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There is no greater impotence in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

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
Upon
Crashes
Right
Impotence
Like
Crash
World
Favourite
Wave
Knowing
Greater
Wrong

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I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.
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Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
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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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For what does it mean to be a hero? It requires you to be prepared to deal with forces larger than yourself.
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You don't know a woman until you've met her in court.
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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.
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The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
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The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again.
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Prevarication, like honesty, is reflexive, and soon becomes a sturdy habit, as reliable as truth.
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The women's movement is filled with tyrants, just as men's political movements are equally filled.
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Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.
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There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
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To make an Army work you have to have every man in it fitted into a fear ladder... The Army functions best when you're frightened of the man above you, and contemptuous of your subordinates.
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A nation fights well in proportion to the amount of men and materials it has. And the other equation is that the individual soldier in that army is a more effective soldier the poorer his standard of living has been in the past.
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What is there about polarity that is matter becoming more complex?
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To be married to a good woman is to live with tender surprise.
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MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.
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Reagan bankrupted the Soviet Union by increasing armaments.
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There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
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Somerset Maugham ... wrote somewhere that Nobody is any better than he ought to be.... I carried it along with me as a working philosophy, but I suppose that finally I would have to take exception to the thought ... or else the universe is just an elaborate clock.
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