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"Yws I have Akissi," Clarence said to himself. And he turned again to watch her pounding millet. "I have Akissi, changeable as she is; I have a different Akissi every night."

He was wondering how to begin his explanation when he suddenly realized that this 'good luck' which he never ceased thinking about was in fact nothing more than a 'favor'; either one received it, or one did not receive it, one kept it or lost it, and there was no more point in receiving it than in not receiving it, no more point in losing it than in keeping it.

An apprpriate way of dying for a former restaurant critic, isn't it? Professional, so to speak. Acute pancreatitis. Caused by what? By the exceptional Czech dumplings, pork, and beer. And of course, by the always exceptional Czech doctors. Damned Prague.

contentment between agonies is the elixir
of existence.

Men like you [Vautrin] should dwell in caves and never come out. You made me live with your giant's life, and I have paid for it with my very existence.

Don't worry. To begin with, the Prefect [of Police] won't always be there ... The times are ripe for revolution, and revolutions stir the water up nicely.

And that is how three men each as strong in his own sphere as Jacques Collin [Vautrin], Peyrade and Corentin came to find themselves at grips von the same ground, and to put their genius into a struggle in which each fought for his own passion or his own interest. It was one of those unknown but terrible battles in which all the strength and talent expend themselves in hatred, petty irritations, ruses.

This Spanish priest's cassock concealed Jacques Collin, one of the celebrities of the convict world, who, ten years before, had been living under the respectable name of Vautrin in the Maison Vauquer, where Rastignac and Bianchon then lodged. Jacques Collin, the chief of gallows-dodgers, known as Dodgedeath, escaping from Rochefort immediately he had been returned there, benefited by the example of [Napoleon]....

Preacher words! A lot of people saying that a thing is so, doesn't prove it is so.

The Late Classic Palenque texts provide a great deal of information about the supernatural foundations for Maya royal authority.... They arrayed themselves in the same trappings of authority, performed the same rituals to ensure the continuance of the world order, attacked their neighbors, and took and sacrificed captives. These activities ... set them apart from the rest of society.

It struck him full force, the unavoidable knowledge that he was riding through life on a fourth-class ticket.

By climbing up into his own head and shutting out every voice but his own, 'civilized man' has gone deaf. He can't hear the wolf calling him brother—not master, but brother. He can't hear the earth calling him child—not father, but son.

Nobody knows, or will ever precisely know, the Great Irish Famine of 1847, which was by far the largest human catastrophe in European history during our period. Rough estimates suggest that something like one million people died of and through hunger and another million emigrated from the stricken island between 1846 and 1851.

Only unrealistic dreamers can suggest that Louis XVI might have accepted defeat and immediately turned himself into a constitutional monarch, even if he had been a less negligible and stupid man than he was, married to a less chicken-brained and irresponsible woman, and prepared to listen to less disastrous advisers.

This morning waked in a quiet fathomless mist. It was upon the world of water unstirred, soon the first faint wind of morning would thin it away; but now it was about the Nausikaa timelessly: the yacht was a thick jewel swaddled in soft gray wool, while in the wool some where dawn was like a suspended breath.

Gordon stood against the wall, aloof, not listening to them hardly, watching within the bitter and arrogant loneliness of his heart a shape strange and new as fire swirling, headless armless legless but when his name was spoken he stirred.... "Let's have a drink."

hey have no capacity for receiving arguments, no minds for retaining or sifting facts and no mental processes that will hold logic. If they had any of these they would not be [members of the KKK].

I am, or rather am ready to be, the man who really loves; [Jacques] is the lover. I have the sensibility of a real artist, while he achieves works and reaps the glory of them.

The love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed.

The point is, you went searching for a lost girl once before, Mr Pierce. Makes me wonder if you're not trying to make up for something with this girl Lilly.

[T]here came to McClintic something it was time he got around to seeing: that the only way clear of the cool/crazy flipflop was obviously slow, frustrating and hard work. Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

Perhaps one day one of them might ask: what was the tag-end of an age if not that sort of imbalance, that tilt toward the more devious, the less forceful?

Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness. [Benny] Profane was afraid of land or seascapes like this, where nothing else lived but himself. It seemed he was always walking into one: turn a corner in the street, open a door to a weather-deck and there he'd be, in alien country.

It is Porlock's writing. I can hardly doubt that it is Porlock's writing, though I have seen it only twice before. The Greek e with the peculiar top flourish is distinctive. But if it is Porlock, then it must be something of the first importance.

Every hour I spent with her brought fresh evidence of her inability to play the ideal part my imagination had all these years been assigning to her. She was selfish, thirsty for pleasures of the most vulgar sort, liked to bask in an atmosphere of erotic admiration, amused herself by collecting adorers and treating them badly, was stupid and a liar—in other words, was one of the normal types of healthy young womanhood

I don't see that it would be possible to live in a more exciting age. The sense that everything's perfectly provisional and temporary—everything, from social institutions to what we've hitherto regarded as the most sacred scientific truths—the feeling that nothing, from the Treaty of Versailles to the rationally explicable universe, is really safe, the intimate conviction that anything may happen....

So then they sacrificed themselves. Hunahpu was sacrificed by Xbalanque. Each of his legs and arms was severed. His head was cut off and placed far away. His heart was dug out and placed on a leaf. Now all these lords of Xibalba [the Underworld] were drunk at the sight, as Xbalanque went on dancing. "Arise!" he said and immediately he was brought back to life again.

She remembered all the rules and precautions he used to lay on her before a job. Don't bet on black before a job, don't eat chicken before a job, never wear a red hat and so on and so on. It was all step on a crack, break your mother's back stuff....

My poor fellow men, poor unknown brothers, it is your turn for sacrifice. Another time it will be ours. Tomorrow, perhaps, it will be our turn to feel the skies bursting over our heads and the ground opening beneath our feet, to be assaulted by a prodigious army of missiles and to be swept aside by blasts a hundred thousand times more powerful than a hurricane.

Never have I seen such a disappearance of a village.... Here, framed by the shredded trees—which, in the midst of the fog, surround us with a ghostly sort of decor—nothing has any shape; there is not even a fragment of wall or railing or gate still standing, and we are amazed to discover, under the heap of beams, stones and ironmongery, that there are paving stones—here there used to be a street!