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Indians saw us even if we didn't see them. People talked grandly of the huge cities and the complexity, but India in its sprawl seemed to me less a country than a bloated village, a village of a billion, with village pieties, village pleasures, village peculiarities, and village crimes.

For, indeed, my heart had been secretly set on going [to Kilauea and Mauna Loa], and I have had to repeat to myself fifty times a day, 'no, I must not think of it, for it is impossible.'

This nation, with its elaborate governmental machinery, its churches and institutions, has to me the mournful aspect of a shriveled and wizened old man dressed in clothing much too big, the garments of his once athletic and vigorous youth.

But there were twilight depths too, where no sunlight penetrated the leafy gloom, damp and cool: dreamy shades, in which the music of the water was all too sweet, and the loveliness too entrancing, creating the sadness, hardly "akin to pain," which is latent in all intense enjoyment.

But where were the hard, angular, careworn, sallow, passionate faces of men and women, such as form the majority of every crowd at home, as well as in America and Australia? The conditions of life must surely be easier here, and people must have found rest from some of its burdensome conventionalities.

They came to a window where the curtains were drawn aside and in the room a woman sat before a dresser and a mirror. It seemed as if she might sit before the mirror, trying smiles and fingering the lines that formed, indefinitely.

Honolulu, more than any place I know, is a collection of miseries human and animal, wherein all the troubles and labors of mortal men, all their vices and vanities, are dumped, as in a midden.

Why are the women of our great families so barren, why are the men so sterile? Alas, this is a question no human being can answer. The gods, those inscrutable ones: they give, they withhold, they take away, as they deem right. And who is a man to ask them why?

Dancers who had moved like virgins now put their bodies into the motions of love. In those of us at Ke'elikolani's mat, as among the commoners below, the pulsing of the drums entered into our own bodies.... Already, beyond the rows of gleaming eyes and flashing teeth which hedged us in, younger hastier folk in pairs were stealing away into the night.

The messenger came in secret, in the shadows of evening, without runners to cry the way or guards to show who sent him. Quietly, as a friend or neighbor might, he rose into the yard of my country house at Makiki, in the hills above Honolulu, where we had fled from the sickness which was afflicting the people in the town.

His hand with the knife moved and my knee drove his balls up into him and as he crumpled in two, screeching in pain, I grabbed him by the wrist and swung his hand with the blade into himself with a sickening squish and put everything into it as I swung the sunk-in blade around in an uneven circle that opened his stomach up and let him reconsider what he had for supper.

You could be so happy in Hawaii's embrace you did not notice what was missing.

Remembering what Keola had said, I looked up the word "prayer" in a Hawaiian dictionary and found the word for "sorcery." It seemed there were no other kinds. There was a Christian sort of prayer, of course, but all the Hawaiian prayers seemed related to black magic, curses, and casting spells.

All players looked to me like desperate losers; games were the pastimes of people -- always men -- who could not bear to be alone, who did not read.

He had dreamed about her. Now waking to the sweaty southern night, he found both arms clasped around his pillow, the cloth wet with saliva where his mouth had pressed against it, and he flung it away from him with a mixture of disgust and disappointment. Some babe, he thought drowsily, his hand moving from bed lamp to alarm clock to cigarettes. A dream boat–and that's the way he'd better leave her.

When we were free at last and I was driving her on the road to the Yacht Club, driving the car myself for this last time, she lay back against the seat and fluffed her hair. I caught a glimpse of her face and the worry was gone. "O Sergius," she said with the glow of adulation still warm, "isn't this a wonderful life?"

I don't care how much slop I've jammed up the hole of more than one cruddy and delirious piece of film product, I am still sentimental enough to think that everyone's got to be an altruist about one person in the world.

Back perhaps so far as the Spanish Civil War, certainly through all the cocktail parties and the jeep rides and the requisitioned castles which had been the Second World War to him (excepting that visit to a concentration camp which had terrified him deeply because it matched so exactly his growing conviction that civilization was capable of any barbarity provided only that it be authoritative and organized) ....

The Whole cannot have an end and endless narratives do not exist, thus it has no goal, thus it has no meaning, from which it follows that all we call the world,the universe, the cosmos lacks any palpable content, in other words, it does not exist, in other words the Whole has no existence, it does not exist, because if it existed, then every reference to the smaller wholes ....

We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not-too-illustrious children of a not-too-illustrious epoch that will consider itself fulfilled only when every individual writhing in it—after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history—will finally attain the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion.

Some weeks were painful, agonizing, in the office and at home. Sitting at the dinner table, he would suddenly feel his forehead bathed in sweat, his nerves knotted, a sense of constriction in his chest; at moments like these, he couldn't bear to have anyone look at him.

‘Gentlemen,’ returned Mr. Micawber, ‘do with me as you will! I am a straw upon the surface of the deep, and am tossed in all directions by the elephants—I beg your pardon; I should have said the elements.’

‘When I was quite a young boy,’ said Uriah, ‘I got to know what umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the umble point of my learning, and says I, “Hold hard!” When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. “People like to be above you,” says father, “keep yourself down.” I am very umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!’

Well, well!’ said my aunt. ‘I only ask. I don’t depreciate [Dora]. Poor little couple! And so you think you were formed for one another, and are to go through a party-supper-table kind of life, like two pretty pieces of confectionery, do you, Trot?’

There was no noise, no effort, no consciousness, in anything [Steerforth] did; but in everything an indescribable lightness, a seeming impossibility of doing anything else, or doing anything better, which was so graceful, so natural, and agreeable, that it overcomes me, even now, in the remembrance.

This was all the consolation that her firmness administered to me. I do not doubt that she had a choice pleasure in exhibiting what she called her self-command, and her firmness, and her strength of mind, and her common sense, and the whole diabolical catalogue of her unamiable qualities, on such an occasion.

‘Yon’s our house, Mas’r Davy!’

I looked in all directions, as far as I could stare over the wilderness, and away at the sea, and away at the river, but no house could I make out. There was a black barge, or some other kind of superannuated boat, not far off, high and dry on the ground, with an iron funnel sticking out of it for a chimney and smoking very cosily....

Christian navigation continued active only in the Orient. Byzantium succeeded in preventing Islam from obtaining mastery of the sea. Ships continued to sail from Venice along the Adriatic coast and the coast of Greece to the great city on the Bosphorus.

With Islam a new world was established on those Mediterranean shores which had formerly known the syncretism of the Roman civilization. Henceforth two different and hostile civilizations existed on the shores of Mare Nostrum.