Jim > Recent Status Updates

Black loved Los Angeles, the expansiveness of it, like a sneeze still tickling at the back of his sinuses, able to become anything, or nothing. He loved that. The feeling that he could become the person he always wanted to be, even though nothing in his life pointed to it.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

About the accident itself I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That's it, really: all I can divulge. Not much, I know.

Whenever government becomes so intolerably bad that it seriously affects the interests of each individual, when it oppressively robs men of the comfort, the prosperity, the personal privileges to which they have been brought up to think themselves entitled, people tend to take a passionate interesr in law-making. -- "Political Democracy"

Travel offers the best kind of loneliness, since real adventure is not about physical risk but about the acquisition of knowledge. The war stories told by foreign correspondents around bar tables get stale, but the stories that age slower, but which are harder to communicate, are those regarding a thought or perception that may have been kindled by a mere line of text, or shard of stone.

For some reason a different kind of reality has taken the place of my normal reality. Wherever it might have been brought from, whoever might have carried me here, I have been left shut up entirely alone in this strange, dusty, viewless room with no exit.

For the powers of every mind are strictly limited; we have our inborn idiosyncrasies, our acquired sentiments, prejudices, scales of value; it is impossible for any man to transcend himself.

The manners and customs of bugs are peculiar; they wait until the candle is out, and then, as soon as it is dark, sally forth -- not at random; they make straight for the neck, the place of their predilection; sometimes they select the wrists; a few rare ones prefer the ankles.

You have no right to pray for a person against his will, to ask for a favour for him without his leave. It's treachery! You haven't gained much by it, however. That's one comfort. It'll teach you what your prayers are worth. Much to be proud of, I'm sure!

But my mother started hanging around these white women who were so white I could see through them. They weren't literally translucent, but they engaged in activities that were so damn foreign to me (so dang Caucasian) that it made me feel lonely as hell.

Every convict feels that he is, so to speak, not at home, but on a visit. He looks at twenty years as though hey were two, and is fully convinced that when he leaves prison at fifty-five he will be as full of life and energy as he is now at thirty-five. "I've still life before me," he thinks and resolutely drives away all doubts and other vexatious ideas.

I could never have imagined, for instance, how terrible and agonising it would be never once for a single minute to be alone for the ten years of my imprisonment.

A library is a metaphor for human beings or what's best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.

Varanasi made going anywhere else seem nonsensical. All of time was here, and probably all of space too. The city was a mandala, a cosmogram. It contained the cosmos.

Now he felt, with equal conviction (and rather more evidence), that he was entering the stupid years. The stupid years complemented the vague years. They went together. The vague years and the stupid years were the same years and they had already started. Well, bring them on.

In broad daylight, upon a June afternoon in the most thickly inhabited portion of England, a train with its occupants had disappeared as completely as if some master of subtle chemistry had volatilised it into gas. Indeed, among the various conjectures which were put forward in the public press, there were some which seriously asserted that supernatural, or at least, preternatural, agencies had been at work....

The thirty-thousand-foot level has been reached time after time with no discomfort beyond cold and asthma. What does this prove? A visitor might descend on this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them.

"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction," he said once, while the fire blazed between us. "We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere."

There was a light in the temple, and as we passed we could hear voices of men chanting hymns. In a native temple the priests rise at all hours of the night to do honour to their god. Before we could stop him, Fleete dashed up the steps, patted two priests on the back, and was gravely grinding the ashes of his cigar-butt into the forehead of the red stone image of Hanuman [the monkey god].

A rich Italian woman I met said she always travelled with a group of the same people—friends. They were amusing, of course. What is the point otherwise? But travel often means being alone, pleasurably sometimes, sometimes not.

Once upon a day an old butler named Eldon lay dying in his room attended by the head housemaid, Miss Agatha Burch. from time to time the other servants separately or in chorus gave expression to proper sentiments and then went on with what they had been doing

Sukhanov surveyed the mass of jostling banners. 'Bolsheviks again,' he later remembered thinking. 'And behind them is another Bolshevik column ... Apparently the next one, too.' His eyes widened. He turned his head slowly to take it all slowly in.

To the tsar, this -- from the loyal Alexeev -- was a severe blow. He pondered. At last he recalled Ruzskii and ordered him to relay to Rodzianko and Alexeev his consent -- that the Duma should form a cabinet. Then he cabled Ivanov, rescinding his command and ordering him not to proceed to Petrograd. By then, that order, of course, like the man who gave it, was redundant.

Man was engaged in a mad scramble for power and knowledge, but nowhere is there any hint of what he meant to do with it once he had attained it.

I do not know how many suns I counted. I counted and counted, but more passed overhead than I could possibly count. And yet a hundred years had still not passed. Finally, staring at the round stone, which was now covered with moss, I began to wonder if the woman had not deceived me.

Beneath his bluff good humour lay an undercurrent of malevolence, and the longer he looked at Maigret the more apparent this malevolence became, perhaps because physically the inspector was as burly and powerful as he was, only on a bigger scale, and because in the apartment his calmness suggested a large, immovable object.

Human beings are so constructed that they don't know what they know. What a book contains can be learned from the contents page, but there's no contents page in the head. The head is like a full bag; in order to see what's in it you have to pull everything out, item by item. Groping for a memory in your head is like groping in a bag with your hand.

Listening to their recital I got the impression that the whole neighborhood was crippled and riddled with malignant diseases. Everybody with whom they had any dealings ... every one carried about him perpetually a little flower which grew out of his own body and which was named after one or the other of the familiar maladies.... Those who weren't crippled, diseased or insane were out of work and living on relief.

Here we are, we the people of the United States: the greatest people on earth, so we think. We have everything.... We have land, water, sky and all that goes with it. We could become the great shining example of the world.... But there are ghosts all about, ghosts whom we can't seem to lay hands on. We are not happy, not contented, not radiant, not fearless.

A flashback-inclined Freudian might conjure up the image of two brilliant young men, straight out of college, both eager to write the Novel of the Future, who discover, to their great dismay, the the authenticity baton (which is, of course, entirely phony) has been passed on. Passed to women, to those of color, to people of different sexualities, to people from far-off, war-torn places....