A Quote by Christopher Hitchens
I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
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In one was, I suppose, I have been "in denial" for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely this reason, I can't see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it's all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me.
A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way-I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.)
It's an American thing, but it's particularly a southern thing, and its romanticization is hyper-Southern. And it's still irresistible to me, even in middle age. There's something that pulls me to that, but at the same time, I have this increasing awareness of how banal it really is - that evil is inherently banal.
No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin.
I am free, and always have been; free to accept my own reality, free to trust my perceptions, free to believe what makes me feel sane even if others call me crazy, free to disagree even if it means great loss, free to seek the way home until I find it.
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
Everyone knows that time is Death, that Death hides in clocks. Imposing another time powered by the Clock of the Imagination, however, can refuse his law. Here, freed of the Grim Reaper's scythe, we learn that pain is knowledge and all knowledge pain.
I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.
I'll make death love me; for I will contend
Even with his pestilent scythe.
A banal poem is never more than a banal poem. A banal or trite lyric, however, can be - with the right vocal cords - brilliantly and shatteringly conveyed.
Recreation is intended to the mind as whetting is to the scythe, to sharpen the edge of it, which otherwise would grow dull and blunt,--as good no scythe as no edge.
Let us award a just, a brilliant homage to those rare men whom nature has endowed with the precious privilege of arranging a thousand isolated facts, of making seductive theories spring from them; but let us not forget to state, that the scythe of the reaper had cut the stalks before one had thought of uniting them into sheaves!
I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper.
Once I was a prisoner lost inside myself with the world surrounding me, wandering through the misery, but now I am free. Free to love, free to laugh, free to soar, free to shine, free to give.
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