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Rite of Passage
Alexei Panshin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with.”
“Classics aren't books that are read for pleasure. Classics are books that are imposed on unwilling students, books that are subjected to analyses of "levels of significance" and other blatt, books that are dead.”
“If I had the opportunity, I would make the proposal that no man should be killed except by somebody who knows him well enough for the act to have impact. No death should be like nose blowing. Death is important enough that it should affect the person who causes it.”
“There is a lesson that I learned at twelve - the world does not end at the edge of a quad. There are people outside. The world does not end on the Fourth Level. There are people elsewhere. It took me two years to learn to apply the lesson - that neither does the world end with the Ship. If you want to accept life, you have to accept the whole bloody universe. The universe is filled with people, and there is not a single solitary spear carrier among them.”
“A book isn't a single, static thing with one unarguable meaning. Each reader who comes to it brings his own special knowledge, habits and attitudes. Each reader reads a different book. Each reader imagines a different story. A few years ago, for instance, a friend of my mother's sent me a copy of a test on Rite of Passage that she had given her students. The first question read: "True or False? The theme of Rite of Passage is..." I can't tell you what the presumed themed was, but I can tell you that I didn't recognize it. Beads of sweat leaped out of my forehead. After two more questions, I had to put the test aside. I didn't know the "right" answers.”
“There is something unique about the size, and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is a real discovery about running your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow LOOKS right.”
“If you read Rite of Passage and enjoy yourself, I couldn't be more pleased. I hope it gets you of. On the other hand, if you should be assigned Rite of Passage, and you start to read it and it doesn't work for you, just put it aside and forget the whole thing. Tell the teacher I said it was okay. Okay?”
“The trouble is that each of us is his own hero, existing in a world of spear carriers.”
“It was, if you like, an oasis in the general desert of childish and adult ignorance where we could safely bring out our thoughts and not have them denigrated, laughed at, or trampled upon, even when they deserved it. A place like that is precious.”
“If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn't, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those "mature" people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures.”
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Book Keywords:
literature, classic-literature, literature-curriculum, classics, classic-fiction, themes, classics-curriculum