lives on, What is stolen will remain What is gone is gone... What is sea-born dies on land, Soft is trod upon. What is given burns the hand - What is gone is gone... Here is there, and high is low; All may be undone. What is true, no two men know - What is gone is gone... Who has choices need not choose. We must, who have none. We can love but what we lose - What is gone is gone.
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Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn (The Last Unicorn, #1))
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What initially began as a couple of pieces that fitted together from first dates, slowly expands with time and for a moment the puzzle actually looks like it will be realized. Heartbreak is when the puzzle is nearly finished and you suddenly realize that pieces are missing. Perhaps they were never in the box in the first place or perhaps they went missing along the way; regardless, the puzzle remains undone. You frantically search the box and your surroundings, desperately trying to find the missing pieces, anxiously looking to fill the void, but you search for what cannot be found.
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Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
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Casting back her head, Arya gazed up at the twinkling sky, her long neck gold with firelight, her face pale with the radiance of the heavenx. "Do you ask out of friendly concern or your own self-interest?" She gave an abrupt, choked laugh, the sound of water falling over cold rocks. "Never mind. The night air has addled me. It has undone my sense of courtesy and left me free to say the most spiteful things that occur to me." "No matter." "It does matter, because I regret it, and I shall not tolerate it. Did I love Faolin? How would you define love? For over twenty years, we traveled together, the only immortals to walk among the short-lived races. We were companions...and friends.
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Christopher Paolini
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We don’t have to do anything at all to die. We can hide in a cupboard under the stairs our whole life and it’ll still find us. Death will show up wearing an invisible cloak and it will wave a magic wand and whisk us away when we least expect it. It will erase every trace of our existence on this earth and it will do all this work for free. It will ask for nothing in return. It will take a bow at our funeral and accept the accolades for a job well done and then it will disappear. Living is a little more complex. There’s one thing we always have to do. Breathe. In and out, every single day in every hour minute and moment we must inhale whether we like it or not. Even as we plan to asphyxiate our hopes and dreams still we breathe. Even as we wither away and sell our dignity to the man on the corner we breathe. We breathe when we’re wrong, we breathe when we’re right, we breathe even as we slip off the ledge toward an early grave. It cannot be undone. So I breathe. I count all the steps I’ve climbed toward the noose hanging from the ceiling of my existence and I count out the number of times I’ve been stupid and I run out of numbers.
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Tahereh Mafi (Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2))
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It was this: the future beginning to hang thick in the air, and Henry starting a quiet, drunk conversation about whether or not Blue would like to travel to Venezuela with him. Blue replying softly that she would, she very much would, and Gansey hearing the longing in her voice like he was being undone, like his own feelings were being unbearably mirrored. I can’t come? Gansey asked. Yes, you can meet us there in a fancy plane, Henry said. Don’t be fooled by his nice hair, Blue interjected, Gansey would hike. And warmth filled the empty caverns in Gansey’s heart. He felt known.
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Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven King (The Raven Cycle, #4))
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...gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself...what they imitate is a phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity...gay identities work neither to copy nor emulate heterosexuality, but rather, to expose heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization. That heterosexuality is always in the act of elaborating itself is evidence that it is perpetually at risk, that it, that it 'knows' it's own possibility of becoming undone
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Judith Butler
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Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate. I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing. And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything. If only I could think! If only I could feel!
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Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
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There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or ceased to live. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderate creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothingness. Thoughts came tumbling over one another in Philip's eager fancy, and he took long breaths of joyous satisfaction. He felt inclined to leap and sing. He had not been so happy for months. 'Oh, life,' he cried in his heart, 'Oh life, where is thy sting?
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W. Somerset Maugham (Of Human Bondage)
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The eye turned to the fire gave back no light and he closed it with his thumb and sat by her and put his hand upon her bloodied forehead and closed his own eyes that he could see her running in the mountains, running in the starlight where the grass was wet and the sun's coming as yet had not undone the rich matrix of creatures passed in the night before her. Deer and hare and dove and groundvole all richly empaneled on the air for her delight, all nations of the possible world ordained by God of which she was one among and not separate from. Where she ran the cries of the coyotes clapped shut as if a door had closed upon them and all was fear and marvel. He took up her stiff head out of the leaves and held it or he reached to hold what cannot be held, what already ran among the mountains at once terrible and of great beauty, like flowers that feed on flesh. What blood and bone are made of but can themselves not make on any altar nor by any wound of war. What we may well believe has power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower but is swift and a huntress and the wind itself is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.
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Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing (The Border Trilogy, #2))
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We're the unmended, the untended, cold soldiers of the shoe. We're the neglected, the never resurrected, agonies of the few. We're the once kissed, unmissed and always refused. Because we're the unfinished and feared and we're never pursued. And just that easily, on my behalf, I come around. Because I'm burning. The beast of War feeds only on the meats of War. And now I'm for carnage. Here's how my anguish frees. Destroy everyone of course. Because I'm unwanted and unsafe. And I'll take tears away with torments and rape, killings and fears not even the dead will escape. Encircling the Guilty, Ashamed, Blameless and Enslaved. Absolved. Butchering their prejudice. Patience. Their Value. Because I'm without value. I'm the coming of every holocaust. Turning no lost. Rending tissue, sinew and bone. Excepting no suffering. By me all levees will break. All silos heave. I will walk heavy. And I will walk strange. Because I am too soon. Because without Her, I am only revolutions Of ruin. Because I am too soon. Because without You, I am only revolutions Of ruin. I'm the prophecy prophecies pass. Why need dies at last. How oceans dry. Islands drown. And skies of salt crash to the ground. I turn the powerful. Defy the weak. Only grass grows down abandoned streets. For a greater economy shall follow Us and it will be undone. And a greater autonomy shall follow Us and it too will be undone. And a greater feeling shall follow Love and it too we will blow to dust. For I am longings without trust. The cycloidal haste freedom from Hailey forever wastes. Dust cares for only dust. And time only for Us. Because I am too soon. Because without Her, I am only revolutions Of ruin. Because I am too soon. Because without You, I am only revolutions Of ruin. We are always sixteen...
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Mark Z. Danielewski (Only Revolutions)
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As Con and Sin approached the Harrowgate, it flashed and a tank of a blood-bay stallion leaped out, scattering staff and patients. Atop the horse sat a massive male in hard leather armor. His hair was short, reddish brown, and his eyes were black as Sin's. "What the hell are you doing?" Eidolon shouted, but the big male swiveled his head and focused his gaze on Sin with such intensity that Con stiffened. "Why is he looking at you like that?" "I...ah..." She slid him a timid glance. "I sort of slept with him once." Con took a deep breath and tried to rein in his desire to rip out the horse guy's throat. "Where'd you find him? EviLove.com?
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Larissa Ione (Sin Undone (Demonica, #5))
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Before the Law stands a doorkeeper on guard. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country who begs for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot admit the man at the moment. The man, on reflection, asks if he will be allowed, then, to enter later. 'It is possible,' answers the doorkeeper, 'but not at this moment.' Since the door leading into the Law stands open as usual and the doorkeeper steps to one side, the man bends down to peer through the entrance. When the doorkeeper sees that, he laughs and says: 'If you are so strongly tempted, try to get in without my permission. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall keepers stand at every door, one more powerful than the other. Even the third of these has an aspect that even I cannot bear to look at.' These are difficulties which the man from the country has not expected to meet, the Law, he thinks, should be accessible to every man and at all times, but when he looks more closely at the doorkeeper in his furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long, thin, Tartar beard, he decides that he had better wait until he gets permission to enter. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit down at the side of the door. There he sits waiting for days and years. He makes many attempts to be allowed in and wearies the doorkeeper with his importunity. The doorkeeper often engages him in brief conversation, asking him about his home and about other matters, but the questions are put quite impersonally, as great men put questions, and always conclude with the statement that the man cannot be allowed to enter yet. The man, who has equipped himself with many things for his journey, parts with all he has, however valuable, in the hope of bribing the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts it all, saying, however, as he takes each gift: 'I take this only to keep you from feeling that you have left something undone.' During all these long years the man watches the doorkeeper almost incessantly. He forgets about the other doorkeepers, and this one seems to him the only barrier between himself and the Law. In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself. He grows childish, and since in his prolonged watch he has learned to know even the fleas in the doorkeeper's fur collar, he begs the very fleas to help him and to persuade the doorkeeper to change his mind. Finally his eyes grow dim and he does not know whether the world is really darkening around him or whether his eyes are only deceiving him. But in the darkness he can now perceive a radiance that streams immortally from the door of the Law. Now his life is drawing to a close. Before he dies, all that he has experienced during the whole time of his sojourn condenses in his mind into one question, which he has never yet put to the doorkeeper. He beckons the doorkeeper, since he can no longer raise his stiffening body. The doorkeeper has to bend far down to hear him, for the difference in size between them has increased very much to the man's disadvantage. 'What do you want to know now?' asks the doorkeeper, 'you are insatiable.' 'Everyone strives to attain the Law,' answers the man, 'how does it come about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance but me?' The doorkeeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.
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Franz Kafka (The Trial)