Jim > Recent Status Updates

That's what I love about Cuban women, they're so sweet you can never say no when they ask you for something. It's not that way with European women. European women are so cold they give you a chance to say NO at every turn, and you feel good about it too.

When men are imbeciles, the one who is mad dominates the others.

This is how the end must look. No deluge, no rains of fire, no Auschwitz, no comet. This is how the world will look when God has deserted it, whoever he is. Like an abandoned house, everything coated in cosmic dust, muggy and steeped in silence. Everything living will congeal and grow mould in light that has no pulse and is therefore dead. In this spectral light everything will crumble.

Dreams have no authors: that's why we're so willing to record them on the Internet. All over the world, wherever people are sleeping, small, jumbled worlds are flaring up in their heads, growing over reality like scar tissue.

When you're travelling all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you're at home you simply are, you don't have to struggle with anything or achieve anything. You can put yourself to one side -- and that's when you see the most.

Esteban wondered whether the God she was invoking was the biblical Jehovah, the God of Voltaire, or the Great Architect of the Masons—such was the Confusion of Gods adored in the recently ended Century of Light.

We, without cross, without redeemer, without God, are coming in ships without chaplains aboard to vanquish privilege and guarantee equality.

No one would trust a negro to build a palace, defend a prisoner, arbitrate a theological discussion, or govern a country.

Even in death he retained the hard, impassible expression of a man who had never asked for favors and never performed them for others.

It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter—one that no man ever coveted, and but a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet not many have learned to prize. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that, like other privileges, may be terribly misused.

There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better. And never kill anything without a good reason for it.

Indeed, I often feel that the unassuming goodness of her nature offers a reproof to all those who are tempted to stake their interest on the advantages of social pre-eminence in a world where the possession of every commodity is untrustworthy, where the footing of even a king is precarious, and where life itself is for every man and for every woman as fugitive as is an inconsequential dream.

I once saw a man chase his mother through the streets with an ax. Wearing nothing -- nothing but a crucifix dangling from his neck.

Everyone fears death, just as they fear misfortune, yet death is inescapable, which means it is real. And that we did not invent it. At this very moment Ruhshona begins to see death as the most important thing that can exist within a person. She views those who don't carry death within themselves—who don't live by it—as empty, like wrapping paper, like candy wrappers. Hollow, soulless people.

This happy-go-lucky deceit unites the nation just as well as any good law. Electricity, gas, phone bills unpaid? In the capital, a lack of money is something to be ashamed of; here [in the Provinces] it's pretty much the norm. The utility company employees try to help us out here and there: "These meter readings look way off. Why don't I reset a few values for you here..."

If anything distinguished us from the rest of the world, it was our possession of Creole wisdom, where nothing is really painful or totally pleasant.

The heat is a malign plague invading everything. The heat descends like a tight, stretchy cloak of red silk, wrapping itself round bodies, trees and things, to inject there the dark poison of despair and a slower, certain death.

Cuban society with its mixture of Latin and African blood is certainly not peaceful by temperament. Threats of "I'll kill you with my machete" come easily in drunken rows; a funny one once overheard was "I'll beat you up till the picture on your ID card weeps/" Peaceful Havana is not. It's just that the lid is securely kept on.

Built on deep contradictions, the Cuban capitalhas become a place like no other. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was a center of elegance and political violence, of commercially exploited sensuality and endemic corruption.

There has been so much strangeness that we have become numbed to it. You finally get to a point where you suspend all wonder and begin accepting the unusual as if it were everyday.

The literature on raw food has provided unpersuasive visuals. The cover photo of one manifesto displays a truly hideous spread of such unappetizing, clumsy butt-ugliness as to frighten away any but the most fervently devoted; it looks as if some fifties-era Betty Crocker got titanically drunk and decided to lay out a buffet for the Symbionese Liberation Army.

A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.

I can think of lots of people who would like to use this razor to open my throat. Of course, they're annoyed that I'm still alive! And besides, so am I. I don't give a damn about power! A throne is nothing but a bit of gilded wood to park your arse on!

It is a very good notion at times to pretend to be a fool.

How frequently men form false opinions has been observed and is still observed by those who happen to be witnesses of their decisions, unless made by men of first-class ability, are very often the reverse of being sound.

Government by the populace is better than government by princes. If account be taken of all the disorders due to populaces and all those due to princes, and of all the glories won by populaces and all those won by princes, it will be found that alike in goodness and in glory the populace is far superior.

Instituions and laws made in the early days of a republic when men were good, no longer serve their purpose when men have become bad.

This bears out what has been said above, namely, that men never do good unless necessity drives them to it; but when they are too free to choose and can do just as they please, confusion and disorder become everywhere rampant.

His Holiness [Pope Alexander VI] is showing the world that the amount of a pope's income is whatever he chooses it to be.