Jim > Recent Status Updates

So what? Guys are useful sometimes, even if you're not really into them. It's like masturbating, but better, 'cos you have to do less of the work. Just think of a man as a dildo with a really big base.

During the last week of April 1942, the Japanese of Los Angeles awoke to find that evacuation orders had sprouted, overnight, from trees and poles all over the city. They had a week, the orders said, to prepare for their departure; they were being moved inland, away from the coast. All over LA Issei and Nissei rushed frantically around their homes and neighborhoods.

Now, the old neighborhood is feared and avoided, even by the people who live there. Although stores wait for customers right down on the Boulevard, people drive to the South Bay, or even over to the Westside, to see a movie or do their weekly shopping.

Alright, I'll be like the void, I wont say anything, I wont be up or down, I wont be happy or unhappy, I'll pay no attention to success or failure—
Period.

There's only one fire, you know, just one, and it's always burning, and you're wasting your time if you try to put it down, because fire does not rest.

Now everything is black, now it seems like a small, barely visible slit is about to appear, now it is easier to tell that it is a small slice of white light, all fogged up, now it is wider, and wider still.

But in his estrangement [following the death of his son], Wenceslao for weeks, months, years, will sit at the door of his house, or at the table under the Chinaberry tree, constantly wondering: what is this island, what are those trees, who is that woman who lives in silence under the same roof as me, who speaks when she is alone, wrapped in those eternal, black nightgowns whose color fades by the day.

The story of Avitus' elevation to the throne has seemed worth telling, because it illustrates the manner in which the great barbarian monarchies influenced the fortunes of the dying [Western Roman] Empire, the degrees in which force and art were still blended in order to secure obedience to its behests, and the nature of the tie which bound those later 'shadow emperors' to their by no means shadowy patrons.

A Roman when asked by the Emperor whether he as right to kill Aetius, who defeated Attila at Chalons in CE 451: "Whether it was a good deed, most noble emperor, or something quite other than a good deed, I am scarcely able to say. One thing, however, I do know, that you have chopped off your right hand with your left."

[Attila's] extraordinary good fortune and unbounded power have quite turned his head: so that he will listen to no argument which does not fall in with his own caprices.

Children were quite disturbing really. I was difficult to think about children for long. They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness.
...
Such children these with their condor eyes! Pearl felt her heart sink as she watched them.

Pearl suspected God didn't love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.

Maigret accepted [a drink]. He was filled by an almost overwhelming laziness. A succession of images flashed across his retinas, all confused, and he made no attempt to sort them into any order.

As for my soul, I simply don't and never did understand how I could 'save' it. One can save one's pennies. But how can one save one's soul? One can only live one's soul. The business is to live, really alive.

But it's nice to think that all the gods are God all the while. And if a god only genuinely feels to you like God, then it is God. But if it doesn't feel quite, quite altogether like God to you, then wait a while, and you'll hear him fizzle.

It is the humble, the wistful, the would-be-loving souls today who bully us with their charity-demanding insolence. They just make up their minds, these needful sympathetic souls, that one is there to do their will.

Did I come into this world thru the womb of my mother the earth just so I could talk and write like everybody else?

For after all what is success? You kill yourself and a few others to get to the top of your profession, so to speak, so that when you reach middle age or a little later you can stay home and cultivate your own garden in bliss; but by that time, because you've invented some kind of better mousetrap, mobs come rushing across your garden and trampling all your flowers. What's with that?

Opening the door, he stepped out of the booth and fell squarely face down on the carpeted floor. It caused a great commotion in the bar, and before the Doctor could reach him, two of the waiters were on their knees, hovering over the body.

Any kind of life, the most unfavorable conditions, sickness, poverty -- anything seemed preferable to that unseemly "selflessness" into which I had got myself originally in ignorance and youth and which I had got stuck later on from inertia and so-called "sense of duty."

Philosophy, as I have so far understood and lived it, means living voluntarily among ice and high mountains -- seeking out everything strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a ban by morality.

I've never had any big goals, ambitions, or dreams but I've always had so many little schemes, dodges, scams, hobbies, and interests on the go that I've never felt the lack of a larger purpose or the need for loftier consolidation.

You plan carefully, do everything correctly and then, at some point, something unpredictable, random, and entire unforeseeable happens. You fix it. You continue on until the next setback.

Reading meant accompanying Mr Bloom to the taverns of Dublin at the beginning of this century, Fabrice del Dongo through post-Napoleonic Italy, Hector and Achilles through the streets of Troy and the military camps that surrounded it.

The narrator who, as a rule, appears in my novels rehearses several starting points in the pursuit of a truth, a revelation, and in the effort will lose his way a thousand times, stumble constantly, and will maintain the pace with great difficulty between suffering hallucinations and sleepwalking, only in the end to declare himself defeated.

The march toward old age, and, let's say it plainly, toward death, continues to provide unimaginable surprises, as if everything were an invention, a spectacle in which I am both actor and audience....

Both of Morgan's ambitions were fulfilled. People laughed at him, and they still do. And he made the most beautiful fireworks in the world. But as Hat said, when a man gets something he wants badly, he doesn't like it.