Jim > Recent Status Updates

You know, everyone I know is kind of furtive, kind of beat. They all go along the street like they were guilty of something, but didn't believe in guilt. I can spot them immediately! And it's happening all over the country, to everyone; a sort of revolution of the soul, I guess you'd call it!

[S]ilences rise to heaven, too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one's silences.

There was no one to turn to for advice; I would have to work this out for myself. It had been drummed into me during military service that a good soldier carries out his orders without thinking, like a machine. There are others to do the thinking for him. That was all very well, but a man who didn't think for himself was doomed.

The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

There is nothing, sad to say, surprising in [John] Updike's ignorance of history and politics and of people unlike himself; in this, he is a standard American and so a typical citizen of what Vice-President Agnew once called the greatest nation in the country. But Updike has literary ambitions as well as most of the skills of a popular writer...except empathy.

[N]o one wants to believe that those they love, particularly their children, are actually mortal, that their deaths can come as swiftly and as easily as a phone call in the middle of the night.

No one should be surprised any more at seeing Jesuits spread slanders; they do so with a safe conscience, and nothing can prevent them, for the credit they enjoy in the world enables them to slander without fear of human justice, and that which they have assumed over cases of conscience has enabled them to establish precepts by which they can do so without fearing divine justice.

American scholarship is now a sort of huge make-work program for the conventionally educated. In a case like this, scholar squirrels gather up every scrap of writing they can find and stuff these bits into volume after volume, with metastasizing footnotes.

There is no glory in maintaining that one may not kill for a slap, in accordance with the Gospel; but it is horribly shameful to deny it. Consequently, far from justifying you, nothing could add further to your guilt, because having had amongst you doctors who told you the truth, you did not remain faithful to the truth and preferred darkness to light.

It is the intention which determines the quality of an action.... [A]nother safer means of avoiding a lie; after saying aloud 'I swear I did not do that' you add under your breath 'today' or after saying aloud 'I swear' you say under your breath 'that I say', and then go on aloud 'that I did not do that.'

For the basic policy which our Society [the Jesuits] has adopted for the good of religion is not to rebuff anyone lest people fall into disrepair.

Introduction: Similarly [Pascal] came to see in the Jesuits all the forces against which the true Christian must fight. Hair-splitting, dishonest, hypocritical, impious, wicked, so runs the progressively graver charges against them....

Fever materialized, a pale woman, young, cruel, and beautiful, with deep eyes shining and red lips. She stoops—stoops over the dying and laughs low—so low that it is like the wind stirring. And the poor human thing she has stricken gasps and battles for failing life, and she sucks away his breath with kisses.

I was very aware of Erin's thigh pressing against mine, and the brush of her breast against my arm. I felt a sudden and far from unpleasant southward tingle. I would argue that—fantasies aside—the majority of men are monogamous from the chin up. Below the belt-buckle, however, there's a wahoo stampeder who just doesn't give a shit.

Not two days after I said I didn't like Stephen King, I decided to give him one more chance, probably in memory of William Lindsay Gresham's NIGHTMARE ALLEY, one of the great carnie novels. We'll see what comes of it.....

The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased, get away from here at once.

That's why you should have been glad to help him. If you can't do that, at least, rejoice you left tonight with all your parts. My advice is, either join the Guards and learn to bend your stubborn neck, or get out of Constantinople. Soon.

I've always noticed that when old people say, 'You're young, you've got your whole life ahead of you,' they smile all over, like it tickled them to think what you're in for. I stood up. Sure, I knew I had my whole life ahead of me, but I wasn't going to cry myself sick on that account.

John Hemming on Percy Harrison Fawcett: "He escaped virtually every kind of pathology in the jungle, but he could not rid himself of the pernicious disease of race."

She came outside the cab, dressed in an old barathea gown, a black cloak and bonnet, and an imperviously close gauze veil of the same sombre hue, which she held about her face as if that were a secret enemy everyone was curious to detect, and she terribly interested to conceal.

She came outside the cab, dressed in an old barathea gown, a black cloak and bonnet, and an imperviously close gauze veil of the same sombre hue, which she held about her face as if that were a secret enemy everyone was curious to detect, and she terribly interested to conceal.

Lacrimae rerum, the tears of things, all the years behind me and Cody, the way I always say "me and Cody" instead of "Cody and I" or some such, and Irwin watching us across the world night now with a bite of marvel on his lower lip saying "Ah, angels of the West, Companions in Heaven" and writing letters asking "What now, what's the latest, what visions, what arguments, what sweet agreements?" and such.

Yes that's right, the population explosion is gonna cover every bit of backard dirt in America someday in fact they'll even have to start piling up friggin levels of houses and others lover that like your cityCityCITY till the houses reach a hundred miles in the air in all directions on the map and people looking at the earth from another planet with super telescopes will see a prickly ball hangin in space....

She came on slowly; her bows, the high, clumsy bows pointed towards us, the water turning from her forefront. She came on; she was near at hand. We saw her plainly—saw the rotted planks, the crumbling rigging, the rust-corroded metal-work, the broken rail, the gaping deck, and I could imagine that the clean water broke away from her sides in refluent wavelets as though in recoil from a thing unclean.

She stood before me, wondering, amazed. Alas, so changed! The red-and-yellow silk shawl still covered her shoulders; her hair still hung in those eldritch curls. But the beautiful face had grown wan and tired, and across the forehead lines were drawn like silver threads.

As development of the H-Bomb proceeded, someone asked Einstein how the Third World War would be fought. Einstein answered glumly that he had no idea what kind of weapons would be used in the Third World War, but he could assure the questioner that the war after that would be fought with stones.

If I keep coming back to the energy of Texas, it is because I am so aware of it. It seems to me like that thrust of dynamism which caused and permitted whole peoples to migrate and to conquer in earlier ages. The land mass of Texas is rich in recoverable spoil. If this had not been so, I think I believe the relentless energy of Texans would have moved out and conquered new lands.

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost all smothered with rubbish.

But food lovers, as we shall see, are rarely sympathetic characters in Balzac's work, and there is not a single character to be found who is both virtuous and preoccupied with his or her stomach....

The armies brought together men of different patrias, often in uneasy proximity, close observers of their differences and rivalries. National prejudices were born and stereotypes created, revealed in the language of the time, and sometimes in that of Bolivar: Venezuelans were pardos or militares, New Granadans mestizos or curiales, Ecuadorians indios. Americans did not naturally like each other.