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The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
--
"Black Matters" in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

 

Toni Morrison

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You have the ability to control the power of your thoughts. You have the ability to control the power of your mind. You have the ability to make a vibration dominant that matches your desire. You do. And that's all it takes. And that's all any successful person ever has done. It's all anyone who has ever achieved anything that they wanted has ever done. They just wanted it, and talked themselves into believing it.

 

Esther Hicks

 

Bernard Mickey Wrangle had developed a psychological test of his own. It was short, simple, and infallible. To administer the test, merely ask the subject to name his or her favorite Beatle. If you are at all familiar with the distinct separate public images of the four Beatles, then you'll recognize that the one chosen reveals as much about the subject's personality as most of us will ever hope to know.

 

Tom Robbins

 

Ideologues of all persuasions think they know how the economy will respond to the Administration's strange mixture of Lafferism and monetarism. Indeed, their self-confidence is so vast, and their ability to rationalize so crafty, that one cannot imagine a scenario for the next few years, that they would regard as falsifying their dogma. The failure of any prediction can always be blamed on quirky political decisions or unforeseen historical events.

 

Martin Gardner

 

The physical power to get the money does not seem to me a test of the right to tax. Might does not make right even in taxation. To hold that what the use of official authority may get the state may keep, and that if it cannot get hold of a nonresident stockholder it may hold the company as hostage for him, is strange constitutional doctrine to me.

 

Robert H. Jackson

 

They say the test of this [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say “Can he name a kitten?” And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

 

Samuel (novelist Butler