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I made my dark way to the bathroom. On the central paio, my grandmother was lying asleep on her shawl, floating, suspended a yard off the ground. Beneath her, stretched out on her rebozo, without any concern for scorpions, ants, or worms, my nanny, Dulce, lay sprawled on the ground like a small dog. Her rebozo did not share the ability of Grandma's shawl to float freely in the air.

I gave the Gypsy my hand. She looked at it attentively. Then she closed it and said to me, looking into my eyes, "No, I can't read it for you. I don't like to take coins from people who have your sort of luck. Don't eat any more mangoes. I figure that one half of your heart has already turned yellow, and the other half is turning brown with the heat. That's what I figure."

Chesterton remarked with considerable humor and not a little pointed criticism of a flawed ideology, that certainly toy bows and arrows might at times be considered mildly dangerous. But it was always "dangerous to have little boys." We will not stop the possible dangerous use of any toy by banning the toy. We can only eliminate this dangerous use by abolishing all "little boys."

Another expression that Chesterton had great fun with was "that we should fight the Germans with their own weapons." Immediately, Chesterton quipped that a man "does not bite a shark." Obviously Chesteron is leading to the most important of principles about what we stand for. We do not imitate our enemies, we do not fight with their weapons, "out of respect for ourselves" and for our principles.

When we are really holy we may regard the Universe as a lark; so perhaps it is not essentially wrong to regard the University as a lark. But the plain and present fact is that our upper classes do regard the University as a lark and do not regard it as a University. It also happens [that] they neglect to provide themselves with that extreme degree of holiness which [is] a necessary preliminary to such indulgence....

To be a skipper/ No—hell on earth, that's what that is. And if you don't believe in eternal life—aye, and most skippers do—but I don't: then why spend your one chance of life here at sea, and on earth ashore (because you'll no forget your debts, even ashore): why spend the one chance of life you've got in hell? Why? No—never be a skipper. That's what I think. Let someone else worry.

Clouds—so obviou, but why do we have clouds? Water molecules only condense if they have a particle to condense around. Dust—that's the usual explanation. Dust! Yes, sure, but most of that dust, said Hamilton, will turn out to be bacteria: clouds are biological. Clouds are the servant-agents, sustained, created, if you like, by bacteria to distribute themselves....

Tom Robbins: "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."

The origins of the word "beat" are obscure, but the meaning is only too clear to most Americans. More than mere weariness, it implies the feeling of having been used, of being raw. It involves a certain nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul.

"What can the soul prefer to happiness?" I cried, impetuously. She whispered: "Holiness..." so low that I divined rather than heard the word.

"What can the soul prefer to happiness?" I cried, impetuously. She whispered: "Holiness..." so low that I divines rather than heard the word.

"Why not, Maria Alexandrovna? He is a lump of composition, not a man at
all! Remember, you haven't seen him for six years, and I saw him half an
hour ago. He is half a corpse; he's only the memory of a man; they've
forgotten to bury him! Why, his eye is made of glass, and his leg of cork,
and he goes on wires; he even talks on wires!"

"Ideas flow when one is young, but not every one of them should be caught on the wing and immediately uttered, one should not hurry tio speak out. It is better to wait for a larger synthesis—o reflect more, and wait until many small fragments expressing an idea are gathered together into one larger image that stands out strongly and in relief, and then express it."

For was [Dostoevsky] not later to proclaim, with accents of prophetic passion, that the Russian peasantry was imbued with a sense of moral rectitude that could serve as a shining example to its "betters"?

Rivers swollen to excess, an unexpected summer, and that most peculiar cargo: With the perspective of time and distance, these three things could sum up our hundred leagues of troubles, explaining the paradoxical difficulty of crossing the flatlands.

If in the long run the Lombardos ended up being some small-time thieves and brought some harm on him ... his friends would drown him under a spray of reproaches for being stubborn and not listening to those who, wishing the best for him, had given him fair warning.

And what if there are only spiders [in the afterlife], or something of that sort? .... We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.

I have known [Raskolnikov] for a year and a half; he is morose, gloomy, proud and haughty, and of late—and perhaps for a long time before—he has been suspicious and fanciful. He has a noble nature and a kind heart. He does not like showing his feelings and would rather do a cruel thing than open his heart freely. Sometimes, though, he is not at all morbid, but simply cold and inhumanly callous....

We may note in passing, one peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic: the more final they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of his plans.

Do you suppose I don't feel it? And the more I drink the more I feel it. That's why I drink, too. I try to find sympathy and feeling in drink.... I drink so that I may suffer twice as much!

[Osvaldo Lamborghini] should have gone to work as a hit man, or a prostitute, or a gravedigger, which are less complicated jobs than trying to destroy literature. Literature is an armor-plated machine. It doesn't care about writers, Sometimes it doesn't even notice they exist.

There are ten million Belarussians, and two million of us live on poisoned land. It's a huge devil's laboratory.

Neither would I urge one to run away from the danger zone. The danger is everywhere: there are no safe and secure places in which to start a new life. Stay where you are and make what life you can among the impending ruins.

That's what society is for—the cultivation of the art of hatred. It is the survival of the fittest in a new realm. You study your victim, you find out his weaknesses and his foibles, and you know just where to plant your sting.

To love at a distance and without hope; never to possess; to dream chastely of pale charms and impossible kisses extinguished on the waxen brow of death: ah, that is something like it. A delicious straying away from the world, and never the return. As only the unreal is not ignoble and empty, existence must be admitted to be abominable.

Dust isn't a bad thing. Besides having the taste of ancient biscuit and the smell of an old book, it is the floating velvet which softens hard surfaces, the fine dry wash which takes the garishness out of crude colour schemes.

"Is there anything you care for or want?" she watched him as though he were a new and curious animal. To be null and void," he said without hesitation.

Usually, in cases of a similar nature, there is left in the mind of the spectator some glimmering of doubt as to the reality of the vision before his eyes ; a degree of hope, however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the apparition is not actually a visitant from the world of shadows. It is not too much to say that such remnants of doubt have been at the bottom of almost every such visitation.

Every species of calamity and horror befell me. Among other miseries I was smothered to death between huge pillows, by demons of the most ghastly and ferocious aspect. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. Then deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me. Immensely tall trunks of trees,