Jim > Recent Status Updates

At the window, Emily [Dickinson] was sitting very still. As usual her posture was stiff, as if her backbone were made of an ungiving material like plastic. Her skin looked pale as paper, and as thin. Her hair was pulled back so tightly into a knot, it seemed that the corners of her eyes were being flattened.

Ralph realized that he was unhappy, confused, and somehow frightened. He had walked the familiar streets so many times, prolonging his shopping expeditions, prolonging his [dog walks]. He had stared at corners where he had once glimpsed [Elsie], by that bookshop on a corner of Sheridan Square, along the cheap shops on Christopher Street, and on lower Seventh Avenue....

[Ralph Linderman] must still have looked rather grim, because [the clerk] at the grocery store said when he walked in: “Don't give me no lectures this afternoon.... I ain't in the mood. And I been good, I swear.... No foolin' around with girls, I swear!”

'How is it,' said the Devil, 'that you do not seem to be affected by our climate here [in Hell]?'
'I take it,' said Pedro, 'that Your Majesty has not visited in Texas.'

Sophie pursed her mouth and resumed her knitting. 'There is one thing that will make me well,' she said, 'and that's not having to see another damned ashram or mad guru.'

To begin with, the possibilities had seemed endless and fascinating ... Then how was it they were living in this filth and squalor, this meanness and hardship amongst people who despised them even as they exploited them?

The permanence of this stream [trade along the Silk Road] ... is one among the triumphs of the human reason over chaos, though its virtual obstruction at the Roman end through eight centuries of unnecessary war is the melancholy subject of this book.

Rome beautified herself with her plunder—with colonnades such as the ageing Augustus loved to sit under on the Palatine, and libraries 'among cold baths and hot baths,' and the first theatre built by Pompey in stone, where early in the first century cushions came into use under Caligula and senators took to wearing Thessalian hats against the sun.

Even Cicero, writing about the invasion of Britain, remarks that 'there is not a scrap of silver in the island, nor any hope of booty except from slaves.' However moderate the Republic's colonial theory in Rome, the policy of the army in the field may be summed up by Lord Kitchener's unhappy phrase, to 'loot like blazes.'

And yet, this was to happen. With all the chances against her of house, hall, place, park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.

Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

Language as it is now used in El Salvador is the language of advertising, of persuasion, the product being one or another of the soluciones crafted in Washington or Panama or Mexico, which is part of the place's pervasive obscenity.

I didn't know that recovery was a process, like peeling back layers of tracing paper, and taking steps forward and then back, so I was internally starting to feel pretty anxious.

At first I did not see him. He seemed to be part of a wooden porch there, wood upon wood, until he stepped forward. The face was white, seemingly curved and crumpled like a sheet of paper, with the same blank eyes that had stared at me from the table in my workshop.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! Now I hear them—Ding-dong bell.

Over a thousand years ago, there was a Chinese judge named Dee Jen-djieh about whom stories were written. In the 1950s, a Dutch diplomat named

He talks like a doctor of literature and calls himself a commission agent, but I think he is nothing but a 'guest of rivers and lakes,' or in plain language, an itinerant swindler.

Today's economic penetration arouses an old apprehension. The Chinese remain profoundly alien. Almost no Russians learn their language or travel their hinterland. Yet the Chinese they see are no longer the flotsam of a failed empire, but the citizens of a formidable nation.

His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky.

The prospect of her future days was involved in darkness and uncertainty. Again she was going to claim the bounty of strangers -- again going to encounter the uncertainty of their kindness; exposed to the hardships of dependence, or to the difficulty of earning a precarious livelihood.

Adeline with a smile inqired of La Motte, if he believed in spirits. The question was ill-timed, for the present scene impressed its terrors upon La Motte, and, in spite of endeavour, he felt a superstitious dread stealing upon him.

Divorce: such a spiteful-sounding word -- but such an appealing concept.
Marriage: such a softly seductive word -- but such a spiteful reality.

Women have that brief period between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one when they are naturally fresh-faced and attractive, if you like that sort of thing. After that, it's downhill all the way to the grave.

There's a period between the Terrible Twos and the Terrible Teens when children are delightful company -- after that, it's best you lock them in a basement and feed them food through a coal hole until they leave home.

hey digged, and deep, deep below the road, they found part of the slender bones and skull of a young female, which they deposited decently in the churchyard. The family of the Sandisons is extinct—the Mysterious Bride appears no more on the Eve of St Lawrence—and the wicked people of the great muckle village have got a lesson on Divine justice written to them in lines of blood.

I murdered her. Who else loved her so well as to shed her innocent blood? It was I that enjoyed her beauty -- a beauty surpassing that of the daughters of men, -- it was I that filled her soul with bliss, and with trouble, -- it was I alone that was privileged to take her life.

I would love to write a small book, five effigies against the backdrop of the imperial city: Pushkin, Gogol, Blok, Akhmatova, Bely -- five personal hells.

Sock treatment can yield amazing results. It stimulates weakened fibers and rescues energy on the verge of being lost. Sometimes it's fun to provoke yourself. Without going overboard, of course....