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He atoned, atoned for his mysterious guilt. He conducted church services with the buttercup, and the placid businessman now claimed that everyone had their own religion, we all have to adopt our own personal stance toward God the inexpressible.

On December 31st of 1958 Lila had her irst episode of dissolving margins. The term isn't mine, she always used it. She said that on those occasions the outlines of people and things suddenly dissolved, disappeared.

It's been two years since our betrothal was agreed upon, and you've never said a word against it until now, when everything is being prepared for the betrothal banquet and the wedding. Have you thought about what it will mean if you step forward and ask for the bond to be broken, Kristin?

No bargain is without some loss. And whoever wishes to give his life must take the risk and see what he can win.

One night Kutsch left a hastily penned drama lying in the coffeehouse, on one of those sofas on which the habitual aesthete is wont to fling himself down to sip coffee and stare into space. Some fellow found the play, picked it up, put it in his pocket, brought it home, copied it over, completed it, prepared it for staging, and then had it put on in a first-rate theater, where it was a success.

For not only was it an almost unimaginable thing in those days for a woman of means to make her own way in the world and to live in independence, but the particular profession for which Florence was clearly marked out both by her instincts and her capacities was at that time a peculiarly disreputable one. A 'nurse' meant then a coarse old woman, always ignorant, usually dirty, often brutal, a Mrs. Gamp, in bunched-up

Nearby, in Vitry-le-Francois, he was regaled with stories about seven or eight girls in the area who had plotted together to dress and live as men. One married a woman and lived with her for several months—"to her satisfaction, so they say"—until someone reported the case to the authorities and she was hanged.

[Grusinskaya] did not in her heart believe in the existence of love. It seemed to her as unreal as the painted drop scenes, the temples of love, and the banks of roses that formed the settings for her dances.

Actually ever since [Kringelein] had moved into Room No 70 nothing was real to him any longer. Everything was like a fevered dream. Everything went by much too fast. Nothing stayed long enough to be enjoyed.

In one famous passage [Montaigne] mused, "When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?" And he added in another version of the text: "We entertain each other with reciprocal monkey tricks. If I have my time to begin or to refuse, so has she hers."

"Forget much of what you learn" and "Be slow-witted" became two of Montaigne's best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fantastical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led--which was all he really wanted to do.

My fatherland—inescapably, the United States of America—is or has become a strangely gigantically foolish place that sooner or later will be undone by the calamitous mental life of its population, whose bizarre domination by misconceptions is all too well incorporated by its representatives in Washington DC.

Luther condemned the existing grammar schools as teaching he student "only enough bad Latin to become a priest and read Mass...and yet remain all his life a poor ignoramus fit neither to cackle nor lay eggs." As for the universities, they seemed to him dens of murderers, temples of Moloch, synagogues of corruption; "nothing more hellish ever appeared on earth or would ever appear."

The true subject of history, says Ibn-Kaldun, is civilization: how it arises, how it is maintained, how it develops letters, sciences, and arts, and why it decays. Empires, like individuals, have a life and trajectory which are their own. They grow, they mature, they decline.

Nobody but Nelson could find his bearings in such weather...No matter whereabouts in London, whatever the lost soul, whatever the destination, he never landed at the wrong address, in the wrong square, the wrong dead-end, he could have spotted a ghost from one mist hidden in another...And yet London strets are real killers, a fuck-you layout, their street numbers all cockeyed and ass-backwards....

When you are standing before the [pinball] machine engaged in your solitary act of consumption, another guy is plowing through Proust, while another guy is doing some heavy petting with his girlfriend while watching True Grit at the local drive-in. They're the ones who may wind up becoming groundbreaking novelists or happily married men.

"By idolatry," [John] Knox wrote in 1560, "we understand the Mass, invocation of saints, adoration of images, and the keeping and retaining of the same, and all honoring of God not contained in His Holy Word."

Some [churchmen] exploited the credulity—and gathered the coins—of the commons by bogus relics to which they ascribed miraculous cures; bishops complained of the "stinking boots, mucky combs ... rotten girdles ... locks of hair, and filthy rags ... set forth and commended unto the ignorant people" as authentic relics of holy men or women.

[Luther in 1525] There are nowadays almost as many sects and creeds as there are heads.

Some [Anabaptists] were racked and drawn asunder, others were burnt to ashes and dust; some were roasted on pillars or torn with red-hot pincers.... Others were hanged on trees, beheaded with the sword, or thrown into the water.... The rest were hunted from one country and place to another. Like owls and ravens, which durst not fly by day, they were often compelled to to hide and live in rocks and clefts.

[Erasmus] There are priests now in vast numbers, enormous herds of them, seculars and regulars, and it is notorious that very few of them are chaste. The great proportion fall into lust and incest and open profligacy. It would surely be better if those who cannot be continent should be allowed lawful wives of their own, and so escape this foul and miserable pollution.

I was thinking it must be rather the same living in one of those tinpot South American republics. Never mind the statute book or the official proclamations, it's how the Top Peron's feeling at any given moment decides whether you're in for a medal or running for your life. And the police have taken your passport so you can't leave.

Breasts had brought Jenny a peck of trouble over the years. With Patrick it was fair to say that they turned the scale. He seemed able to stand up well to things like bottoms and faces, and she had heard him say more than once that he could take legs or leave them alone, which was rather sad, and tactless of him too, because her own were meant to be pretty good, one of her best features.

From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day. (Cf. Tuesday, November 8, 2016)

Erasmus on English homes: "Almost all the floors are of clay and rushes from the marshes, so carelessly renewed that the foundation sometimes remains for twenty years, harboring, there below, spittle and vomit and wine of dogs and men, beer ... remnants of fishes, and other filth unnameable. Hence with the change of weather a vapor exhales which in my judgment is far from wholesome."

The France of 1300 was by no means the majestic realm that today reaches from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and from the Vosges and Alps to the Atlantic.

I am not of the opinion that the elderly are of good advice. Experience serves as nothing; the same fact is never reproduced in the same circumstances. On the contrary, we must admit that spontaneity is useful for something, because in twenty years one has lived and there is nothing more important to come later.

The ramparts of the city were of salt as also all its walls, pillars, and roofs.... The doors, too, were made of slabs of salt covered with leather so that the edges might not crack. All the land around [Taghaza] is a salt pan. If an animal dies there it is thrown into the desert and turns to salt.

Panic gripped Moist and, not at all coincidentally, so did a pair of padded paddles, which closed over his ears. Just before all sound was silenced, he heard: "You may experience a taste of eggs and the sensation of being slapped in the face with some sort of a fish."

What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.