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Can't you tell me something nice about my dress or something instead of grumbling the whole time about how expensive I am? You know what they say. "If you don't like my peaches, why do you shake my tree?"

The subject of any European government today feels all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag's monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic.

San Martin equated republicanism with popular government, which was anathema to him. He declared himself "a republican American from principles and inclination, but one who sacrifices these in the interests of his country."

[Manuel Belgrano] warned San Martin that he would see the difficulties for himself as he marched north: "You will see the poverty of our countries and the difficulties presented by their great distances, the sparse populations and the resulting lack of resources to enable us to operate with due speed."

In the last six months, five women who, like these, were on their way home or to visit a woman friend, five women walking along the Paris streets, had been murdered by the same man.

A Romanian woman once sang me a phrase of folk music and I have since found it in tens of times in different works from different composers of the past four hundred years. Indubitably: things do not begin; or they don't begin when they are created. Or the world was created old.

But the novelist is riskier than a poet, he loots and exploits and gnaws away at everything he sees. With him, you can never feel safe, never sure that one day he won't lay you naked on the pages of a book.

Yet nothing ever wholly dies. Great Britain no doubt fared the worse in some respects for rejecting the truths of the radicals in the seventeenth century, but they were not utterly lost.

Abiezer Coppe: We had as lief be dead drunk every day of the week, and lie with whores i'th market place; and account them as good actions as taking the poor abused enslaved ploughman's money from him ... for killing of men."

For Ranters Christ in us is far more important than the historical Christ who died at Jerusalem, and 'all the commandments of God, both in the Old and New Testaments, are the fruits of the curse.' Since all men are now freed of the curse, they are also free of the commandments; our will is God's will.

Three months earlier, when a group of Presbyterian ministers visited the New Model Army at Oxford, 'the multitude of soldiers in a violent manner called upon us to prove our calling ... whether those that are called ministers had any more authority to preach in public than private Christians which were gifted.'

From, say, 1645 to 1653, there was a great overturning, questioning, revaluing, of everything in England. Old institutions, old beliefs, old values came in question.

"One feels," he said slowly, as we stood looking down, a few minutes later, at that small face [of a toddler], which sleep had transfigured into the image of an unearthly serenity, "one feels so desperately sorry for them. They don't know what they're in for. Seventy years of ambushes and betrayals, of booby traps and deceptions."

The swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost hipless girl of twenty-five, with styleless, colorless, brittle hair pushed back behind her ears, which were very large... Her joke of a name aside ... she was a stunning and final girl.

Suddenly, that image was violently shattered. Vivien [Leigh], who had been in a private conversation with her husband, raised her voice loud enough to be heard by the entire room, "Larry [Olivier], why don't you f*ck me anymore?"

Adam was turning into a white rat, but by a strange kind of metamorphosis; he still kept his own body, his hands and feet did not turn pink nor his front teeth lengthen into fangs; no, his fingers still smelt of tobacco and his armpits of sweat, and his back was still bent forward in a crouching position, close to the floor, regulated by the S-shaped bend in his spine.

Cuello would not even respond, restricting himself to existing, to gathering density and volume from the external world, the same way a srcerr conjures, in empty space, to the senses of the audience, a being that until that moment had been invisible, and whose presence lasts only as long as the incantation.

And the Mathematician thinks: If time were like this street, it would be easy to go back and retrace it in every sense, stop where you wanted, like this straight street with a beginning and an end, and where things would give the impression of being aligned, of being rough and clean like those well-furnished weekend houses in residential neighborhoods.

Leto begins to see the group, the Mathematician included, not as cars or trees or houses or sky or human beings, but as a systm of relations whose function is no doubt connected to the combination of disparate movements....

'You're the biggest eejit this side of Cork,' his old father used snappishly to grumble at him. 'Can't you stay where you are and no go looking for destruction?' But he might be washing the cobbles of our yard forever, Tim Paddy pointed out, while the whole world passed him by.

Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.

She reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead in the bottom of her wastebasket.

Lord Cochrane is such a miracle of nautical skill and courage; his cause of banishment from his country is so lamentable—his adventures have been so romantic—and his achievements so splendid, that no Englishman can read them without pride, that such 5things have been done by his countryman; and without solemn concern that such talents and genius should be lost to the land that gave them birth.

The enthusiasm of the Admiralty was predictably more muted. In reply to Collingwood's account of the action of Fort Trinidad and the prodigious damage done to the French for the loss of three men, they sent a reprimand to Cochran for excessive use of powder and shot.

For most contemporaries the sight of England's warships anchored offshore in deeper water was their closest acquaintance with naval life. The distance was a necessary one and was made more significant by the boats rowed in careful circles round the anchored vessels.... These were the guard boats intended to dissuade volunteers and pressed men alike from trying to slip through an open port and swim for home.

He believed he understood, for the first time, why people say life is a dream: if you live long enough, the events of a lifetime, like the events of a dream, cannot be communicated, simply because they are of no interest to anyone. Human beings themselves after death become figures in a dream to the survivors, they fade away and are forgotten like dreams that were once convincing but which no one cares to hear about.

There is an obvious resemblance between an unreadable script and a secret code; similar methods can be employed to break both. But the diferences must not be overlooked. The code is deliberately designed to baffle the investigator; the script is only puzzling by accident.

The immensity of the darkness struck home to Grosvenor. He had looked at it so often from inside the ship that he had become indifferent. But now he was suddenly aware that man's farthest stellar frontiers were but a pinpoint in this blackness that reached billions of light-years in every direction.

The immensity of the darkness struck home to Grosvenor. He had looked at it so often from inside the ship that he had become indifferent. But now he was suddenly aware that man's farthest stellar frontiers were but a pinpoint in this blackness that reached billions of light-years in every direction.

Nitrate Miner: "We are born and as soon as we are born we start to die; each one of our experiences dies instantly and what keeps us going is the remembrance of those joyous moments. But we should not try o repeat them."