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The intelligence and energy of many men and women for long years had been directed toward the development of a way of living in which all had work to do but were never under pressure and all had leisure. The extent of spring planting, the amount of wood to be cut, the hours of labor needed on each thing, had all been worked out.

There was a dream that continued endlessly, of dark places, of endless talk and of questions, of half-wakings, to find it night, of problems always on the point of solution and never solved, of Nattana weaving in and out, now a dark shadowed figure, now a vivid one, burning, painful, and too sweet, and of a knocking, and of a long night and day not yet come....

While those they loved fell everywhere.
Although unhoping of relief,
They held the fort with steadfast care
And yielded neither to despair
Nor to the lassitude of grief.

All the Dorns were in that baby! Of course I know there might have been another one, but that was the precious one. It was a good baby and he knew it. I was in that baby, John, and my great-grandfather, who drove out the settlers, and the Dorn who wasn't afraid of firearms although he had never seen them before—and my great-uncle, and my brother. He saved us all for hundreds of years.

There was truth in the warning not to love an Islandian woman. n all that made them lovable they were my own sort, but they brought wonderment, confusion, pain, and glimpses of unfathomable deeps.

If you think that an advocate of the simple life should not succumb to a cooler, it is you rather than I who is inconsistent. Even Thoreau had a fire in his cottage at Walden and it is no more effete to cool oneself in a hot climate than it is to get warm before a stove in a cold one.

As for desire, give it up completely for the time being. Otherwise, if you desire any of the things that are not up to us, you are bound to be unfortunate, while none of the things up to us, which it would be fine to desire, will be available to you.

I felt it was all doomed—all that rot, that corrupt class, that great jumble of prostitutes, pederasts, actors, actresses, libertines, and profiteers, of Nepmen and kulaks who bought their clothes in London and Paris, and imitated the fashions in New York and Berlin.

As a member of the Hitler Youth, I was, in fact, a young Nazi. A believer until the end. Not what one would call fanatical, not leading the pack, but with my eye fixed on the flag that was to mean "more than death" to us, I kept pace in the rank and file.

Here -- as so often elsewhere in Baja -- the present-day traveler will be gratefully aware of the fact that though enterprises so regularly failed, they usually failed in so early a stage that they left no enduring ugliness behind.

The great sorrow of my life, when she said these words, was precisely that I sometimes felt I didn't have her at all, or had no more of her than one of her indifferent, faraway brothers or sisters, who seemed to keep up a relationship with the Cheffe only so they could go on asking for money now and then.

I was thinking only about the Cheffe, who by some miracle loved me and would come join me in that studio, to which in reality she never came and never would have thought of coming, that's why I couldn't be a great cook, I was perpetually bedeviled by love, desire and illusions.

There are times when every nation needs to think a little less about its history. Dwelling on the past can stop a people moving on.

People who leave traveler's checks about deserve to lose them.

No, these images of gods are symbols only. Not all devotees have the same level of spiritual achievement. Some people can see god in a flame when they meditate, but most others need something more concrete, something on which they can focus their devotion. These images here are just indications of the different moods of the gods, mere reflections.

Angry examinees at Patna University had 'torched a police jeep and damaged the car of the Vice-Chancellor.' What had caused this? A cut in student grants? According to reports the Vice-Chancellor found all the examinees adopting unfair means. He seized two sacks full of notes, chits and books. In a brazen move, the examinees walked out and resorted to wanton vandalism.

[I] got back to the office with a headache and the feeling I had devoted most of the day to snipping hangnails in a season of plague.

Re the suicide of a hood: The Big Exit. If they can't get somebody to do it for them, they do it themselves. Most of them would have been better off if their mothers had thrown them away and raised the afterbirth.

Reusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated to me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.

It is difficult for me to believe that the untroubled young man in that photograph is my father. Fearful and anxious, he comes into focus for me as a weary middle-aged man stockpiling food and ammunition.