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The Sense of an Ending
The Sense of an Ending (Complete List of Updates)
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POWERFUL QUOTE
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seem to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return." - pg.3
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"...Robson had been cut down in the flower of youth..." - pg.12
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"...another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface..." - pg.3
HAIKU
Avaricious bonds
Consume the life out of us
we must lock ourselves
20 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." - pg.17
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"And sometimes this meant her body would be as tightly guarded as a fisheries exclusion zone." - pg.22
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"There followed one of those pauses when couples tacitly agree not to discuss something." - pg.25
HAIKU
Awkward beginnings
Drift us apart preemptiv-
-ely ceasing our smile
30 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"...mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history - Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you cab infer past actions from current mental states." - pg.44
POWERFUL WORD IMAGE
"...nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed, and time with it." - pg.36
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"Then there was a whisper, and a craning of necks, and all thoughts of damp and cold vanished..." - pg.36
HAIKU
Nature casts shadow
Unanticipated pain
Imminent despair
40 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense." - pg.52
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"He also asked to be cremated, and for his ashes to be scattered, since the swift destruction of the body was also a philosopher's active choice, and preferable to the supine waiting for natural decomposition in the ground." - pg.50
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"Cheerful. Happy. Like himself, only more so. As we said goodbye, he told me he was in love." - pg.51
HAIKU
At one's prime is sprung
Unprecedented love
The cause of out death
50 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"The less time there remains in your life, the less you want to waste it." - pg.68
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"But its still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.." - pg.74
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"They just repeat the line, again and again, until the song chooses to end" - pg.62
HAIKU
That which we were once
Proud, confident and lively
We No longer are
60 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"They say time finds you out..." - pg.79
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"...see no evil..." - pg.78
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"...hear no evil, speak no evil." - pg.78
HAIKU
That which I desire
That which when brought to me will
Be my salvation
70 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"But time . . . how time first grounds us, and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time . . . give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical." - pg.92
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"...blood money..." - pg.92
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"...time was telling not against them, it was telling against me." - pg.98
HAIKU
The character lies
Together with his future
In the daunting past
80 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books, You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK." - pg.110
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"Sleep the sleep of the wicked." - pg.112
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"...impervious to the world outside, moving her head to music only she could hear." - pg.114
HAIKU
My emotions are
Running amok while others
Are impervious
90 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory..." - pg.122
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"They mush all, I suppose, have been between thirty and fifty, yet at the same time had a kind of fixed, ageless quality." - pg.125
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"I was alone with two voices speaking clearly in my head..." - pg.131
HAIKU
Those close to me now
Consumed and abandoned so
I am forsaken
100 Percent
POWERFUL QUOTE
"There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest." - pg.150
POWERFUL WORD-IMAGE
"He didn't grandly refuse an existential gift, he was afraid of the pram in the hall." - pg.142
POWERFUL SOUND-IMAGE
"...this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it." - pg.138
Haiku
The redundant pain
Extinguishing my very
Essence now triumphs