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Quotes

A dead enemy always smells good.

—Aulus Vitellius, 69

It is very foolish to attack one’s enemy openly if one can injure him in secret.

—Giambattista Giraldi, 1543

The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.

—Susanne K. Langer, 1962

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.

—P.G. Wodehouse, 1929

It was lonesome, the leaving.

—Wetatonmi, c. 1877

To blow and to swallow at the same time is not easy; I cannot at the same time be here and also there.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

A world is sooner destroyed than made.

—Thomas Burnet, 1684

Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1938

I was born without knowing why, I have lived without knowing why, and I am dying without either knowing why or how.

—Pierre Gassendi, 1655

Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater.

—Anthony Doerr, 2006

There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883

What a torture to talk to filled heads that allow nothing from the outside to enter them.

—Joseph Joubert, 1807

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

—Billie Holiday, 1956