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Here's all this commotion, all these people running around, all this fuss being made over Archanjo's Centennial, and yet they're distorting his work and his personality beyond belief. They're building him a monument all right but the Archanjo they're building it to isn't our Archanjo but another, far prettier, man.

He concentrated on telling how ordinary people lived in Bahia, the miseries and marvels of that daily life of poverty and faith; in showing how the much oppressed and persecuted folk of Bahia had determined to prevail in spite of everything....

The Tent of Miracles was a kind of Senate, a gathering place for the notables among the poor, a numerous and important assemblage.

he Tent of Miracles, Ladeira do Tabuao No. 60, is the main building of this popular university. There's Master Lidio Corro painting miracles, casting magic shadows, cutting rough engravings in wood; there's Pedro Archanjo, who might be called the chancellor of the university himself.

The rest of that country is notable primarily for its weather, which is violent and prolonged; its emptiness, which is almost frighteningly total; and its wind, which blows all the time in a way to stiffen your hair and rattle the eyes in your head.

The strangeness of what we were about to do, the unearthliness of it, overwhelmed me. I was like a man awakened out of pleasant dreams to the most horrible surroundings.

Ay me, I see the ruin of my house,
The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind;
Insulting tyranny begins to jut
Upon the innocent and aweless throne.
Welcome destruction, blood, and massacre.
I see as in a map the end of all.

Oh, I abused them, called them sons of toads, hell's scullions, slime of the pit. For I was above them, beyond them. They were slaves. I was free spirit. My flesh only lay pent their in solitary. I was not pent. I had mastered the flesh, and the spaciousness of time was mine to wander in, while my poor flesh, not even suffering, lay in the little death of the [strait-]jacket.

The white man has gone around the world in mastery I do believe because of his unwise uncaringness. That has been the manner of his going, although, of course, he was driven on by restiveness and lust for booty.

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt. And the man already well weakened grows weaker more slowly.

I noticed that Amelia sat on her chair in a strange way—first she stood next to it, then, after a moment and as if on command, she sat down—I had no time to think about it as she fell to the floor from the chair. We saw a red stain on the floor.

Gods dance on their own bodies
New flowers open forgetting Death
Celestial eyes beyond the heartbreak of illusion
I see the gay Creator
Bands rise up in anthem to the worlds
Flags and banners waving in transcendence

"There are many gods," he had told me so often, "and you never know which one of them is awake, so pray to them all."

When she came to Buenos Aires in 1935, Eva Duarte was no "Santa Lucia shopkeeper," to quote the popular song, and neither did she sing like a lark nor mirror the glory of the day. She was ... nothing, or less than nothing: a sidewalk sparrow, a bonbon bitten into, so skinny it was painful. Passion, memory, and death made her beautiful.

The reason I've been a leading figure in history time and time again, is precisely because I have contradicted myself. You've already heard about [Count von] Schlieffen's strategy. You have to change plans several times a day, pull them out one at a time, as needed. The socialist fatherland? I invented it. The conservative fatherland? I keep it alive. I have to blow in all directions like the cock on the weathervane.

But what I feel about facts is on the other side of the river. And, as far as I'm concerned, that's all that matters. Nobody will ever know what the Mona Lisa or her smile looked like because that face and that smile are not her own but the ones Leonardo painted.

The man, instead, went to his own room and to his table—to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction—the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life.

He and Rysom had been raised on the Australian myths of desecration -- on tales of fabulous vomiting into glove compartments or punch bowls, of silence ruptured by obscene sound: the legends of forlorn men avenging themselves on an empty continent, which, in its vast removal, did not hear or judge them.

In the Norwegian-Old Icelandic poetry the Norse religion is worked together into a whole, which comprises the creation of the world, the relation of gods to men in life and death, and finally the downfall of the gods and of the world at Ragnarok, after which there shall come a new heaven and a new earth where men are judged after their uprightness and good conduct, and not for bravery alone.

Joy is distinct not only from pleasure in general but even from aesthetic pleasure. It must have the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.

I did not know where we were, but I could not believe we were still on the Hempstocks' land, no more than I believed we were in the world I had grown up in. The sky of this place was the dull orange of a warning light; the plants, which were spiky, like huge, ragged aloes, were a dark silvery green, and looked as if they had been beaten from gunmetal.

'Mr Big,' said M., weighing his words, 'is probably the most powerful negro criminal in the world. He is,' and he enumerated carefully, 'the head of the Black Widow Voodoo cult and believed by that cult to be the Baron Samedi himself.'

There are probably infinite identical worlds, infinite worlds with slight variations, infinite different worlds. What I am writing now in this jail at Ft Toro, I have already written before and I shall write throughout eternity, on a paper, in a jail, that are all quite similar.

I experienced a feeling of scorn, almost disgust, for these people and their indefatigable, repetitious activity.... To be on an island inhabited by artificial ghosts was the most unbearable of nightmares; to be in love with one of those images was worse than being in love with a ghost....

Speaking of air, she says that any institution that has anything to do with the Communist state, even this one, smells of dust. Perhaps from too many papers, documents about God knows what and God knows whom.

He served himself and a few of us with choice fare, but the rest of us with cheap food and tiny portions ... " put the same food before all," I replied. "for I invite them for dinner, not for disgrace."

His milestones are coming so fast ... they're like telephone poles through the windows of a train.

"That was Louella O. Parsons," he said when he sat down after exchanging a few pleasantries. "The first thing I did when I got to town was call her up and give her an item for her column. That's a good habit to gt into because every couple of times you can slip her a story about yourself too."

Now I understand that she wanted to redeem herself for what she had done to Lavinia by committing still greater cruelties with everyone else. Redemption through evil.

I like transportation. Dreaming about trips. Leaving without ever leaving. Leaving and staying and by staying leaving.