Modesty and conscientiousness receive their reward only in novels. In life they are exploited and then shoved aside.

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But probably that's the way of the world - when we have finally learned something we're too old to apply it - and so it goes, wave after wave, generation after generation. No one learns anything at all from anyone else.

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Sometimes I used to think that one day i should wake up, and all that had been would be over. forgotten, sunk, drowned. Nothing was sure - not even memory.

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Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.

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We are forlorn like children, and experienced like old men, we are crude and sorrowful and superficial—I believe we are lost.

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Good or ill, life is life; you only realize that when you have to risk it.

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With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.

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Keep things at arm's length. If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.

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To forget is the secret of eternal youth. One grows old only through memory. There's much too little forgetting.

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Every little bean must be heard as well as seen!

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