Jim > Recent Status Updates

I am a slave, my wife is a slave, and so there is nothing for it but flattery. That's how it is! You get something by it anyway, if only to make sop for the children. Sugar, scatter as much sugar as you can in everything, that will make things more wholesome for you.

Foma was a complete illustration of the saying, 'Let him sit down to the table and he will put his feet on it.' He paid us out for his past! A base soul escaping from oppression becomes an oppressor.

Yet Geronimo was not a chief. Sometimes he led parts or all of the Chircicahua Apache tribe; at other times he commanded only a personal following of about thirty in his extended family. Sometimes he executed brilliant strategies and tactics; at other times he neglected the most elementary techniques of Apache warfare. He was not, as legend asserts, the hero leading his people in a last stand to retain their homeland

You do not live with impunity for months and years as the guest of the desert. Sooner or later, it has its way with you, annihilates the good officer, the timid executive, overthrows his solicitude for his responsibilities.

Are you a man capable of enduring the weight of that confidence, and further, if necessary, of assuming the consequences it may bring. I don't know that, either. The future will decide. For the present there is only one thing certain, the fact, I tell you again, that I killed Captain Morhange.

I remember when I was in high school—in the church courtyard—a beggar. 'Give a little something, for the sake of Christ!' I walk by. 'Please give, for the sake of Christ!' I keep walking. Running up to me, he said. 'If not for God's sake—then for the devil's if you like!' Why did I give to him? He was indignant.

Scream your lungs out, posters! What do we have to do with your machines, your Lenins, Trotskys, your new-born proletariats, your decaying bourgeoisie...We have Ramadan, Mullahs, grapes, a dim memory of a great queen...This is the boiling sediment at the bottom of these gilded cups. We—are outside, we—are above, we—are a long time ago. It's for you—to be, we—have passed. We—are once and forever. We—are not.

The dogmas are: first, that humanity is perpetually and permanently improving through the process of time; and, second, that improvement consists in a greater and greater indifference or incredulity about the miraculous. And it goes without saying that the man who uses them cannot prove them, for he cannot even state them.

Anyone can talk for ever about a non-existent religion which shall be free from all the evils of existence. Anyone can dream of that entirely humane and harmonious Christianity, whose Christ is never born and never crucified. It is so easy to do, that half a hundred people in the papers and the public discussions have been doing nothing else for the last 20 or 30 years.

Some men say an army of horse and some men say an army on foot
and some men say an arm of ships is the most beautiful thing
on the black earth. But I say it is
what you love.

In 1837 that long and sorrowful conflict grew bloodier when the government of Chihuahua first offered a bounty for human scalps.... [I]n the moral history of the world this official sanctioning of scalping [of Apaches] was unprecedented. 'The policy frankly sought extermination."

I know it takes all sorts to make a world; but I cannot repress a shudder when I see them throwing away their hard-won holidays by doing something. For my own part, I can never get enough Nothing to do.

I have felt that the world is conceiving liberty as something that works outwards. And I have always conceived it as something that works inwards.... It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving stones.

No actors. (No directing of actors.)
no parts. (No learning of parts.)
No staging.
But the use of working models, taken from life.
BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors).

In his 43rd year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.

She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation.

As on the towing-path, so on the youth-bereft rafts of the barges, yonder, stood many stupefied elders, staring at the river, staring back from the river into one another's faces.

But to the Duke, there was nothing weird about her: she was radiantly a woman; a goddess; and his first and last love. Bitter his heart was, but only against the mob she wooed, not against her for wooing it. She was cruel? All goddesses are that.

She swept among them. Her own intrinsic radiance was not all that flashed from her. She was a moving reflector and refractor of all the rays of all the eyes that mankind had turned on her. Her mien told the story of her days. Bright eyes, light feet—she trod erect from a vista whose glare was dazzling to all beholders. She swept among them, a miracle, overwhelming, breath-bereaving.

I tried to ignore you, as pedants always do try to ignore any fact they cannot fit into their pet system. The basis of my pet system was celibacy. I don't mean the mere state of being a bachelor. I mean celibacy of the soul—egoism, in fact. You have converted me from that. I am now a confirmed tuist [sic].

The union between Sosuke and Oyone had dyed their existence a somber hue and reduced their presence, they felt, to mere wraiths that barely cast a shadow on the world. From one year to the next each lived with the sensation of harboring deep inside a frightening moral contagion, though neither of them ever acknowledged this feeling to the other.

Meanwhile a thin coating of frost settled on the ground, reducing the basho plant behind the house to shreds. In the mornings a bulbul called out shrilly from the landlord's garden atop the embankment. In the evenings, mingling with the toots of the tofu-seller's horn, the drum of the wooden fish-block resounded from Emmyoji, the local temple. The days grew ever shorter.

Hierarchically organized "feudal" kingdoms with defined territories and a more or less bureaucratic administration replaced looser confederations of warriors. Kings strove to organize an orderly succession to the kingdom ... in sharp contrast to the free-for-all of the Viking Age, when warlords fought for the unstable loyalties of people not defined territories.

Yet do we truly know the real Vikings? Do we genuinely recognize who they were, what they did, and what they stood for? The modern cultural imagination captures only aspects of the Vikings, and what we think we know is skewed, exaggerated, or simply misunderstood. Their iconic horned helmets, for starters, never existed ...

I saw everything before me in good order, possible, realized or realizable. Nevertheless, it was asif I, I myself, might generate failure. Not that I judged myself guilty of this failure; it was as if the guilt were an inheritance and had little to do with me. I was equipped with a kind of advance resignation.

I'm happy to have a little luck once and a while, I replied. Too much, and fate pays a call. La Visita, my grandmother called it.

I'm happy to have a little luck once and a while, I replied. To much, and fate pays a call. La Visita, my grandmother called it.

'How wonderful it is here,' enthused our hostess. 'After the lives we led under the Bolsheviks! It's barely believable. You turn on a tap -- and water comes out. You go to light the stove -- and there's firewood already there.'

[T]he commoners lived in terror of the chiefs and the priests. All that they possessed, even their bodies, belonged to the alii, and they could be deprived of their possessions, and their lives, in an instant if they were so unfortunate as to anger a chief or to break one of the innumerable taboos raised by the priests.

The disposition of the natives appears gentle enough now, but—as we all know—the temper of aborigines is as unstable as the sea which lies around them, and just as deadly. I fear that, faced with the shifting humors of our hosts and the predictable behavior of ourselves, the end of our sojourn here may not be as delightful as is its beginning.