Pavlo > Recent Status Updates

It was all going reasonably well until the fat jokes and the Asian jokes started. There’s not tons, but it’s noticeable

Everybody and everything was wrong, it seemed, except murderers and the idea of murder.

If a handful of coin was flung a wild crush would follow in which the strongest, most violent and ruthless children would grab the money and the weakest and smallest be left weeping with trampled fingers. This custom still prevails in parts of Scotland. Some modern conservative philosophers will think it good training for the world of adult competition.

...she was unselfish and hard-working, and taught me how useless these virtues are when separated from courage and intelligence.

What good is a dead Candle to a kidnapped Bell?

“There must be a fourth kind,” I said, “because I am no longer innocent and hate what Dr. Hooker and what you think equally.”

“That is because you are searching for a way which does not exist.”

“I will search as long as I live rather than be a childish fool or selfish optimist or equally selfish cynic,” I told him, “and I will make my husband a searcher too.”

Dr. Hooker has left the boat in Morocco without saying good-bye or asking for his New Testament. He lent it to me so I could find peace in Jesus, but there is none. Jesus was as maddened by all-over cruelty and coldness as I am. He too must have hated discovering he had to make people better all by himself. He had one advantage over me — he could do miracles

“Only in Modern Glasgow — the BABYLON of Material Science — could you have gained wealth, power and respect by carving up human brains, prowling through morgues and haunting the death-beds of the poor. You would have been burned as a warlock for that when Scotland was a Spiritual Nation, GOD-SWINE BOSH BACK-STAIR, BEAST OF THE BOTTOMLESS PIT!!!!!”

Primo sentences in this book

Я читав до цього тільки одну його збірку оповідань, абсолютно розкішну, а це читається справді, ніби це написано не 90-х роках XX століття, а десь за сто років до того, як якийсь Конан Дойл, чи Стівенсон, чи Мері Шеллі

“Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.”

In pornography, capitalism has taken the erotic charge of female subordination and turned it into a multibillion-dollar-industry

If you’ve only got two modes of communicating with someone — one of which is a polite request, the other being violence — the polite request *is* the threat of violence. And so you can then maintain the self-image of a person who is unfailingly polite, while everyone responds very quickly and actively to everything you ask for

Misogyny infuses into our cells and becomes part of who we are because by the time we know enough to reject it, it’s too late

“There are, in fact, many methods, stand-points, views and convictions which are all at war with one another—the main reason for this being that, since they fail to be mutually comprehensible, none of them can grant the validity of any other.”

The symbol of Nuremberg was a yawn

Delicious writing here, among other things

I was to be bricked up in fame! Embalmed in fame! Buried in fame - but for work I knew to be absolutely worthless! This was my sentence: I must endure thirty years of being called "Distinguished" by people incapable of distinguishing!

... I bet you that's how God hears the world. Millions of sounds ascending at once and mixing in His ear to become an unending music, unimaginable to us! [To SALIERI] That's our job! That's our JOB, we composeres: to combinde the inner minds of him and him and him, and her and her - the thoughts of chambermaids and Court Composers - and turn the audience into God.

Gluck says! Chevalier Gluck! ... What's Chevalier? I'm a Chevalier. The Pope made me a Chevalier when I was still wetting my bed.

If you talk seriously about the widespread problem of this wilful incompetence, you’re a ‘misandrist’ (the worst of all the crimes!). You catch the exact same ball they’ve been throwing around for laughs and you do nothing more than describe the ball, and suddenly you’ve ruined the game. ... Men will literally show people exactly who they are, but when you repeat it back to them verbatim they get mad at you.

If you talk seriously about the widespread problem of this wilful incompetence, you’re a ‘misandrist’ (the worst of all the crimes!). You catch the exact same ball they’ve been throwing around for laughs and you do nothing more than describe the ball, and suddenly you’ve ruined the game.

The law was everywhere. In the euphemisms and understatements of m. diary … As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law.