Jim > Recent Status Updates

Death stood knocking at Archibald Corbyn's door—not at the door of Corbyn Hall, but at the door of the Corbyn heart; and when that had ceased to beat, one of the oldest, wealthiest, proudest, and most aristocratic families in Barbados would be extinct.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisley nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

And while he stood leaning against the low branch of a tree, turning toward her the brightness of his lucid and cruel eyes, she, in surrender and angelic trust -- like a wholly submissive slave -- offered him like a prayer the treaures of her body utterly dedicated to him.

He felt powerless and beset by forces far beyond his bailiwick, imagining a city of the dead co-existing with Los Angeles in another time warp, a city where beautiful women beseeched him with terrified eyes to find their killer.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

Yesterday, Parliament announced an open forum day. Everyone was given the chance to speak. Or, in other words, no one listened.

As he passed the door of the room where Cunshi was asleep, he was overcome by a sudden desire. No one would learn of it. In any case was he not the master and the employer? Would it not have been considered quite in order if he had raped the Indian girl who brought him fresh milk each morning in bed?

Our first morning in the new house. We wake at six under about twenty pounds of blankets, but our night would still have been cold had we not slept plastered together. Tonight, more blankets. My guess is that the night-time temperatures inside the house are in the mid-forties.

Memories define us. Charon the grim ferryman of Greek myth, who took the souls of the dead from the banks of the Lethe to the underworld, forced his passengers to drink from the river. The waters of the Lethe erased memory. It obliterated all that makes us distinct, all that makes it possible to love, to understand, to react, to form our lives and relationships.

Ethel Hook is one of those extraordinarily wholesome, amazingly efficient and intensely English girls to whom, unless one is oneself equally wholesome, equally English, and even more efficient, one would so much rather not be married.

At times, Boswell's life reads as if he had been watched over, not by a guardian angel, but by a guardian goblin.

Then Macaulay points out that other good writers have made fools of themselves outside their books.... 'But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses, Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not ben a great fool, he would never have been a great writer.'

'Which way, General?' his companion asked, and [General Nathan Bedford] Forrest replied glumly [this was after the surrender]. 'Either. If one road led to hell and the other to Mexico, I would be indifferent which to take.'

Old Peter [General James Longstreet] was quick to point out that the Articles of ar provided the death penalty for officers who urged capitulation on their commanders. As for himself, he said angrily, 'If General Le doesn't know when to surrender until I tell him, he will never know.'

Robt E Lee: 'Well, Colonel,' he said o one of his staff as he drew rein, 'it has happened as I told hem it would at Richmond, The line has been stretched until it has broken.'

Grant: 'Everything looks like dissolution in the South. A few more days of success with Sherman will put us where we can crow loud.'

'Ain't we in one hell of a fix?' one ragged Tennessean groaned as he picked himself up, slathered with mud from a fall on the slippery pike. 'Ain't we in one hell of a fix: a one-eyed President, a one-legged general, and a one-horse Confederacy!'

Grant, for one, disagreed with this assessment of the situation in North Georgia. Informed of [Jefferson] Davis's late-September prediction that the fate that crumpled Napoleon in Russia now awaited Sherman outside Atlanta, he thought it over briefly, then inquired: 'Who is to furnish the snow for this Moscow retreat?'

Grant told halleck to see it it that [Jubal Early] was pursued by 'verans, militiamen, men on horseback, and everything that can be got to follow,' with specific instructions to 'eat out Virginia clean and clear as far as they go, so that crows flying over it will have to carry their own provender with them.'

I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.

The quiet and the peacefulness made it seem almost like a different city, one that I shared with far fewer people than that place in the sun. Often, in those days, I thought I preferred the night, when it felt more appropriate to be solitary, to be quiet, to withdraw.

Our tent is pitched against a narrow ledge anchored by boulders. A night wind comes scything up the valley. We bolt down noodles and warm tuna, then ease into our sleeping bags fully dressed. Ram is quiet, tired, and Iswor's head is throbbing with the first signs of altitude sickness. Tomorrow we will be climbing another 1,600 feet within 3 hours, and I wonder when the first nausea will hit us all.

'And what happens to the villages?' He said what I already know: that they become the ghetto of the unenterprising, the sick, the old. It was the same all over Asia. Sometimes the villages were sustained by women. Often they fell to absentee landlords. On their picturesque hillsides they started to go silent.

'Are you going to charge those works?' a cannoneer asked as a column of infantry passed his battery, headed for the front, and was told by a foot soldier: 'No, we are not going to charge. We are going to run toward the Confederate earthworks and then we are going to run back. We have had enough of assaulting earthworks.'

William Tecumseh Sherman: Georgia has a million of inhabitants.... If they can live, we should not starve.

An officer on Meade's staff observed Hancock's troops slogging down to Wilcox Landing just before sunset, hot and tired from their thirty-mile overnight march, their faded, sweat-splotched uniforms in tatters from forty days of combat, and was struck by the thought that 'the more they serve, the less they look like soldiers and the more they resemble day laborers who have bought second-hand military clothes.'

Grant got up from the stump, took the cigar out of his mouth, and turned on this prophet of doom and idolator of his opponent, "Oh, I am tired of hearing what Lee is going to do,. Some of you seem to think he is going to turn a double somersault and land in our rear and on both flanks at the same time. Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves, instead of what Lee is going to do."

US Grant on the Art of War: Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can, and strike him as hard as you can. And keep moving on.

At the end of the 20th century, people spoke as if the Balkans had existed forever. However, 200 years earlier, they had not yet come into being. It was not the Balkans but "Rumeli that the Ottomans ruled, the formerly "Roman" lands that they had conquered from Constantinople.

Now it is a sad fact that I and many of us in positions of authority in Japan have formed an unsatisfactory opinion about the British people since the war. You have not only lot a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands.