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There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same.

Norman Mailer

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Norman Mailer
Age: 84 †
Born: 1923
Born: January 31
Died: 2007
Died: November 10
Actor
Biographer
Essayist
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Historian
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Long Branch
New Jersey
Norman Kingsley Mailer
Andreas Wilson
Inspiration
Grows
Literature
Law
Inspirational
Remaining
Else
Cruel
Must
Pay
Life
Grow

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I was now at a university in New York, a professor of existential psychology with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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I don't think life is absurd. I think we are all here for a huge purpose. I think we shrink from the immensity of the purpose we are here for.
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The nightmare in every democracy, the very nightmare, is if it gets worse and worse and worse, we could end up totalitarian.
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We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.
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Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.
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When I read it [Tough Guys Don't Dance], I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
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I did like Robert Vavra's book not only for its so very good photographs but for the text as well. He's no ordinary fellow, obviously.
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Sex is not only a divine and beautiful activity it's a murderous activity. People kill each other in bed. Some of the greatest crimes ever committed were committed in bed. And no weapons were used.
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Cancer is the growth of madness denied.
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Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.
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It all comes down to who does the dishes.
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Comfortless was my religion, anxiety of the anxieties, for I believed God was not love, but courage. Love came only as a reward.
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Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitionshe has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover's sense of the momentof crisis, and he knewhow costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.
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Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.
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We sail across dominions barely seen, washed by the swells of time. We plow through fields of magnetism. Past and future come together on thunderheads and our dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds of the Gods.
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The private terror of the liberal spirit is invariably suicide, not murder.
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The Frenchman Jean-PaulSartre ... had a dialectical mind good as a machine for cybernetics, immense in its way, he could peel a nuance like an onion, but he had no sense of evil, the anguish of God, and the possible existence of Satan.
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I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
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You never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant.
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