Jim > Recent Status Updates

Life for her must be a matter of business. Was it not the case with nine out of every ten among mankind, with nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, that life must be a matter of business and not of romance? Of course she could not marry Mr. Finn, knowing, as she did, that neither of them had a shilling.

And yet from day to day his intimacy with her became more close. He had never made love to her, nor could he discover that it was possible for him to do so. She seemed to be a woman for whom all the ordinary stages of love-making were quite unsuitable,

He does not bear the best reputation in this world as a steady man. Is he altogether the sort of man that mammas of the best kind are seeking for their daughters? I like a roué myself;—and a prig who sits all night in the House, and talks about nothing but church-rates and suffrage, is to me intolerable. I prefer men who are improper...

His [Sharok's] other job was harder, but there he was destroying the people he had hated since childhood, the people who had destroyed Russia -- the Old Bolsheviks, the so-called Leninist Guard -- and at the same time all the Jews, Latvians, and Poles who had make the October Revolution.

And so at the February and march Plenum of 1937, Comrade Stalin officially declared war -- which he had begun ten years earlier -- against his own people.

According to scholars, in early 1937 there were five million people in prisons and camps. Between January 1937 and December 1938, another seven million were arrested. Of them, one million were shot and two million died in the camps.

This should be dated 9/4, but Goodreads was down last night.

HE [Stalin] had created a Party that would hold power forever. HE had created a Party distinguished from the parties of all time, a Party that was not only a symbol of the state, but also the sole power in the state, a Party that made belonging to it not only the chief merit of its members but the content and meaning of their lives.

For Carthaginians, more Romans simply meant more Romans to kill. This was the dark side of a truly professional fighting force, especially one that fought with edged weapons; they were used to killing, inured to it. They would kill without hesitation. It was a terrible advantage that the Carthaginians had and that most of the Romans at Cannae lacked.

She had left John Grey because she feared that she would do him no good as his wife,—that she would not make him happy; and she had afterwards betrothed herself for a second time to her cousin, because she believed that she could serve him by marrying him. Of course she had been wrong.

Sometimes. Do you know, there are moments when I almost make up my mind to go headlong to the devil,—when I think it is the best thing to be done. It's a hard thing for a woman to do, because she has to undergo so much obloquy before she gets used to it. A man can take to drinking, and gambling and all the rest of it, and nobody despises him a bit.

Not until more than a century after his death has it finally dawned on students of Balzac that he was basically a reporter, a man endowed with remarkable perception and sensitivity, an observer who not only completely understood both his own era and human nature, but who possessed an uncanny ability to write objectively about people and the world in which they lived.

According to one of the innumerable Balzac legends, he was penniless on the day he left [Vienna], and had to borrow some coins from [Countess Eveline] Hanska in order to tip the hotel employees who stood in a line at the entrance to bid him farewell.

[Father Chichambre's paradise] was one of those country paradises that group three cypresses around a well. Tenderly, he would show it to us, far away, behind a mass of plane trees with its six houses and the top of a squat steeple; and we said to ourselves that it would be good to live there. It was a paradise facing south, towards the warmth, a modest paradise....