Jim > Recent Status Updates

Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement -- colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism, "Excuse me."

"Except that in my business," Maxine gently, "what I see a lot of is innocent people making these deals with the satanic forces, for money way out of scale to anything they're used to, and there's a point where it all rolls in on them and they go under, and sometimes thy don't come back up."

Can it be, some
evil spell I'm under? Oh be
Still, you squirmin,
Uh, throbbin brain.

GUYS AND DOLLS is a roaring success, which will look even better on the DVD Mr Stonechat, the director, is shooting of it, given the many sight-line issues at the Scott and Nutella Vontz Auditorium, whose architect owing to some sort of mental condition kept changing his mind about such nuances of design as getting rows of seats to face the stage and so forth.

"Interesting, Maxine. You want to, like, talk about it?" Beaming at her with that vacant, perhaps only Californian, the-Universe-is-a-joke-but-you-don't-get-it smile which so often drives her to un-Buddhist daydreams seething with rage. Maxine doesn't want to say "airhead" exactly, though she guesses if someone put a tire gauge in his ear it might read a couple of psi below spec.

Man's immortality is not to live forever; for that wish is born of fear. Each moment free from fear makes a man immortal.

There were some Athenians, of the party which favored peace with Macedon. The boy noticed his father taking care with his accent. The Athenians might have helped his enemies, they might have sunk intrigue with the Persians their forebears had fought at Marathon, but they still had in their gift the prize of Greekness.

[T]here will always be supper parties and family celebrations that have as their life and soul somebody who is deemed to be amusing and agreeable, yet who in society proper would be given short shrift. Also, in those smaller worlds, where the aristocracy's factitious scale of grandeurs does not exist, it is replaced by distinctions that are even sillier.

Each of our friends is so inseparable from his faults that, if we are to go on liking him, we must leaven them with reminders of his talent, his kind heart, his affectionate ways, or, rather we must try, by exercising all our goodwill, to overlook them.

[T}he greater part of our memory exists outside us, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again.

Because one can avoid dangers by watching out while crossing the street, one has the impression that one can also avoid punishment. But punishments can come from within; and the unexpected danger may arise from the heart.

Suppose he wants to rob -- who can prevent him? He can trespass, he can burgle, he could walk through a cordon of policemen as easy as me or you could give the slip to a blind man! Easier!

I went to bed full of whiskey and frustration and dreamed about a man in a bloody Chinese coat who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I ran after them and tried to take a photograph with an empty camera.

Again and again I repeated that phrase: alone, always alone. Only a day before, being alone had meant nothing. I knew nothing of loneliness.

The whole Bergotte I had slowly and painstakingly constructed for myself, a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books, had suddenly been rendered useless by the need to include the bottle-nose and the black goatee....

Theoretically, we are aware that the earth is spinning, but in reality we do not notice it: the ground we walk on seems to be stationary and gives no cause for alarm. The same happens with Time. To make its passing perceptible, novelists have to turn the hands of the clock at dizzying speed, to make the reader live through ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.

As regards Swann, it turns out our old family friend was now no longer only "young Swann" and "Swann of the Jockey Club"; to these personalities, he had added a new one, which was not to be his last, that of Odette's husband.

His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift relates that the emperor of Lilliput could discern the movement of the minute hand; Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue.

The great oceanic depressions that come rolling in from the Pacific crash with their full force against those foothills of the Andes which stand there defying the sea.... There are frequent storms, and the wind howls across the coastal shelves.... Sometimes a squall comes down in the form of a snowstorm and takes a cruel revenge on them too. Then trees and native huts and even blocks of ice go flying through the air.

You'll see how convincing this simulacrum is when it orders its own pizza.

I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

"Yes, my dear wife, I am glad to say, continues in the pink. I've just been seeing her off on the boat at Southampton. She is taking a trip to the West Indies."
"Jamaica?"
"No, she went of her own free will."

For the common soldier, at least, war has the feel—the spiritual texture—of a great ghostly fog, thick and permanent. There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in.

I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired.... After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote REE in the upper right hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.

The news that war had broken out caught everybody napping, because no one had been paying war the least bit of mind. It's true that about a week and a half earlier Granny Dunya had been spreading word about the dream she had in which her hen Klashka had given birth to a goat with four horns.

The British owe their successful conquests to the technique of Divide and Conquer. They have consistently urged class against class, district against district, creed against creed, and in the resultant chaos of warring sects and factions, they established themselvs and maintained their rule of exploitation.

But the Flying Column would attack whenever there were good grounds for believing that it would inflict more casualties on an enemy force than those it would itself suffer. It would choose its own battleground, and when possible, would refuse battle if the circumstances were unfavourable.

Evil only upsets people now and then, but the visible signs of evil evil hurt them from morning till night. It might be better to be a rascal than to look like one; the rascal by nature only offends now and again, but the evil-looking person offends all the time.

James Fenimore Cooper: I have never yet been in a country in which what are called the lower orders have not clearer and sounder views than their betters of the great principles which ought to predominate in the control of human affairs.

Southerners ceased to send their sons abroad for education and more and more ceased to send them to college in the North; ... in short, the South closed door after door through which the thought of mankind had passed and became by its own desire a forbidden region.