Jim > Recent Status Updates

Outside, wind found her windows from a new angle. They thrummed scarily. Any very pronounced weather, here, worried her. It got written up, she knew, in the next day's papers, like some lesser species of earthquake. Fifteen minutes of rain and the lower reaches of the Beverly Center pancaked; house-sized boulders coasted majestically down hillsides into busy intersections.

The composer surely wished to express his feeling of being the last survivor of a vanished world\, a ghost among ghosts.

He was not likely to forget; but you cannot dam up life like a sluggish stream. It will break out and flow over a man's troubles, it will close upon a sorrow like the sea upon a dead body, no matter how much love has gone to the bottom.

The old world was held together by conventions, and that's why it fell apart. This world is held together by conventions, too, just different ones! It'll fall apart too, with time. The most important thing is to protect your own personal, internal world from all these conventions!

Taras could see Lenya losing his last shred of respect for him, but even if there was no need to get behind the wheel that evening, he didn't like the idea of drinking with a man in a gray cap. This was a very different kind of person, with a very different kind of life that was lived by a different set of rules.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing.

Instead of a full-frontal attack with banners waving, [Hiroo Onoda] wants to make himself invisible, become an impalpable dream figure, an elusive and deadly mist, a rumor, a report. Through him the jungle is to become more than a jungle, a landscape with a deadly nimbus of sudden demise.

Céline: 'I adhere only to myself, as much as I can.'

Maigret stuffed his lighted pipe into his pocket and went in with deliberately slow and ponderous steps. On certain occasions, particularly when he was feeling in a good humour, he enjoyed appearing unnaturally stupid, and then he looked stouter and more loutish, like a regular caricature of a policeman, lacking only a big moustache.

There are certain phrases which, on a railway journey for instance, stick in one's mind and which fit the rhythm of the train so closely that one can't get rid of them. One such was haunting Maigret while driving in an old creaking taxi, and the rhythm was emphasized by the beating of heavy rain against the floppy roof.
In-qaui-ries-on-be-half-of-the-next-of-kin, In-qui-ries-on-be-half....

Nobody was innocent. There were only varying degrees of responsibility.

I'm damn sure that [Salander] did not kill Dag and Mia, and I'm going to prove it. I'm going to produce another killer for you, and when that happens I am also going to write an article that you and your colleagues are going to find painful reading.

And then out of the blue she had destroyed him. She had struck back with a power and determination that he had not dreamed she possessed. She had humiliated him. She had tortured him. She had all but demolished him.

i tell you, boss, the marks are out there pawing the ground—What's this 'Sky Switch'?—What's this 'Reality Con'? What's this 'Tone Scale'??—They'll take the place apart—Any minute now—I've seen it happen before on Mercury where we put out a Cool Issue—And the law is moving in fast—Nova Heat—Not locals, Boss—This is Nova Heat—Well, boss?

The 1920's careened through darkening cities in black Cadillacs spitting film bulletrs of accelerated time

I took a sort of languid, amateur interest in questions of psychology, and was impelled thereby to plunge into phenomena of mind, soul, and sense. Three things of the real nature of which, I mam convinced, no man will ever learn more than we know at present -- which is nothing.

[T]hat Red Cross man had a good heart ... I don't think he was taken in ... later on I was in even tighter squeezes ... without doctors and medicine I'd never have come through ... that's why in the great epileptic moments, purges, massacres, assorted lunacies, the doctors ... black, yellow, or white regardless ... get it in the neck ... they know too much ... they're too clannish, unforgivable and unforgiven ...

If you've ever passed through armies in flames ... yourself, I mean, not your brother-in-law, through jellied cities and empires, and desperate, panting populations, offering you, oh yes! ... their babies, their wives, and then some! ... anybody! anything! ... just so the damage! the lightning! should come down on you! and not them! ... nothing will ever surprise you any more ....

"Celine, we're starting a neo-movement of national resurrection! We're counting on you!"
"Don't! ... I don't want to revive anything at all! ... Europe died at Stalingrad ... the devil has its soul! he can keep it! ... the stinking whore!"

He was convinced that there was no such place as hell. According to him, after the death of their bodies, the souls of the righteous flew to a 'holy paradise', while the souls of the sinners remained in their bodies and lived on in their graves until their bodies were eaten up by worms.

Baliassin is troubled by the thought of the insecurity of life.
'I think the scientists are all lying.... ven the way of the sun is not known to them for certain. For instance, I sometimes watch the sun set and think: what if it didn't rise tomorrow? No sunrise and there's an end of us all!'

[President Clinton's] woes, the scandal, the repeated denials and counterattacks, were on the radio.... As he listened, he saw the president's pink sheepish face and blue uncertain eyes, the bags of sleeplessness under them, as naked as a man's features could be, as blank and pathetic and symmetrical as a target.

You don't have to love me. Love is a burden. It's a pain. It causes unhappiness. Just be my friend..... Love doesn't make you better. It excludes the whole world. For a brief period you have an adoring partner, and later an enemy. Love is like some horrible twisted religion the way it changes you. And afterwards, when love ends, you're lost.

Darkness was a zone Steadman entered in order to know his mind and advance the narrative of his book. Daylight was unhelpful and ambiguous for seeming to be true, yet it was shabby and misleading.

He had no choice but to get wrecked, because of those two at home, because drinking with fatboy meant he didn't have to go home until much later at night, when there'd be no one on the streets apart from the little punks acting as spies for them and the odd nocturnal hound;....

I conceived my ideal leave-taking from this earth—a drama prepared by strange portents, swiftly developed by dreams and visions nurtured in an atmosphere of sublime dread, growing overnight like some gaudy fungus in a forgotten cellar, and always with the awful hand of the mortician god working the machinery behind the scenes.

What is Christmas for?
It's for catalyzing a family crisis.
It's for highlighting all the problems in a relationship.
It's for abusing the husband, the wife and the children.

I'm your sister, Aimee