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  "title": "Beauty",
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      "slug": "i-learned-very",
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      "text": "I learned very soon there was nothing beautiful in that place. Even the things they watched were not beautiful. There was no contrast between beauty and ugliness. There was only ugliness. I suppose it was more practical for them. If there had been any beauty at all, people might have wanted that instead. As it was, they didn’t know there was any such thing, so the lack did not bother them.",
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      "text": "According to Mama, nine-tenths of King Arthur was questing and the other tenth was politics.",
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      "slug": "thread-and-needles",
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      "text": "Thread and needles. To sew, so Mama had said, a cap of wisdom, a thinking cap. If one wanted a thinking cap. Mama hadn’t. Wisdom was the curse of man, she said. In seeking wisdom we had lost our heritage. I didn’t believe that. We hadn’t sought wisdom diligently enough, that’s how we’d lost our heritage. We preferred cleverness to wisdom. Instead of seeking the truth, we had preferred to believe in easy certainties. Always so much easier to take the lazy, easy way and then pretend God had commanded it.",
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      "text": "We have been thwarted at every turn by god. Not the real God. A false one which has been set up by man to expedite his destruction of the earth. He is the gobble-god who bids fair to swallow everything in the name of a totally selfish humanity. His ten commandments are me first (let me live as I please), humans first (let all other living things die for my benefit), sperm first (no birth control), birth first (no abortions), males first (no women’s rights), my culture/tribe/language/religion first (separatism/terrorism), my race first (no human rights), my politics first (lousy liberals/rotten reactionaries), my country first (wave the flag, the flag, the flag), and, above all, profit first.",
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      "slug": "i-wept-a-time",
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      "text": "I wept a time for Mama and for Israfel, but weeping does no good, does it? Sitting down and weeping is what women have done for centuries, and it has done no good at all. Nor praying. God has given us the earth. He is not waiting in the next room, ready to fix it for us if we ruin it. If we do not care for it, no one will. On other worlds, other races of men perhaps do better than we have done. He cares for us, but he does not control what we do.",
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      "slug": "i-had-told",
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      "text": "I had told myself it was God’s will when it was nothing of the kind. It was only man’s stupidity.",
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      "text": "There’s some who say magic came from nature, and with men destroying nature right and left, there’s not enough of it left.",
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      "slug": "innocence-gone-forever",
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      "text": "Innocence. Gone, forever, with the unthinkable and the unspeakable. And innocent laughter gone as well. Now only the dirty giggle, the wicked snigger, the game of out-grossing, the playtime of the beasts. So that when the real death stalks When the real horror begins It will all be familiar and we will be able to enjoy it.",
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      "slug": "and-when-a-man",
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      "text": "“And when a man or a woman climbs, Beauty, he or she can end up as high as the angels or higher.” “The saints,” I nodded, thinking I knew. “Oh, saints,” Puck said. “Whsst. Saints! Martyrs and virgins and what all. Relics in churches, and both the relic and the churches dead as brass. No. I’ll tell you who climbs. Gardeners climb. And farmers. And painters. And poets. People who build beautiful things without destroying to do it.”",
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      "slug": "then-suddenly-i-got",
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      "text": "Then, suddenly, I got old. Up until a year or two ago, I wasn’t…didn’t feel old at all.",
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      "text": "Fairy things don’t impress cats. Fairy things and holy things. Cats are, perhaps, a separate creation.",
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      "text": "There is no innocence so deep as to veil the urgencies of the flesh from one’s own youthful awareness.",
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      "text": "She sighed. “Things the Creator Himself made have perished, Beauty, because of what someone else does. The Holy One makes a tree that lives for four thousand years, and someone chops it down to make paper to package chewing gum. The Creator makes whales who sing in the deep, and men kill them to put their oil in lipsticks.”",
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      "text": "The sidesaddle was designed to protect a maiden’s virginity, while risking the maiden’s neck. Rather much for rather little, I thought.",
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      "text": "“Much of life,” he said to me, “depends on our being ignorant of reality. If we understood reality, we would never go on.”",
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      "text": "Men are like that. They marry for reasons that have nothing to do with what they expect from matrimony and then damn their wives for not being what they want later. They marry for beauty and charm and sex, and then expect their wives to be sensible, parsimonious and efficient.",
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