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[Trump] said he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and people would still vote for him. Am I dreaming this?

The world has grown many shades darker in that time [during the Civil War]. Not only here. The wounds of his ruptured nation lie open and ugly.

Willa was falling into cold sweats as she tried to stave off images of disaster. Unprovoked losses one after another -- her mother, jobs, savings, Helene, the ceiling -- had stripped Willa of the useful illusion that everything would be fine. It amazed her now to watch people walking through life with their ludicrous trust.

"The simplest thing would be to tear it down," the man said. "The house is a shambles."

The woman was clearly a coquette, a flapper, with those scarlet fingernails and blue eyelids. Such women were blazing inside and he feared at the earliest opportunity she would try to back him up against the kitchen table and press her paps against him and try to nuzzle him and kiss him, married man or not.

The thing that tipped the scales was Gnomonism. Did the organization even exist? Was there anything in it?

Robespierre has to contemplate the real possibility of the victory of his enemies—and his enemies of course are the enemies of the people. The day's sombre experience has, moreover, confirmed his idea, which has been growing in his mind, that sometimes the worst enemies of the people can be the people themselves. Generally he prefers the people as a rhetorical abstraction rather than as a concrete reality.

[Letter from the Washerwomen of Piques:] You f—ing Robespierre henchman. You've got a cheek telling us to be good republicans and to get used to doing without food or linen—that you and those f—ing deputies wear, you who want for nothing and call yourselves republicans and sans-culottes. You pester us with your orders and you can go and be hanged along with all the Robespierres....

Robespierre's speech purported not to accuse; yet it did little else.... A word indicating conspiracy (conspirator, conspiracy, plot, faction, etc.) cropped up almost every single minute of his two-hour speech. Despite claiming to be preaching harmony, his speech performed discord and exudes menace. Robespierre's speech made him sound to deputies less like a man who is ready to die than a man who wants to kill.

These chapters are an attempt to understand the nature of Romanticism through an examination of its treatment of a single theme, the sea.

In fact this kind of faith is not unusual in Los Angeles. In a city not only largely conceived as a series of real estate promotions but largely supported by a series of confidence games, a city even then afloat on motion pictures and junk bonds an the B-2 Stealth bomber, the conviction that something can be made of nothing may be one of the few narratives in which everyone participates.

Writers are only rarely likeable. They bring nothing to the party, leave their game at the typewriter. They fear their contribution to the general welfare to be evanescent, even doubtful, and, since the business of publishing is an only marginally profitable enterprise that increasingly attracts people who sense this marginality all too keenly, ... it has become natural enough for a publisher to seize on this.

Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values.

While engaged upon this little mosaic work of legend and fable, I felt like one of those merchants told of in Sinbad's Second Voyage, who were obliged to content themselves with gathering the small jewels which eagles brought up from the Valley of Diamonds.

Everything was fine with the Zen Lunatics, the nut wagon was too far away to hear us. But there was a wisdom in it all, as you'll see if you take a walk some night on a suburban street and pass house after house each with the lamplight of the living room, shining golden, and inside the little blue square of the television....

His father was right about one thing, at least, when he said that lies could run around the world before the truth could get its boots on. And it was amazing how people wanted to believe them.

There was this to be said about the Smell of Foul Old Ron, an odor so intense that it took on a personality of its own and fully justified the capital letter: after the initial shock the organs of smell just gave up and shut down, as if no more able to comprehend the thing than an oyster can comprehend the ocean. After some minutes in its presence, wax would start to trickle out of people's ears....

"Tcha!" she exclaimed. "That's just like 'ee, Will Sly. An ostrich, that's what you are, with your 'ead buried in sand. 'No cause for alarm,' indeed! If it'd bin you 'e'd jumped out at, you'd not go about saying there was 'no cause for alarm.' There 'e were, white and nekked like an evil sperrit..."

While reading aloud, [Kerouac] had a very funny habit of reading to the end of an exhalation or breath, and ending with a shudder of laughter, at the extremity of the thought and outrageous exquisiteness of the language he arrived at ....

There was a notion that if we could arrive at some condition of total sensory openness, eye, ear, taste, smell, touch, mind, if all senses were alert and open, then there would be a simultaneity of noticing of detail, some kind of scheme or web that would approximate visionary coherence.

The idea, in short, was that "the poetry in my books" was a form of freedom, without which I wouldn't be able to live. Implacably confined by Magic, I would be stripped of that freedom. Magic, underneath its tinsel, was a mechanism like any other.

The entire tone of the city, the way people looked and talked and met one another, was Cuban. The very image [Miami] had begun presenting, of itself, what was then its newfound glamour, its "hotness" (hot colors, hot vice, shady dealings under the palm trees), was that of prerevolutionary Havana, as perceived by Americans.

All human beings, especially those with good looks or some other advantage over their fellows, need strong opposition when young, that in itself. If it isn't forthcoming, their characters suffer. They become egotistical, impossible to deflect from any course of action they may have set themselves....

'Where shall we date its death?' he was saying in a not very interrogative tone. 'The year 2000? 2020? -- before that surely. It doesn't affect the point: as an active force, as something to be reckoned with, Marxism has ceased to exist. Its followers have died or fallen into cynicism or impotence.

In a sense I can never like any Russian, but your position is quite different: I wouldn't try to change it even if I could. Anything that helps make life less intolerable is to be seized on. These days.

Marcel Duchamp: Everything around me takes the shape of the Knight or the Queen, and the exterior world has no other interest for me other than its transformation to winning or losing positions.

Rogissart was no doubt at that moment telephoning to Mme Dossin and the latter was no doubt reclining on a sofa draped in muslins that were probably mauve. She'd be looking distinguished of course. Looking distinguished and being in delicate health combined to provide her with a full-time occupation, leaving her perhaps just sufficient energy to arrange a few flowers in a vase.

He gave a good long speech. Said a lot of heart-felt, positive things. Productivity, he said, that foundation stone of Soviet life, is improving. Total output, he said, is also bounding ahead. And the quality of goods too, he said, is becoming wonderful. I would even buy some things myself, he said, but I can't spare the cash.

How true is the old saying, attributed to Pliny the Elder, that a man who lets himself get above himself is simply asking for it, for it is just when things seem to be running as smooth as treacle out of a jug that he finds Fate waiting for him round the corner with the stuffed eelskin.