Jim > Recent Status Updates

Right now, with you three, here in this building, this is a year ago. It's not so much like I can see the future; it's more that I've got one foot stuck in the past. I can't shake it loose. I'm retarded. I'm reliving one year of my life forever.... I'm living the same life two times!

But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth....

Americans are much too brutal while they are trying to make money, and much too sloppily senimental and even gullible after they make it. Before: they think the world is crooked. After: They think it quaint.

You need some money urgently for some reason I can only guess at. You're prepared to sell information. But you won't sell it to anyone who really wants it, like the Russians or the Chinese, 'cos that would be unsporting, like pinching knives and forks from the mess.

If you had taken [St. Francis] to the loneliest star that the madness of an astronomer can conceive, he would have only beheld in it the features of a new friend.

El Caucho knows that if, one day, somebody pries Madame Puñez's heart open, such an aroma of jasmine will pour out that the entire Portail Léogane neighborhood will be perfumed by it.

Truth is always double-edged, iridescent, varicolored, subtle.

You might take one of the ovals of La Nina Estrellita's face for that of a sorceress, another for that of a Madonna or still for the purity of a young girl. You could find another ten ovals—one could be that of a bird in a dream, another could a mask of torture, still another is that of a hard-boiled egg of everybody's bad conscience, another the arc of life, and that final and most vibrating loop, which is ... Death

You're quite a girl, Judy. It's a long walk from Jamaica. And you were going to take him on with your bow and arrow. You know what they say in China: "Before you set on revenge, dig two graves." Have you done that, or did you expect to get away with it?

And what has religion ever done for you, may I ask? Do you think God gives a damn about the likes of you and me? I don't know what got you into this mess. I can guess—you're no beauty and this is a hard country to find a man in—but I know what's keeping you this way. Your silly religious scruples. You're waiting for a miracle.

But Miss Hearne knelt upright, her heart singing a Te Deum, a full chant which admitted no distraction. For here she was in church, after all these years, with a good man kneeling beside her, not the youngest or handsomest surely, but a man who had not forgotten her in the moment of meeting....

Didier, our little 12-year-old boy, died four years ago in a moment of irreparable destiny. Brave and adventurous ever since he was a small child, Didier had been a strong swimmer. He pleaded for his own motorcycle... He thought the very sea would have to respect his nonchalant expertise.

An hour crawled by lick a sick cockroach. I was a grain of sand on the desert of oblivion. I was a two-gun cowpoke fresh out of bullets. Three shots. Three misses. I hate it when they come in threes.

I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth.

I could explain what it is that is really charming about New York; in spite of its suffering from the curse of cosmopolitanism and even the provincial superstition of progress. It is partly that all this destruction and reconstruction is an unexhausted artistic energy; but it is partly also that it is an artistic energy that does not take itself too seriously.

The few really untrue and unscrupulous things I have seen in American 'stories' have always been in the headlines. And the headlines are written by somebody else; some solitary and savage cynic locked up in the office, hating all mankind, and raging and revenging himself at random, while the neat, polite, and rational pressman can safely be let loose to wander about the town.

When the radiator hose burst, the car had done exactly ninety-nine thousand four hundred meters, since its odometer was set to zero. It was doing over one hundred kilometers per hour, with the needle on the temperature gauge stuck firmly in the red.

Maybe we just get given our faces, our lives, our fates, our happiness and unhappiness. Some get a lot, some bugger all. And love the same. Like different glass sizes for beer. You get a lot, you get bugger all, you drink it and it's gone.... No one makes love like they make a wall or a house. They catch it like a cold. It makes them miserable and then it passes, and pretending otherwise is the road to hell.

For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god. It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal.

And as she lay in bed feeling Keith silently sobbing behind her back, she understood that love does not end until all its power is exorcised in misery and cruelty and obliteration as much as in goodness and joy. And every night as she lay there, she could feel rolling in her stomach shards of broken glass—cutting, cutting, cutting.

Nakamura understood that the colonel, with his gentle voice, was telling him something more than this story: that he was saying that no matter what adversity, no matter what lack of tools and manpower Nakamura might have to put up with, he would endure, the railway would be built, the war would be won, and all this because of the Japanese spirit.

What is a line, he wondered, the Line? A line was something that proceeded from one point to another—from reality to unreality, from life to hell—'breadthless length,' as he recalled Euclid describing it in schoolboy geometry. A length without breadth, a life without meaning, the procession from life to death. A journey to hell.

I saw how a man can become nothing, literally nothing, as though he'd never been. When that happened they put empty full-dress uniforms in the coffin, and threw in a few spadefuls of Afghan earth to make up the weight.

I always think, said Miss Goering, that the [taxi] driver is only waiting for passengers to become absorbed in conversation in order to shoot down some street, to an inaccessible and lonely place where he will either torture or murder them. I am certain that most people feel the same way about it as I do but they have the good taste not to mention it.

The first dragons to appear in our city suffered a great deal due to the backwardness of our customs. They received precarious training at best, and their moral instruction was compromised dreadfully by absurd discussions which their arrival somehow prompted.

Indeed the future was already dull and menacing with the ambitions other people entertained on his behalf. It seldom occurred to him to question their right to cherish these expectations. Not only must he learn to drive a horse, he must master so many difficult matters: ride a bicycle, play hockey, play the piano, talk French and, hardest of all, earn his living and provide for his sisters....

They call me Slim Memed, Sergeant. The only thing you'll ever catch is your own death. Get out of here, Sergeant, and go back to your police station.

Suleyman looked him over pityingly from head to foot. "You, Durdu, are going straight to your death." "Why, Uncle?" "A real brigand would never light such a fire on a mountaintop. Don't underestimate your enemy. It means you are going straight to your death."

She had told him of a number of tragic accidents that had occurred in these treacherous waters [of the Rhone] and of the heavy toll of unsuspecting victims who were drowned every year. Only those who were completely familiar with the river could risk diving in, and then only at specific points.

"You ever notice how even the simplest thing gets complicated in the Arctic?" "Goes with.... You're so busy taking care of the little shit, you never have time to worry about the big shit."