Jim > Recent Status Updates

We have to learn the art of stopping -- stopping our thinking, our habit energies, the strong emotions that rule us. When an emotion rushes through us like a storm, we have no peace.

Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month.

[Sylvia] had been born and brought up -- to the age of sixteen -- in Lowell, Massachusetts, the middle child of five children of a little, wiry, sour, savage, sallow tool-and-die maker and a fat, dim, defeated woman who always looked as if she had just finished weeping or was just about to begin.

"What do you care about my Rikki?" she said angrily. "No one cared about him while he was alive. Why are you asking about him now? Why did you have to rake the whole thing up?"

He couldn't believe his eyes. In a daze, he went over to Vera's dressing table and opened the drawers and compartments: it was the same story. Had she left him? Moved out?

Basically every chef I've ever met, if you asked them, 'If you had to spend the rest of your life in one country, eating one country's food for the rest of your life, where would that be?' They're all gonna say the same thing: Japan. Tokyo. Period.

Basically every chef I've ever met, if you asked them, 'If you had to spend the rest of your life in one country, eating one country's food for the rest of your life, where would that be?' They're all gonna say the same thing: Japan. Tokyo. Period.

"That's a bad mood you're in."
"I'm aware of it. I have troubles."
He sipped his drink. "Take me. I never have troubles. I travel light. No room in my pack for troubles. Or for houses or possessions or fat problems. When I get bored, I roll along to some other place."

I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical Beduins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honorable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favour from the dreary, inhuman, and for our sins, inveterate dotage of their blood-guilty religion.

Blood-guiltiness they think to be a misfortune in one's life, rather than a stain in human fellowship. The manslayer who flees to tribe or town, is taken in to the public hospitality; and a lodging will be assigned him if he came so bare that he may hire none: the charitable call him to meat, and the company have no dainty to dip with the homicide hand in the dish.

Nejm had received me well, a western man; but commonly it were to put their tolerance to a dangerous proof, to return upon any Moslemin: then the alien in religion may find with confusion of heart, that those which were before his friends, are fallen out of charity with him, to the insane inhumanity of religious fanaticism!

A pleasure it is to listen to the cheerful Beduin talk, a travellers' school of mere humanity, -- and there is no land so perilous which by humanity he may not pass, for man is of one mind everywhere, ay, and in their kind, even the brute animals of the same foster earth ....

It was now ascertained that the Haj brought the small-pox among them. This terrible disease and cholera-fever are the destruction of nomad Arabia. In their weakly nourished bodies is only little resistance to any malignant sickness.

As a critic, I thought of myself as film-maker. Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed. I think of myself as an essayist, producing essays in novel form or novels in essay form: only instead of writing, I film them.

Marvellous are the fables of the East; and if the truth be in the mouth of many witnesses, it were hard not to believe them; the world is yet full of miracles.

The Arabians inhabit a land of dearth and hunger, and there is no worse food than the date, which they must eat in their few irrigated valleys. The fruit is overheating and inwardly fretting under a sultry climate; too much of cloying sweet, not ministering enough of brawn and bone....

My life has always been sad music.... Like a long symphony played all in minors. Wind in trees and conversations heard through walls at night. No one looked at me, no one wanted to know. But I maintained; that's all there is. There's one day, and the end of it, and night, and sleep that comes slowly, and then another day. Until there are as many behind as there are ahead.

This trip is mapped through a dark passage in my recent past. It deals with a mortal dread we all share: the madness that betides us when we have been fucked over once too often by the petty thugs and conscienceless pillagers who infest the world.

I am anti-entropy. my work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling.

He waded back to the bank, absolutely stunned to realize that he'd found the body of a girl who had fallen into the Pond and drowned.

Poor creatures that we are, the best days of our lives
are first to fly; along come sickness, sorrows and the sores
of age; and what sweeps us away only a mortal tide.

For that's the way it is—
world forces all things to the bad, to founder and to fall.

God is so beautiful
that it doesn't make any difference
whether he
exists or not

Our deaths which have already happened in the future will arrive to us in the present soon -- like the light of stars.

Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.

Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number -- Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar and have a beer with Dionysus, every now and then.

In wondering why Americans are afraid of dragons, I began to realize that a great many Americans are not only antifantasy, but altogether antifiction. We tend as a people to look upon all works of the imagination either as suspect or as contemptible.

Forget the old Europe, the Europe of the tourist guidebooks. It exists only in the old buildings submerged in traffic and in the minds of the guidebook writers and the tourist industry (the latter being a real plague). Modern Europe is like modern America with a surface of crenellated battlements and decaying cathedrals, the whole thing a "grand Camembert pourri."

Woke up very early, hearing voices thru a wall, and thought of a woman's deep Spanish voice heard thru a wall in Málaga, years ago. She was moaning and moaning, coming in the night. She was a long time coming, now still heard on great Southwest plain in the heart of another world. And will go on, the primitive inchoate nightlife of the world: life against the night....

One of these nights you stay awake hour after hour, after an early sleep, thinking of everything, sea sweep, old men and women, early remembrances, bad deeds, wash of time, terrible the toll of it, on and on. Flesh cargoes, motionless, horizontal, coasting through sleep, gunwales awash, into eternity....