"The past is our ultimate privacy; we pile it up, year by year, decade by decade, it stows itself away, with its perverse random recall system."

--

Source : Penelope Lively (2012). “How It All Began: A Novel”, p.174, Penguin

Penelope Lively

#Past Quotes #Years Quotes #Privacy Quotes

“Who despises all that is despicable is made to be impressed with all that is grand.”
“The E.U. initially decided to end the isolation of Turkish Cyprus, to balance the accession of Cyprus. But the E.U. has not carried through on its promise.”
“...but you are too much for them: the weak in courage are strong in cunning; and one by one, you have absorbed and have captured and dishonored, and have distilled of your deliverers the most ruinous of all poisons; people hear Beethoven in concert halls, or over a bridge game, or to relax; CÃ©zannes are hung on walls, reproduced, in natural wood frames; van Gogh is the man who cut off his ear and whose yellows became recently popular in window decoration.”
“Moping is an unattractive attribute in a man.”
“Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.”

Source : Abigail Adams, John Adams, L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Mary-Jo Kline (1975). “The Book of Abigail and John: Selected Letters of the Adams Family, 1762-1784”, p.113, UPNE
“Bid imagination run / Much on the Great Questioner; / What He can question, what if questioned I / Can with a fitting confidence reply.”
“It is easy to study the rules of overloading and of templates without noticing that together they are one of the keys to elegant and efficient type-safe containers”
“At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven. If so, I was going to reply, You know what? You're right. Fine.”

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