

“Napoleon, the man of genius, did this! But to say that he destroyed his army because he wished to, or because he was very stupid, would be as unjust as to say that he had brought his troops to Moscow because he wished to and because he was very clever and a genius”
― War and Peace
― War and Peace

“Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets...My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.”
― Shalimar the Clown
― Shalimar the Clown

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
― The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time
― The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

“Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.”
― The Left Hand of Darkness
― The Left Hand of Darkness

“The beautiful came to this city [Hollywood] in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian ruble or Argentine peso;to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls.”
― Shalimar the Clown
― Shalimar the Clown

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