"If one's actions are honest, one does not need the predated confidence of others, only their rational perception."
"There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think."
"When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer."
"What greater wealth is there than to own your life and to spend it on growing? Every living thing must grow. It can't stand still. It must grow or perish."
"Whether it's a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one's own eyes–which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification–which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before."
"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, comdemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked."
"Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another."
A strange plague has emerged that strikes pregnant women. By the time it's identified, the virus (MDS, or Maternal Death Syndrome) has already spread around the globe and is latent in everyone on the planet, potentially spelling death to the human race. Triggered upon pregnancy, it causes rapid progressive brain degeneration and is invariably fatal to both mother and child. Research suggests it was genetically engineered deliberately, by combining Creutzfeldt-Jacob Syndrome with a virus, but no one knows why or by whom. A few scientists have come up with a theoretical solution but it's highly controversial and no one knows if it will work. Sixteen-year-old Jessie Lamb's father is involved with the research while Jessie herself struggles to deal with the strange new world she lives in, and to find a way that she can make a difference.
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rivertempest
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless delphipsmith!
Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?
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one_bad_man and wallow in Snape-centric fic of all shapes and sizes :)
This is the best Flashman by far, for my money: fast, funny, outrageous. Flashy is at the top of his game, surviving not only the Charge of the Light Brigade (and the Heavy Brigade, for that matter) but also a hashish-fuelled berserker raid to blow up two barges loaded with weapons and ammunition to prevent the "Ruskis" from taking India away from the British. I laughed until I cried at his account of farting his way through the hail of bullets and cannon at Balaclava, and I have absolutely no doubt that Count Ignatieff will surface someday like a bad penny, and probably try to kill him again :D
Close on the heels of my favorite Flash is my least favorite, Flashman and the Great Game. It's a page-turner because there's lots going on, for sure, but Flashy's creative cowardice and ridiculous predicaments can't compensate for the rivers of blood and gruesome atrocities of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. There are still some good bits (his escort of Thomas Henry Kavanagh through the midnight streets of Lucknow is pretty damn funny), and of course the historical details are as always excellent, but even Flash seems sobered and (at least momentarily) appalled by what he's been through. This one I won't be reading again, it's just too brutal.
mini_fest so I can post this now too, yay! The prompt came from lady_of_clunn and was so wonderful I had to seize it bodily, run off with it, and hide in the corner where I could savor it thoroughly.nursedarry, ennyousai, and noeon; any purple prose remaining is no fault of theirs. And most humble thanks to lady_of_clunn for giving me a nugget of pure gold to work with. I hope that despite my minor alterations it still shines for you. hp_holidaygen so I can now post this here. This was written for aigooism who describes herself as "a very, very picky recipient" which I admit made me a tad apprehensive, but happily it seems to have met her exacting standards. Draco, Luna and Neville are characters that I don't normally write, so it was a lot of fun to take them out for a drive. In addition to the characters, special requests in the prompt included English lit, classical music, character growth and mentor/mentee relationship, all of which fell into place surprisingly easily. (The only one I couldn't work in was "cellos," but one can always imagine them as part of the music!) ennyousai, swiftest of betas, who turned this around on a holiday Sunday, caught a number of Muggle-isms, and offered excellent suggestions for repairing same.
I wanted to like this more than I did. It was clever and readable, and it certainly held my attention, but it's difficult to mix a comedy of manners in with a murder, particularly when the victim is actually a character one knows so one doesn't feel right laughing about it. Nobody seemed to care that much that the victim was dead (apart from the person accused of killing him, naturally!) except insofar as it would cause scandal, so it would have worked better for me if the victim had been someone previously unknown.
Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.
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carisma_senseidancing_serpent
