The Alchemist
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Santiago
Quote 10
"I'm an old superstitious Arab, and I believe in our proverbs. There's one that says, 'Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.'" (2.710)
Hmm. Something may be lost in translation, but it seems to us that there is an "only" missing in here. Logically, everything that happens twice also has happened once, so the sentence doesn't really make sense. But apparently there are two types of events: the once-in-a-lifetime kind and the kinds that we are fated to repeat in a pattern. Of course, there's no way you'll know which is which until it either (1) happens again, or (2) you die.