Jim > Recent Status Updates

Now I understand how deluded I was: history happened here just as it did everywhere else; the world is not the same anywhere. There have been crimes, transgressions, a war, and because of it our lives have come apart.

There is no mystery in this world -- that is the source of my regret.

The wind pushing us toward the horizon sometimes becomes fiercer, jolting the ship. Then I can hear it cracking the sails and whistling in the rigging. These, too, are gthe words that carry me further away. The land I lived on for so long--where is it now? It has become tiny, bobbing on the sea like a lost life raft, while the Zeta advances in the sunlight, driven by the wind.

If you were my wife to-morrow I should expect to use your money, if it were needed, in struggling to obtain a seat in Parliament and a hearing there. I will hardly stoop to tell you that I do not ask you to be my wife for the sake of this aid;—but if you were to become my wife I should expect all your cooperation;—with your money, possibly, but certainly with your warmest spirit.

As for sacrificing myself, that's done. I'm a man utterly ruined and would cut my throat tomorrow for the sake of my relations, if I cared enough about them. I know my own condition pretty well. I have made a shipwreck of everything, and have now only to go down among the breakers.

Rodney Spelvin ... had once been a poet and a very virulent one, too; the sort of man who would produce a slim volume of verse bound in squashy mauve leather at the drop of a hat, mostly on the subject of sunsets and pixies.

I begin to think they'll [the Americans, that is] eat each other up, and then there'll come an entirely new set of people of a different sort. I always regarded the States as a Sodom and Gomorrah, prospering in wickedness, on which fire and brimstone were sure to fall sooner or later.

[Trotsky] then spoke about 'history's enormous furnace,' in which the Russian national character was remoulded and freed from its langupor and sluggishness. 'This furnace is cruel ... tongues of flame lick and scorch us, but [they also] steel our national character.' 'Happy is he,' Trotsky exclaimed, 'who in his mind and heart feels the electrical current of our great epoch.'

History clearly shows [said Stalin] that the salt of the earth is gradually shifting eastwards. In the eighteenth century, France was the salt of the earth, and in the nineteenth—Germany. Now it is Russia.

Jukes once returned to the club-house in the middle of a round because there was a thunderstorm and his caddie got struck by lightning, and I have known Bteam to concede a hole for the almost frivolous reason that that he had sliced his ball into a hornet's nest and was reluctant to play it where it lay.

Who can always drink Lafitte of the finest, can always talk to a woman who is both beautiful and witty, or can always find the right spirit in the poetry he reads? A man has usually to work through much mud before he gets his nugget.

The many years of political freelancing had left their traces on Trotsky. He did not possess the habits of free and easy teamwork which make the strength of a real leader of men.

If the illusory [Menshevik] government makes a hazardous attempt to revive its own corpse, the popular masses will strike a decisive counter-blow. And the blow will be the more powerful the stronger the attack. If the government tries to use the 24 or 48 hours still left to it in order to stab the revolution, then we will declare that the vanguard of the revolution will meet attack with attack and iron with steel.

Step down, Jules Guesde [French socialist turned government minister], get out of the cage, where the capitalist state has shut you up, and look around a little. Perhaps fate will for once, and for the last time, have pity on your sorry old age, and you will hear the muted sound of approaching events. We await them; we summon them; we prepare them.

'How long will it take?' I asked Fridge. He smiled. 'Softly, softly catch de monkey.'

Stalin, in the dark days before he began opposing Trotsky with nothing but preposterous calumny, made a remark which offers a clue to this chapter. Trotsky's strength, Stalin said, reveals itself when the revolution gains momentum and advances; his weakness comes to the fore when the revolution is defeated and must retreat.

'An historical Rubicon,' Trotsky wrote, 'is truly crossed only at the moment when the material means of government pass from the hands of absolutism into those of the people.' Such things, Professor, are never achieved with the signing of a parchment; they take place on the street and are achieved through struggle.'

"I feel sorry for Balzac," Alexandre Dumas is alleged to have said. "He presents such a sorry spectacle that he ought to stay at home behind a closed door"

"You're mistaken," the great Victor Hugo supposedly replied. "It is Balzac who feels pity for all the rest of us, and he'll be remembered long after those who mock him are forgotten."

"Mexicans are supposed to be lazy."

"That's not true, it's a stereotype."

"I forbid you to touch my clichés, young man. They're the shield of my prejudices. And prejudices, as the word itself indicates, are necessary for making judgments. My convictions are clear, deep rooted, and unshakable. At this point in my life, no one's going to change them. Mexicans are lazy."

"Sliding along the streets of America, Dionisio happily gave to that single country the name of an entire continent, gladly sacrificing in favor of a name wkith lineage, position, history (like Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Nicaragua ...) that name without a name, the ghostlike 'United States of America,' which his friend Daniel Cosio Villegas said, was a moniker like 'The Neighborhood Drunkard.'