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These men are happy, despite everything, as they emerge from hell—for the very reason that they are emerging. They are coming back, they are saved. Once again death was there, but spared them.

Monotonous wagons drawn by long-eared beats crawled past. Negroes humped with sleep, portentous upon each wagon and in the wagon bed itself sat other negroes upon chairs: a pagan catafalque under the afternoon. Rigid, as though carved in Egypt ten thousand years ago. Slow dust rising veiled their passing....

"And in a year's time you'll marry me," thought Margot as she went on sobbing nicely, "You'll marry me unless by that time I'm already in Hollywood -- in which case you may go to the devil."

Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.

Repeat after me, there are the living and the dead, there are day-folk and night-folk, there are ghouls and mist-walkers, there are the high hunters and the Hounds of God. Also, there are solitary types.

At the bottom of the ninth, you count up the people you love, both friends and family, and you add their names to the fine places you've been and the good things you've done, and you have it.

At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself—the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?

Some people in A.A. say a recovering drunk should not go inside his own head without an escort. I was beginning to think they were right.

At some point in your life, you have to give up anger or it will destroy your spirit the way cancer destroys living tissue.

He struck me as one of those country birds who, one second after meeting you, will start telling of some bestial escapade involving violence or sex or boh, or who might in the same chatty way want to talk about Christ's Kingdom on Earth.

Everything has a past, especially in India, all the roots, the context, the history, the significance of the slightest thing–every name, every gesture, every morsel of food, every note of music; bend your knee or touch two fingers and it has meaning.

I say this to be on the safe side. These things I say, and shall say, if I can, are no longer, or are not yet, or never were, or never will be, or if they were, if they are, if they will be, were not here, are not here, will not be here, but elsewhere. But I am here.

Differences in elevation, amount of rainfall, availability of water, temperature, distribution of plant and animal life, soil conditions, and location of natural resources combine in the Maya area to produce one of the most diverse environments for its size found anywhere in the world.

"Order 270." I echoed Stalin's remorseless words: "There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors." Lilya explained, "Unless they have proof you were killed in action, they'll treat you as a deserter."

On American trains the passengers seem to have just stepped out of THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and the conductors proceed with disgust along the aisles, stumbling over Coca-Cola cans, abandoned shopping bags, and sheets of newspaper smeared with the tuna fish salad that erupts from sandwiches....

I was happy enough, but inside me, like a warm, living animal, there was a feeling of boredom, loneliness and occasionally of exhilaration. I thought there must be something wrong with my liver.

Gveter perceived nothing. Unduring a nonperiod of no long, he perceived nothing was had happening happened that had not happened. Lost, he groped, lost, he found the word, the word that saved....

Frankly, try how I may, I cannot much like primitive people. They make me feel uncomfortable. "La betise n'est pas mon fort."

I work hard and get promoted and you say I'm a Nazi swine! I never get a word of praise from you, and I suppose I'll never hear one.

That's my dilemma, you see. You might say it's the army's dilemma. We wear these pretty little silver Nazi eagles and swastikas on our chests, and we are not our own men any more.

In the month of January 1930 alone, the number of unemployed Germans rose from one and a half million to almost two and a half. In Berlin the factories were laying off workers at such a rate that in many parts of the city the streets were crowded with unemployed.... Farms within walking distance of the city ... had armed men guarding the crops.

Callaghan, in that swift and effortless way that trial lawyers can so often command, gave an instant verdict on the lives of the Winter brothers. 'One of them is a success story,' said Callaghan, 'and the other is a goddamned horror story.'

William Blake: "He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer."

The gun show wasn't about guns and gun totin'. It was about the self-esteem of men—white men mainly, the dominant ethnic group of the South, animated by a sense of grievance ..., who felt defeated and still persecuted, conspired against by hostile outside forces, making a symbolic last stand.

This seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace.

I knew this going in on the day I took the case that would lead me into the narrows. I knew that my life's mission would always take me to places where evil waits.... And still I went without pause. And still I went, not being ready for the moment when evil would come from its waiting place. When it would grab me like an animal and take me down into the black water.

The forest, the milpa, even the stories, may be destroyed, for they are the transitory forms; but the infrastructure that Chan K'in has made manifest in his stories will withstant the ravages of time and of his fellowmen. He knows that our world provides the outer forms, the connecting links; the enduring home is elsewhere, in another heaven, whose reflection lives within us all.

The roots of all living things are tied together. When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky; before yuou cut down a mahogany you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should ask permission of the keeper of the star.

The roos of all living things are tied together. When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky; before yuou cut down a mahogany you should ask permission of the keeper of the forest, and you should ask permission of the keeper of the star.

A three-piece Mexican band was making the kind of music a Mexican band always makes. Whatever they play, it all sounds the same. They always sing the same song, and it always has nice open vowels and a drawn-out sugary lilt, and the guy who sings it always strums on a guitar and has a lot to say about amor, mi corazon, a lady who is "linda" but very hard to convince....