Jim > Recent Status Updates

I am not spiritually Midwestern anymore, and no longer young—I do not like crowds, screams, loud noise, or heat. I'll endure these things if I have to, but they're no longer my idea of a Special Treat.... The crowds in the hollow—mostly high school couples, local toughs, and kids in single-sex packs—seem radically gratified, vivid, actuated, sponges for sensuous data. feeding on it all somehow.

Tornadoes were for me a transfiguration. Like all serious winds, they were our little stretch of plain's z coordinate, a move up from the Euclidean monotone of furrow, road, axis and grid.

When the IRS agent operating the sting had the nerve to ask [Tony "The Ant"] Spilotro for collateral, Spilotro greeted him with a baseball bat. "Do you know who I am?" Spilotro asked. "I run this town."

((I am reading this book after having seen Sidney Gilliat's film of the same name, starring Alastair Sim.))

They've even started to bury relationships in Holland. Yeah. It's such a trauma when people break up, see? So they have a ceremony to help people get over it. Rings are buried in the earth, in special "separation graveyards," and then people go to lay flowers on their buried troubles.

Copulation equals complication. Outmoded. If only it were a mouse ... if only there were a wire sticking out of [my pregnant girlfriend], attached to a mouse, and you could just delete it all and defrag her. I stare down at the mat. No mouse.

Maybe I'd be willing to go to the theatre if there were more than one play going on at once, if they'd give you a zapper at the entrance and you could turn the revolving stage at will.

Like case histories at a welfare agency, a police file, once opened, never seemed to close. Instead, it grew generationally, the same family names appearing again and again, the charges and investigations marking the passage of one individual from birth to adolescence to adulthood to death, crime scene photo upon mug shot, yellowing page upon yellowing page, like layers of sedimentary accretion formed by sewage....

If you would pledge me your word, I could set you on the right road and path, and I would tell you the name of the country and of the knight who is conducting [Guinevere] ; but whoever would essay to enter that country must endure sore trials, for before he could reach there he must suffer much.

I'd killed a fly on the window once with a can of hair spray, and didn't realize it until the fly turned a lacquered black, with overtones of gold....

Black tea is fermented; green tea is not. To make black tea, the leaves are allowed to sit in the sun for an entire day to oxidize and wilt—essentially to spoil a little. After the first twelves hours of stewing, black tea is turned, the liquor is stirred around; and the mixture is left to cure for another twelve hours.

I learnt to play at cricket, to hate rich people, to cure warts, to write Latin verses, to swim, to recite speeches, to cook kidneys on toast, to draw caricatures of the masters, to construe Greek plays, to black boots, and to receive kicks and serious advice resignedly.

Ramzan nodded, yes, of course he was required to wear a seat belt, just as he was required to give directions to a torture camp, because stupidity was the single abiding law of the universe.

Life: A constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

She had to harden him, to teach him that saving a life and nurturing a life are different processes, and that to succeed in the former one must dispense with the pathos of the latter.

[The Magna Carta] is a document entailing a covenant of service, a document of compassion, sprung from the same spiritual ground as the requisite question of the Grail ceremonial. There's nothing like this in the history of political thinking up to this date. This is the first statement of the notion of bringing people together and of maintaining their political rights.

He always avoided making calls of any significance on the little toy telephones on grounds that cell phones were intended to communicate teenage chatter and that adults didn't take anything heard on one seriously.

Sybil wasn't a very good cook. This was fine by Vimes, because he wasn't a very good eater. After a lifetime of street meals his stomach wasn't set up right. What it craved was little crunchy brown bits, the food group of the gods....

Australia, I find, even on the most superficial level, is extremely difficult to describe.

I had such a foul chest, such green phlegm in London that I thought my last days had come. The house in St Maarten, of course, was designed for 'visual' people, that is to say, there was not a single spot to read a book, let alone write one, without breaking your back or lying on the baked earth with the ants.

My rucksack is taking on the most beautiful patina.

England is gradually closing in on me again, and the moments of euphoria become rarer and rarer as one gets paler and paler and fatter and fatter and the backbiting conversations grow bitchier and bitchier, and everyone thinks and talks of selling something to somebody else.

I don't want to be distracted; I want to focus on the most beautiful things in my life and for me they're right under my nose.