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An apt description of Greek/Roman Myths
Who is to say that prayers have any effect? On the other hand, who is to say they don’t? I picture the gods, diddling around on Olympus, wallowing in the nectar and ambrosia and the aroma of burning bones and fat, mischievous as a pack of ten-year-olds with a sick cat to play with and…
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How true…
No society can work unless its members feel responsibilities as well as rights. Layard, Richard. Happiness: Lessons from a new science. New York: Penguin Press, 2005. 92.
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This sounds familiar…
You did what you were told or you didn’t get paid, and if things went wrong it wasn’t your problem. It was the fault of whatever idiot has accepted this message for sending in the first place. No one cared about you, and everyone at headquarters was an idiot. It wasn’t your fault, no one…
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The Politics of Harry Potter
Rowling removes the technological complications of the contemporary world not out of nostalgia for cultural stability, but to reveal that, without the veneer of technology, the world wrestles with the same social and political questions in the 1990s as it did in the 1790s. Rowling returns to the ideals of the Enlightenment and the French…
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On Children’s Literature
The great subversive works of children’s literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all…
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Motive
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE –Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (as quoted in Inkheart by Cornelia Funke)
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A Curse on Book Thieves
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony…