keller

The Four Singers: [Singly, speaking in conversational tones]
What has gone wrong with the men who are ruling,
I'd like to know who they think they are fooling.
They told us that torture was over and gone,
But everyone knows the same torture goes on.
The king's gone away, the priests emigrating,
The nobles are buried, so why are we waiting?

-- "The Persecution and...
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As I went over to say good-by I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby's face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams - not through her own fault, but because of the...
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"Trust your friends, but cut the cards anyway."

-- Ancient Maltese expression

The whole farm was deeply divided on the subject of the windmill. Snowball did not deny that to build it would be a difficult business. Stone would have to be carried and built up into walls, then the sails would have to be made and after that there would be need for dynamos and cables. (How these were to be procured, Snowball did not say.)...
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Im going on the television, Seymour. What do you think of that? Your Sara on television. Adas fixing my hair. Red. Like the dress. Sort of. Remember, I wore it for Harry's bar mitzvah? Well, the hair isn't so good but Ada will make it nice. Can you imagine, your Sara on television? Did you ever think it could be? Maybe I/ll stay a long...
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This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the...
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Life is only a game of poker, played well or ill
Some hold four aces, some draw or fill
Some make a bluff and oft get there
While others ante and never hold a pair.

-- San Francisco gambler, Pat Hogan's suicide note, written on the back of an ace of hearts

Down a white corridor, their footfalls echoing hollowly - alone. All alone. One elevator at the end.

"This is where you and I part company," Killian said. "Express to the street. Nine seconds."

He offered his hand for the fourth time, and Richards refused it again. Yet he lingered a moment.

"What if I could go up?" he asked, and gestured with his head toward...
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An orchard is an idealized or domesticated version of a forest, and the transformation of a shadowy tract of wilderness into a tidy geometry of apple trees offered a visible, even stirring, proof that a pioneer had mastered the primordial forest. Compared to the awesome majesty of the old-growth trees the early settlers encountered, the modesty of an apple tree, the way it obligingly takes...
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Dusk was setting in by the time they reached the old Malta-Vita plant at the corner of Verona Avenue and Wattles Lane. The company had enjoyed a brief but spectacular success some six years earlier, improving on Dr. Kellogg's Granose Flakes by sweetening them with barley-malt syrup and obtaining a patent on the new product. A pair of out-of-town promoters, men not unlike Goodloe H....
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