Jim > Recent Status Updates

In Bogots, he says, the milk was always sold diluted with water. One day, a pure-milk dairy was started but soon went bankrupt. It had been deliberately ruined by the directors of the water-works, who feared a serious drop in water-consumption.

I keep looking out our window across the sunlit plain toward the stormy mountains, which rumble with thunder all through the afternoon. For me they represent "The Interior"--that somber anatomical phrase which suggests mysterious darkness, winding secret paths and ominous sounds. It is there that we have to go.

And the most annoying thought is that a little money, judiciously applied, would relieve the burdens and anxieties of most of these people; but affairs seem to be so arranged that money is most difficult to get when people need it most.

He was now at the center of the manufacture of gigantic schemes, of speculations of all sorts, of political and social gossip. The atmosphere was full of little and big rumors and of vast, undefined expectations.

[Colonel Beriah] Sellers, Miss Alice, is a great friend of Harry's, who is always trying to build a house beginning at the top.

Vice President Richard Nixon was blunter still, suggesting that a failed uprising somewhere in the Eastern Bloc crushed by the Russians would, in public relations terms, help America: 'It wouldn't be an unmixed evil, from the point of view of the US interest, if the Soviet iron fist were to come down hard again on the Sovit bloc.'

"It would have been better for your friend Sellers," retorted Philip, "if he had had a weakness for district schools. Col. Sellers, Miss Alice, is a great friend of Harry's, who is always trying to build a house by beginning at the top."

If ever any man beguiled him with turnips and water again, let him die the death.

Whatever the lagging dragging journey may have been to the rest of the emigrants, it was a wonder and delight to the children, a world of enchantment; and they believed it to be peopled with the mysterious dwarfs and giants and goblins that figured in the tales the negro slaves were in the habit of telling them nightly by the shuddering light of the kitchen fire.

In this respect I lived in total isolation, and any publication arising out of my research was destined to oblivion, as eminently forgettable as winning at billiards or cup-and-ball. But I was not worried by any of the consequences of what I was doing, for I lived without thinking.

Bolivian military tactics consist in making a great noise and show, in order to see which party will get first to the running-away point, then the least frightened take courage, charge desperately, and 'devil take the hindmost.'

There wasn't any fight left in me. As far as I was concerned the world we existed on was an overly large, stinking cinder, a spinning, useless clinker. I didn't want any part of it.

For thanks to his unyielding perseverance, he had managed to fall in love with the whole and with each one of the parts of his wife, to love, separately and together, all the components of that cellular universe.

A casual observer, deceived by a certain cheery irresponsibility that marked his behaviour, might have set Sam Shotter down as one of those essentially material young men in whose armour romance does not easily find a chink. He would have erred in this assumption.

The steps [of the dance] seemed to symbolize all the artifice, the passion for complexity, the hair-splitting, the sophistication, the dejection, the sudden renaissances, the flaunting challenge, the resignation, the feeling of the enemy closing in, the abandonment by all who should have been friends, the ineluctability of the approaching doom and the determination to perish, when the time came, with style.

I wasn't a political observer, I went on; races, language, what people were like, that what I was after: churches, songs, books, what they wore and ate and looked like, what the hell!

One is only sometimes warned, when these processes begin, of their crucial importance: that certain poems, paintings, kinds of music, books, or ideas are going to change everything, or that one is going to fall in love or become friends for life; the many lengthening strands, in fact, which, plaited together, compose a lifetime. One should be able to detect the muffled bang of the starter's gun.

Defenders of Rushdie have [argued] that he operates, and should therefore be read, within a double narrative tradition: of the Western novel (with its subgenre the antinovel a la Tristram Shandy), and of Eastern story cycles like the Panchatantra, with their chainlike linking of self-contained shorter narratives.

The people who write that kind of stuff [propaganda] never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.

All my memories of that time are memories of scrambling up and down the almost perpendicular slopes, over the jagged limestone that knocked one's boots to pieces, pouncing eagerly on tiny twigs of wood. Three people searching for a couple of hours could collect enough fuel to keep the dug-out fire alight for about an hour.

Borges's gnosticism—his sense that the ultimate God is beyond good and evil, and infinitely remote from creation—is deeply felt. But the sense of dread that informs his work is metaphysical rather than religious in nature: at its base are vertiginous glimpses of the collapse of all structures of meaning, including language itself, flashing intimations that the very self that speaks has no real existence.

He counseled me not to neglect my religious devotions. hat was one thing I'd been able to free myself of in my mind, but I made sure that other people didn't notice it. Tom believed in God. i just went to church every Sunday ... but I think you can't keep a clear head and believe in God both, and I had to keep a clear head.

Swann: To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!

And in fact, Swann's love [for Odette de Crecy] had reached the stagewhere the doctor and, in certain affections, even the boldest surgeon, ask themselves if ridding a patient of his vice or relieving him of his disease is still reasonable or even possible.

To belong to the "little set," the "little circle," the "little clan" attached to the Verdurins, one condition was sufficient but necessary: You had to abide tacitly by a Credo one of whose articles was that the young pianist patronized by Mme Verdurin that year, of whom she would say: "It ought to be against the law to play Wagner like that!" ...

But it is most especially as deep layers of my mental soil, as the firm ground upon which I still stand, that I must think of the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way.

Now we at home no longer had any illusions about M Legrandin, and our contacts with him became less frequent. Mama was infinitely amused each time she caught Legrandin in flagrante delicto in the sin that he would not confess, that he continued to call the sin without forgiveness, snobbishness.

We are very slow to recognize in the particular features of a new writer the model that is labeled "great talent" in our museum of general ideas. Precisely because these features are new, we do not think they fully resemble what we call talent. Instead, we talk about originality, charm, delicacy, strength; and then one day we realize that all of this is, in fact, talent.

I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.