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Part I, Chapter 8
Chapter 8
Of the good success which the valorous Don Quixote had in the dreadful and never-before-imagined adventure of the windmills, with other events worthy to be recorded.
As they were thus discoursing, they perceived some thirty or forty windmills that are in that plain; and as soon as Don Quixote espied them, he said to his squire:
'Fortune disposes our affairs better than we ourselves could have desired; look yonder, friend Sancho Panza, where you may discover somewhat more than thirty monstrous giants, with whom I intend to fight, and take away all their lives: with whose spoils we will begin to enrich ourselves; for it is lawful war, and doing God good service to take away so wicked a generation from off the face of the earth.'
'What giants?' said Sancho Panza.
'Those you see yonder,' answered his master, 'with those long arms; for some of them are wont to have them almost of the length of two leagues.'
'Consider, Sir,' answered Sancho, 'that those which appear yonder, are not giants, but windmills; and what seem to be arms are the sails, which, whirled about by the wind, make the millstone go.'
'One may easily see,' answered Don Quixote, 'that you are not versed in the business of adventures: they are giants; and, if you are afraid, get aside and pray, whilst I engage with them in a fierce and unequal combat.'
And so saying
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...and having heard...that when a man in a forest thinks he is going in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping in this way to go in a straight line. For I stopped being half-witted and became sly, whenever I took the trouble. And my head was a storehouse of useful knowledge. And if I did not go in a rigorously straight line, with my system of going in a circle, at least I did not go in a circle, and that was something.
extract from 'Molloy' - by Samuel Beckett
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Bertrand Russell - On Youthful Cynicism
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"Bits of old posters still clung to the boards. A fine face full of hatred, grimacing against a green background torn into the shape of a star; just below the nose someone had pencilled in a curling moustache. On another strip I could still decipher the word 'purâtre' from which red drops fall, drops of blood perhaps. The face and the word might have been part of the same poster. Now the poster is lacerated, the simple, necessary lines which united them have disappeared, but another unity has established itself between the twisted mouth, the drops of blood, the white letters, and the termination 'âtre': as though a restless and criminal passion were seeking to express itself by these mysterious signs."
extract from 'Nausea' by Jean-Paul Sartre
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