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Can you
identify the author of the following passage? The book?
December 2007
Sufferers
are seldom sweet-tempered; and Laura formed no exception. Pin,
her most frequent companion, had to bear the brunt of her
acrimony: hence the two were soon at war again. For Pin was
tactless, and took small heed of her sister's grumpy moods, save to
cavil at them. \dots Laura retaliated by falling foul of little
personal traits in Pin: a nervous habit she had of clearing her
throat - her very walk. They quarrelled passionately, having
branched as far apart as the end-points of what is ultimately to be a
triangle, between which the connecting lines have not yet been drawn.
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answer, click
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September
2007
``All love
is mathematically just, as much as the
two sides of an algebraic equation.''
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answer, click
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June 2007
'What is it, Virginia love?'
``Mother,' said Virginia.
`Mother? My mother?'
...
``No. Mine. She's come.... And I'm afraid — oh, Stephen, I do think
she doesn't mean to go away very soon, because she has brought two
trunks.''
... ``How very odd,'' said Stephen, who till now
had regarded his mother-in-law as a monument of tact; adding,
after a pause, ``Two trunks, did you say? You counted them, I
suppose. Two trunks. That is certainly a large
number....''
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answer, click
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March
2007
...he
seemed to approach the grave as an hyperbolic curve approaches a line,
less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever
reach it at all.
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answer, click
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December
2006
Anil's
name —
the one
she'd bought from her brother at the age of thirteen —
had another stage to go through before it settled. By the time Anil was
sixteen, she was taut and furious within the family. Her
parents
brought her to an astrologer in Wellawatta in an attempt to mollify
these aspects of her nature. The man wrote down her birth
hour
and date, subtracted and fractioned them, considered her neighbouring
stars and, not
realizing the involved commerce behind it, said the problem resided in
her name. Her tempestuousness could be harnessed with a name
change... He spoke with a voice that approached serenity and wisdom in
the small cubicle, behind whose curtain other families waited in the
hall hoping to overhear gossip and family history. What they heard were
loud insistent refusals from the girl. the
astrologer-soothsayer
had eventually compromised his solution down to a simple
appendage —
the
addition of an e,
so she would be Anile.
It would make her and her name more feminine, the would allow the fury
to curve away.
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answer, click
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October
2006
If
only I could get down to Sidcup! I've been waiting for the
weather to break. He's got my papers, this man I left them
with,
it's got it all down there, I could prove everything.
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answer, click
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August
2006
In
thirteen years as a pilot, Renzo Leoni crawled out of five bloody
wrecks. Blinded by fog, deafened by thunder, he's flown over
the
Mediterranean and the Alps. He's been lost and low on fuel
above
the Libyan desert and trackless Ethiopian wastes, and shot at by
Abyssinian anti-aircraft guns. But it was Emanuele Leoni who
was
buried with that Silver Medal; Renzo took it off the day it was
awarded, and never spoke of it again.
The familiar sensation arises in his throat. Renzo pushes
himself
upright and vectors through the maze of tables and chairs and chests,
trying not to add bruises to his shins. Centuries of
settling have rendered the marble floor uneven, but the
uncompromisingly modern bathroom is only ten years old.
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answer, click
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June 2006
But he
could no longer disbelieve in the reality of love, since God himself
had loved his individual soul with divine love from all eternity.
Gradually, as his soul was enriched with spiritual knowledge, he saw
the whole world forming one vast symmetrical expression of God's power
and love. Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation of
which, were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on the twig of a
tree, his soul should praise and thank the giver. The world for all its
solid substance and complexity no longer existed for his soul save as a
theorem of divine power and love and universality.
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answer, click
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April
2006
"I've been
meaning to ask him here,' said Rodney guiltily, but somehow I've never
got round to it yet. I suppose we should go to tea with him, then. I'll
telephone him. I suppose the clergy house has a
telephone? In touch with the infinite, no doubt, but an ordinary
worldly one too?'
`Goodness,
yes? There's even one in the vestry. People are always ringing up to
ask Father Thames to luncheon or Father Bode to high tea.'
'All
right, then. I'll say we will be delighted.'
`I wonder
if he's really without relatives?' I said. `He
strikes one as the kind of person who would have a mother.'
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February
2006
... an old
man stops in the road and asks if I live here. He tells me he knows the
land well. He pauses and looks along the stone wall, then in a quiet
voice tells me his brother was shot here. Age seventeen, suspected of
being a Partisan.... Yesterday I found a patch of blue cornflowers
around an olive tree where his brother must have fallen. Where did they
come from? A seed dropped by a thrush? Will they spread next year over
the crest of the terrace? Old places exist on sine waves of time and
space that bend in some logarithmic motion I'm beginning to ride.
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answer, click
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January
2006
There
isn't a finite amount of love to go round, so there's a danger someone
else might nick your
share. Some people can only love one person, some can love hundreds,
but it doesn't mean it's the same amount of love in each case. I might
fall in love again, mightn't I? So will you. But when I do, I won't
love my kids any less, any more than you'll stop loving your brother
and father.
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answer, click
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December
2005
'I
couldn't stand it if you left me. I'd do something terrible...'
The
unhappy little voice trailed off into space.
Something
terrible. Like reading Shopenhauer and seducing me with your pretty,
wet little body. But I am not going to fall for it again. Next time not
even Goethe will help you. The white hand of the moon caressed the
alabaster loins. I came to my senses. I regained my cool wisdom, the
rigorous wisdom of modern logic: x wants to sleep
with y; z is in the way; ergo, x
must get rid of z.
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answer, click
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November
2005
He walked
across the park, feeling in need of air and exercise. This made him
think of a passage in Strong's diary about taking a woman friend out on
the Serpentine and as he stood on the bridge the man seemed to
materialise, tweeded and hatted, leaning back from the oars, the girl
at the other end of the boat, hazier but only too conceivable. It
sometimes seemed to Mark impossible that the historical past was
extinguished, gone; surely it must simply be somewhere else, shunted
into another plane of existence, still peopled and active and available
if only one could reach it. Despite such evidence as yellowing letters,
disintegrating books, and the decease of almost everyone to do with his
researches, he found himself disbelieving in organic decay. Somewhere,
Strong was
still prowling around in that light green knickerbocker suit, or
sitting at his desk writing with the scratchy nib pen, or laughing on
the Serpentine with a woman.
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answer, click
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October
2005
Alexander
began to fuss. Kate lifted him out of the high chair and held him. He
liked to roll around in her lap like a bald, brightly clad Buddha.
Sometimes, holding him, she felt as though she held all the words she
was not writing, warm now, tended and alive, sprung at last from their
as yet unformed shapes and configurations, their flat, two-dimesional
boundaries. Loving him was a terrible seduction, Kate thought,
flowering continually while she persisted in thinking he was hers in
the way words were.
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answer, click
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September
2005
Just as a
geometer, stripping things of their sensible qualities, sees only the
linear substratum beneath them, so the stories that people told escaped
me, for what interested me was not what they were trying to say but the
manner in which they said it and the way in which this manner revealed
their character or their foibles...
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answer, click
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August
2005
Poor old
Poppleton! Again and again I have heard him — what do you
think? laboriously explaining jests to her....
Poppleton would say something that convulsed me with laughter
— in spite of my efforts, for I always dreaded the result so
much that I strove my hardest to do no more
than smile appreciation. My laugh compelled Mrs. Poppleton to stare at
me — oh, her eyes! Thereupon, her husband began his dread
performance. The patience, the heroic patience, of that dear, good
fellow! I have known him explain, and re-explain, for a quarter of an
hour, and invariably without success. It might be a mere pun; Mrs.
Poppleton no more understood the nature of a pun than of the binomial
theorem.
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answer, click
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July 2005
Confronted
by the proposition that someone was, in fact, not merely hoping for his
death but deliberately trying to murder him, he was as profoundly
shocked as if he had been presented with incontrovertible proofs that a
squared no longer equalled b
squared+c squared or that his wife had a lover.
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answer, click
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June 2005
"This is a
terrible business, an appalling business. It's doctor's orders. Open
the door."
"Forgive
me, but I will not."
"This
business is as broad as it's long,'' contributed the doctor. ``We had
better all work together. You need us, Mrs. Wilcox, and we need you. ...
"I do not
need you in the least," said Margaret....
"It all
turns on affection now,'' said Margaret. ``Affection. Don't you see?"
Resuming her usual methods, she wrote the word on the house with her
fingers. "Surely you see. I like Helen very much, you not so much. Mr.
Mansbridge doesn't know her. That's all. And affection, when
reciprocated, gives rights. Put that down in your note-book, Mr.
Mansbridge. It's a useful formula."
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answer, click
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May 2005
Thinking
in terms of one
Is easily done ...
But
counting up to two
Is harder to do;
For one must be denied
Before it's tried.
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answer, click
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April
2005
...you
will not be a full-blown mid until the Captain promotes you. Still, you
wear a mid's uniform, and you walk the quarterdeck: you are only the
first term in a progression, to be sure, but you do belong there, and
that is the great thing.
Progressions,
arithmetic, geometric, or just plain physical, tend to be very long;
and as far as the emotionally worn-out Horatio Hanson was concerned,
this first term in his particular sequence would have seemed almost
eternal...
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answer, click
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March
2005
... they
that were perfectly sound ... made nothing of going into the same
houses and chambers, nay, even into the same beds, with those that had
the distemper upon them, and were not recovered. Some, indeed, paid for
their audacious boldness with the price of their lives; an infinite
number fell sick, and the physicians had more work than ever, only with
this difference, that more of their patients recovered; that is to say,
they generally recovered, but certainly there were more people infected
and fell sick now, when there did not die above a thousand or twelve
hundred in a week, than there was when there died five or six thousand
a week, so entirely negligent were the people at that time ... and so
ill were they able to take or accept of the advice of those who
cautioned them for their good.
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answer, click
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February
2005
Of course,
to somebody on it, the moon is always full, so the
local idea of a sane action may well differ from ours.
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answer, click
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January
2005
...they
had a political salon in which every evening they and their friends
discussed the situation not only of the armies but of the fleets. They
thought certainly of these hecatombs of regiments annihilated and
passengers swallowed by the waves; but there is a law of inverse
proportion which multiplies to such an extent anything that concerns
our own welfare and divides by such a formidable figure anything that
does not concern it, that the death of unknown millions is felt by us
as the most insignificant of sensations, hardly even as disagreeable as
a draught.
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answer, click
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December
2004
Margaret
felt mildly interested in the fortunes of the Wilcox family. She had
acquired the habit on Helen's account, and it still clung to her. She
asked for more information about Miss Dolly Fussell that was, and was
given it in even, unemotional tons. Mrs. Wilcox's voice, though sweet
and compelling, had little range of expression. It suggested that
pictures, concerts, and people are all of small and equal value.
For the
answer, click
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November
2004
It
mattered to her that Europe be European. She'd visited the Continent
five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so
about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain
or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she'd had her fill of
the place. It drove her crazy, however, to hear her friend Bea Meisner
affect the same indifference....
For the
answer, click
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October
2004
It had not
taken him long to discover that the women were by far the most
interesting of the two sexes in the colony, although you would never
imagine it the case if you met them with their menfolk present. For
then they affected the most remarkable vapidity. But alone, or with
their own sex, they revealed themselves as scientists when it came to
the vectors of the human heart.
For the
answer, click
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September
2004
What
people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the
same book over and overagain, forgetting that a man who would write the
same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not
utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve
is implied in the upward one.
William
Smith of Bemidji, Minnesota was the first to identify the above
passage. Second was Cornell student Jay Searson, who found it by way of
Google.
For the
answer, click
here
August
2004
The
returned traveller entered the house, where he found awaiting him poor
old Mrs. Martin, to whose earthly course death stood rather as the
asymptote than as the end.
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answer, click
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July 2004
Yes, all
my own desires helped me to a certain extent to understand hers; it was
by this time an immense anguish in which all desires were transformed
into torments that were all the more cruel the more intense they had
been; as though in this algebra of sensibility they reappeared with the
same coefficient but with a minus instead of a plus sign.
For the
answer, click
here
June 2004
He passed
through the narrow vaginal passage, and entered the huge womb of the
Reading Room. Across the floor, dispersed along the radiating desks,
scholars curled, foetus-like, over their books, little buds of
intellectual life thrown off by some gigantic act of generation
performed upon that nest of knowledge, those inexhaustible ovaries of
learning, the concentric inner rings of the catalogue shelves... When
the scholars raised their eyes from their desks they saw nothing to
distract
them, nothing out of harmony with their books, only the smooth, curved
lining of the womb. Wherever the eye traveled, it met no arrest, no
angle, no parallel lines receding into infinity, no pointed arch
striving towards the unattainable: all was curved, round,
self-sufficient, complete.
For the
answer, click
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May 2004
You can
divide people in many ways. Said the astonished executioner: ``I just
divide them into heads and bodies.''
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answer, click
here.
April
2004
"But
— " the girl hesitated — "don't you approve of any
one marrying?''
"Oh, I'm
not so severe! But do you know that there are half a million more women
than men in this happy country of ours?''
"Half a
million!''
Her naive
alarm again excited Rhoda to laughter.
`"Something
like that, they say. So many odd women —
no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost,
futile lives. I, naturally— being one of them myself
— take another view. I look upon them as a great reserve."
For the
answer, click
here.
March
2004
He
hesitated in this walk toward the girl, in case his dead-set vector
made her feel something was wrong, and that he wouldn't find her again
if she moved to avoid him. The thick-linked co-ordinates of his life
met and meshed. He felt carefree, and pleased there was nothing wrong
with his dress or appearance, knowing now why he'd taken such care. He
was lively and still young, though settled in his ideas. Feeling a
certain emptiness in the middle of everything was only a sign that he
hadn't yet lost his old sense of self-preservation.
For the
answer, click
here.
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