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[The Doctor] had advised [Maigret] to drink less, or even not drink at all. Soon he would be put on a diet. Then given pills to take at specific times. He was about to enter the world of old people whose organs turn weak or faulty one after the other, just like old cars that constantly need their parts changing.

The most important thing was to cure Horacio of his foolish, childish desire to represent objects by applying paint to a piece of wood or canvas. What nonsense! Wanting to reproduce Nature, when Nature was right there in front of his eyes!

Thus it appears that Hawaii was taken possession of by the US forces without the consent or wish of the government of the islands, or of anybody else so far as shown, except the United States Minister [John Stevens].

We are men and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds.

That's the warrior's way. I have told you time and time again, the most effective way to live is as a warrior. Worry and think before you make any decision, but once you make it, be on your way free from worries or thoughts; there will be a million other decisions still awaiting you. That's the warrior's way.

Do you really think this is normal? I mean, are these artsy parties normal for Mexico? I can't help feeling that there's something unhealthy about all this. Something sad and dark.

We went back to our mattresses and fell asleep, and sometimes I dreamed that José Arco was gliding on his black motorcycle along a frozen avenue, without a glance at the icicles that hung from the windows, shivering with cold....

When a young man came to thank Vespasian for being given a [military] commission, Vespasian recoiled in disgust at the reek of perfume on the man. He revoked the appointment on the spot, commenting: 'I would rather you smelled of garlic.'

Among the tombstones in the graveyard I went, and there, as the dust of evening settled out of the darkening sky, I cooled my brow against the iron crosses, growing like rusty flowers from the mounded earth.

Slowly I put my disordered life into balance again. I was like a mender of broken china, hoping that the glue I used would not come unstuck, and yet never being quite certain that the mended ware of my life would not fall apart again one day, as I was in the act of using it.

Open your eyes, Malie, my mind screamed at me. Look about you! In those faces, eaten away, I saw myself for what I was. In one of those graves, beyond the gossipping women and the lounging men, I saw the only bed I would ever share, the only lover ever to hold me in his embrace.

And remembering the life [Father Damien] led, and—remembering the pipe shared among his brethren, the common poi bowl, the charity of their fetid breaths, the benison of their foul sores; remembering all these, how could we doubt it?—the inevitability of his contagion, we were forced to tell him he was probably a leper.

I was free to vent my irritation upon [King] Kalakaua's folly. What a crazy thing it was, to be set down in that miserable dirty town [Honolulu], on that windswept island, in the middle of that vast and monstrous sea!

—Did you plant things?
—No. I don't plant anything in my garden anymore. Too afraid. There could be unexploded shells down there. You know how easily they sink into the earth? And it closes over them right away, so you can't even see where they went.

Though he understood that this youthful, almost joyful excitement was false and unjustified, he nevertheless drew reassurance from it, the belief that everything would be fine. Both the DPR and the Ukrainian army were now behind him, as was the roar of distant and nearby bombardment.

Old age does not exist. At least, we do not sufer continuously from being old; like the trees, we have, each year, an attack of old age. We lose our leaves, our good humour, our zest for life; then they come back again.

German, my favorite language in which to be silent.

It's a hard world, Miss Turner, but it's not as bad as you think. You've got a job. You can eat, and you've got two places to sleep—either with Mr Farnsworth or in the back seat of my car. And even if you do something unnatural with Mr Farnsworth, you still won't actually have to sleep with him afterwards.

It should be understood that, for Bukowski, it is reality itself that is violent, in its sordid truth that permits no way out to illusion. The very fact of existence is violent. Everything that follows is just a progressive extension of this ontological violence: in love, in sex, in relations with others, oneself, work.... So much so that the different manifestations of violence are endless in Bukowski's work.

I am Myra Breckenridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for 'why' or 'because.'

For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

The Viceroy of Ouida is the least immediately beguiling, though not the least accomplished of Chatwin's books. It is the most jeweled and the most horror-filled: there are knifings, brandings of flesh, poisonings, cholera, beatings, pus and dysentery.

The book, of course, was always intended to be made up of byways: it was meant to slope off, to jump backwards and forwards in time, to slip from description to speculation, from history to evocation.

It seems to me now that during those years I was always writing down the license numbers of panel trucks, panel trucks circling the block, panel trucks parked across the street, panel trucks idling at the intersection. I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.

The Gnostics thought the planet Earth was a cosmic mistake. I too feel that way—I'm through with this Earth before I've even departed from it. I can see that we haven't learned anything here on our planet except how to better destroy it with our weapons, bombs, and computers.

They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.

In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South.

"You found nothing else in the room?" [Captain Hallet] inquired of the Chinese man. Chan shook his head. "Even so, fates are in smiling mood. What we have now are plentiful."

Sharkey surfed every day, and every day tried something new—a turn, a cutback, swiveling on the face of a wave as though carving his signature on it, writing on water. It was not practice or preparation; it was a way of spending the day, easing the passage of time; a way of living his life, because he made the moves his own.