Quotation Time

Room service? Send up a larger room.

Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?

Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others.

He may look like an idiot and talk like an idiot but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.

I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.

A child of five could understand this. Fetch me a child of five.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Ice Water? Get some Onions - that'll make your eyes water!

You know I could rent you out as a decoy for duck hunters?

You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I'll bet he was glad to get rid of it.

A man's only as old as the woman he feels.

Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?

Why, I'd horse-whip you if I had a horse.

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book.

I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

If I held you any closer I would be on the other side of you.

I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

It is better to have loft and lost than to never have loft at all.

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

Either he's dead or my watch has stopped.

Remember men, we're fighting for this woman's honour; which is probably more than she ever did.

Women should be obscene and not heard.

Time wounds all heels.

Why was I with her? She reminds me of you. In fact, she reminds me more of you than you do!

Behind every successful man is a woman, behind her is his wife.

As soon as I get through with you, you'll have a clear case for divorce and so will my wife.

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

They positioned themselves in strategic locations. I was beginning to lose my patience.

Do you want some foreign city from the high window? Strange black birds.

[...]

Full tup. Full throb.

By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept: I will not be placated by the mechanical motions of existence, nor find consolation in the solicitude of waiters who notice my devastated face.

''What a jerk, she would be thinking now.

''Being up against a person like that made him feel hopeless, exasperated, finally almost desolate. Why? Because he couldn't be sure of holding on to himself against that person? Because he was afraid that in the end they'd be right?''

(NYT, 11/14/04, Book Review, Alice's Wonderland, by Jonathan Franzen)

(Posted because of the latest numbers of dead)

Listen from 6:20 to 6:45.

6:15 to 6:45; 8:27 to 8:35

"Do you mean to tell me you've never used one of these before?"
"I didn't..." he began, unsure if the question was about meaning, or telling, or use.

(for Momus, but from image to feeling)

(for Michael White)

(for milozauckerman)

A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone.

Somehow it was her disaster--her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness, and she forced to stand here in her evening dress. She had schemed; she had pilfered. She was never wholly admirable. She had wanted success.

She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun. But she must go back. She must assemble.

(for questionable motives, in partial reply to his rhetorical questions)

(from the NYT. Exactly three minutes has a literary quality, or an expansiveness, that I appreciate.)

It's a shame that I had to go and put an extra 'u' into 'manipulation'.

Allons, Gilberte, viens; qu'est-ce que tu fais, cria d'une voix perçante et autoritaire une dame en blanc que je n'avais pas vue, et à quelque distance de laquelle un Monsieur habillé de coutil et que je ne connaissais pas, fixait sur moi des yeux qui lui sortaient de la tête; et cessant brusquement de sourire, la jeune fille prit sa bêche et s'éloigna sans se retourner de mon côté, d'un air docile, impénétrable et sournois.

(for youn)

*this never materialized

(re: 'crunked')

(I'm sorry I didn't show! - xpost)

"Rubbish!" Souvarine replied. "Your Karl Marx still believes in letting natural forces take their course. No politics, no conspiracies, am I right? Everything out in the open, and nothing to fight for but wage rises ... To Hell with you and your gradual evolution! Set fire to every town and city, cut the populace to shreds, raze everything to the ground, and when there's nothing left of this whole vile world, maybe a better one will grow up in its place." [Germinal by Emile Zola, pg. 142 of the Oxford's World Classics edition.]

"Have you seen my Book of Virtues? It's been missing for almost a week!"

"No, I haven't seen your Book of Virtues. What does it look like?"

"It looks like a big pile of hypocritical bullshit!"

~~~~~~

"Hi, is this Salomon Smith Barney? Have you seen my missing Book of Virtues? Why do I want it back? Sentimental reasons, I guess. It reminds me of a lonesome gambler who rode into town and established law and order. Sort of. I'd like to shake his hand -- that way he'd only have one free hand to defend himself with. You see, in the words of the ethicist Immanuel Kant, it is a 'categorial imperative' that he get knocked upside the head!"

~~~~~~

"Ok, I hate to act like a fucking dumbass, but are we at war? I mean did we ever actually declare war?"

"Declare war? Who's got time to declare war when there are so many bombs to drop?!"

~~~~~~

"Knock knock!"

"Who's there?"

"WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!"

"So there you are!"

~~~~~~

[In reference to the relinquishing of Iraq last June.] "Nothing says 'good luck' like handing off sovereignty and then running straight to the airport. Do we always treat sovereignty like it's a goddamn grenade?"

~~~~~~

"Why do I get the feeling that when the War on Terrorism is over we're gonna have more fucking Cipro in this country than we know what to do with?"

"Why do I get the feeling that when the War on Terrorism is over we're gonna have more fucking impoverished citizens in this country than we know what to do with? We'll have to declare another War on Poverty!"

"Right! And if you're not with us in the War on Poverty, you're against us! Dick Cheney, I'm calling you out, you oil industry bitch motherfucker! I can't fucking find you or see you, but I'm putting you on notice!"

(stately pace)

La loi, dans un grand souci d'égalité, interdit aux riches comme aux pauvres de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. Anatole France, La Lys Rouge, 1910

—Oriane, ne te fâche pas, reprit Mme de Gallardon qui ne pouvait jamais s’empêcher de sacrifier ses plus grandes espérances sociales et d’éblouir un jour le monde, au plaisir obscur, immédiat et privé, de dire quelque chose de désagréable, il y a des gens qui prétendent que ce M. Swann, c’est quelqu’un qu’on ne peut pas recevoir chez soi, est-ce vrai?

—Mais... tu dois bien savoir que c’est vrai, répondit la princesse des Laumes, puisque tu l’as invité cinquante fois et qu’il n’est jamais venu.

Et quittant sa cousine mortifiée, elle éclata de nouveau d’un rire qui scandalisa les personnes qui écoutaient la musique, mais attira l’attention de Mme de Saint-Euverte, restée par politesse près du piano et qui aperçut seulement alors la princesse. Mme de Saint-Euverte était d’autant plus ravie de voir Mme des Laumes qu’elle la croyait encore à Guermantes en train de soigner son beau-père malade.

(Yes, I think this is northern California, but the terrain and the real estate schemes -- the circuit card -- are southern California.)

--------------------

Even the memorial's actual construction was marred by an echo from the past. The laying of the steles was delayed in 2003 when news spread that the firm Degussa was supplying an anti-graffiti coating for the slabs. Sixty years earlier, Degussa had provided the Zyklon B chemical used in gas chambers. The company remained as a subcontractor after a committee decided that Degussa had consistently apologized over the years for its complicity with the Nazis.

--------------------

The "authentic places" of memory for Jews, said Spiegel, [president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany,] are the "former concentration and death camps, the mass graves, the places of execution, shooting and torture, the platforms from which people were carted away in cattle wagons…. Nowhere else are we closer to the dead, and there is no other place for finding a direct and comprehensive understanding to the atrocities" of the Nazis.

--------------------

[The memorial's architect, Peter Eisenman of New York,] said: "It is clear we won't have solved all the problems. Architecture is not a panacea for evil. Nor will we have satisfied all those present today, but this cannot have been our intention."

(for Amateurist)

There was a certain triteness in these reflections [...]

[but no props for...]

What's frightening for a novelist today is how the technological consumerism that rules our world specifically aims to render both of these concerns ["mystery" and "manners" -- terms of art in the essay] moot.

[He could have written about how the literal fails to communicate what the imagined does. I don't know that the metaphor of disease is any more appropriate than the view of technology as progress. I don't think social psychology is just an anthropomorphization of individual psychology. Sorry for my own clumsiness.]

(for N1tsuh)

However in the city it actually exacted a lot less responsibility to have a girlfriend than a dog.

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

(for gabbneb)

That part of the mouth of the river's current meets the sea's tide, and where salt and fresh waters mix, is the estuary. A pleasing word, lovelier than the brackish conditions it implies, for an estuary is defined by prosaic and precise measures of salinity. The true estuarine nature is divine: estuaries are nurseries where nascent marine life is nurtured and protected. Florida Bay, lying between the tip of peninsular Florida and the Upper Keys, is a large and important estuary whose health depends on fresh, clean water from the Everglades. Pollution and decades of flood control are turning this once crystalline and productive environment into a hypersaline, muddy, superheated lagoon. (Joy Williams of Cascabel, AZ and the Ducktrap River, ME, 2006)

I have a gub.

My message will be, Vladimir -- I call him Vladimir -- that you shouldn't fear a missile defense system [...] As a matter of fact, why don't you cooperate with us on a missile defense system? Why don't you participate with the United States?

There is a world of excitement and woe in that conflation of the aesthetic and the spiritual. It's a madness, which life will punish.

Judge Learned Hand, widely thought to be the greatest American judge never to sit on the Supreme Court, called conspiracy "that darling of the modern prosecutor's nursery" in a classic 1925 decision.

(for Tracer)

[...] all constituents of sentences to which the assertive force does not reach do not belong to scientific exposition but they are sometimes hard to avoid, even for one who sees the danger connected with them. Where the main thing is to approach what cannot be grasped in though by means of guesswork these components have their justification.

Back in the sixties, when I was a thrusting young analytic philosopher, I heard an admired senior colleague, Stuart Hampshire, describe a star-studded international conference on some vast and pretentious topic - a conference from which he had just returned and the results of which he had been asked to sum up at the final session. "No trick at all", Hampshire explained, "for an old syncretist hack like me." At that moment I realized what I wanted to be when I grew up.

The couple's slow approach to what could be an adulterous affair moves forward at the highest level of literacy: each pauses before speaking and then utters a perfectly formed sentence. This syntactical duelling is attended by mute servants who carry candles from room to room.

SXSW is a bastion of that endangered artistic unit, the album.

(for the pinefox)

[...] one imagines them to be the sort of potentially happy couple made joyless by a gargantuan lust for self-improvement.

In Perlstein's mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God -- not, Lord knows, because of Nixon's perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything.

It almost seems as though Perlstein, who was born in 1969, is reluctant to let go of the excitement he has experienced secondhand through the archives he has ransacked to such riveting effect.

http://members.aol.com/naturmedia/01nixon-web-c.jpg

They sat in high-backed, heavy chairs, dined with heavy silverware on heavy, rich foods, drank heavy, good wine, and said what they thought. The conversation soon turned to business, and as it did they automatically spoke more and more in its jargon--a comfortable, clumsy mode of speech that seemed to embrace both commercial brevity and prosperous indolence, embellished here and there with a touch of sociable self-irony.

"What does that have to do with it, my child? It's a large sum, a very large sum." And Consul Buddenbrook nodded several times, as if staggered by the burden of even thinking of such a sum. "Moreover," he continued, "I cannot conceal from you that the firm has suffered other losses, quite apart from this matter, and that losing such a sum would be blow from which it would recover with very, very great difficulty. I mention that in no way to . . ."

He did not finish. Tony had jumped up, had even taken a few steps backward, and, with her damp lace handkerchief still trailing in her hand, she cried, "Good! Enough! Never!"

She looked almost heroic. The word "firm" had hit its mark.

Dead breaths i living breathe.

Filled with a desire to preserve and enhance the luster of the firm in a manner commensurate with its proud old name, Thomas Buddenbrook loved to throw himself into the daily battle, because he knew quite well that he owed many a profitable deal to his self-assurance and elegance, his winning charm, and his polished tact in conversations.

Thomas, however, had imagination enough to adopt as his personal precept the old maxim that all human endeavor is merely symbolic, and to place all his aspirations, abilities, enthusiasm, and active energies both at the service of this small community, where the name Buddenbrook placed him in the first ranks, and at the service of that name and the family firm he had inherited--indeed, he had imagination enough to take seriously his ambition of attaining greatness and power in this small sphere and at the same time to smile at himself for being so ambitious.

And he devoted the same deadly earnest to planning a business maneuver or outlining a speech as he did to contemplating a complete refurbishing of his supply of underwear--to do it at last in one fell swoop, so that at least in that regard everything would be in perfect order for a while.

Everyone acknowledged, whether out of envy or admiration, his cleverness and his hard work--and all the while he was wrestling in vain to find comfort in order and routine, because, to his despair, he found himself forever falling behind his own active imagination.

(for Hillary)

He felt the incomparable satisfaction of watching an enormously superior intellect grab hold of life, of cruel mocking, powerful life, in order to subdue and condemn it. What he felt was the satisfaction of a sufferer who has always known only shame and the bite of conscience for hiding the suffering that cold hard life brings, and who now, suddenly, from the hand of a great and wise man, receives elemental, formal justification for having felt such suffering in this world--in this best of all possible worlds, which by means of playful scorn was proved to be the worst of all possible worlds.

Dear Red, If you're reading this, you've gotten out. And if you've come this far, maybe you're willing to come a little further. You remember the name of the town, don't you? I could use a good man to help me get my project on wheels. I'll keep an eye out for you and the chessboard ready. Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies. I will be hoping that this letter finds you, and finds you well. Your friend, Andy

William: Sons of Scotland, I am William Wallace. Young soldier: William Wallace is 7 feet tall.William: Yes, I’ve heard. He kills men by the hundreds, and if he were
here he’d consume the English with fireballs from his eyes and bolts
of lightning from his arse.

I am William Wallace, and I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny.

You have come to fight as free men, and free men you are.

What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?

Veteran soldier: Fight against that? No, we will run, and we will live.

William: Aye, fight and you may die, run and you’ll live. At least a while.
And dying in your beds many years from now, would you be willing to
trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one
chance to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take
our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom?!

He had once again felt how painful beauty truly is, how it plunged you into shame and yearning despair and at the same time gnawed away at your courage and fitness for daily life.

"The president wanted to know exactly what the returns were in the places he had been and Hillary hadn't been," Mr. Rendell said. "He kept showing Hillary, and she would laugh."

The conventions of illusionistic painting, providing through tint and brushwork the sense of recession in space and of enclosing atmosphere, are not demanded by every culture. In the art-sparse, mercantile world of the American colonies, Copley's lavish literalism must have seemed fair dealing, a heaping measure of value paid in shimmering textures and scrupulously fine detail. "Overminuteness" could scarcely exist, as it did not exist for Holbein or Jan Van Eyck.

In the wake of the great Copley retrospective in Boston in 1966, the critic Barbara Novak ascribed Copley's sensibility not to any artistic predecessor but to a "conceptual bias" present in Puritanism. Jonathan Edwards wrote of "the clarity of 'things,'" of things as the mediators between words and ideas, between empirical and conceptual experience. "The manifestations God makes of Himself in His works," Edwards wrote, "are the principle manifestations of His perfections, and the declaration and teachings of His word are to lead to these." The first great painter of American landscapes, Thomas Cole, who also perpetrated a number of religious pictures and large allegorical canvases, lamented that the public preferred "things not thoughts." Moving from America to England, Copley passed from an art whose soul was empirical to one whose soul was conceptual, societal, and theatrical.

Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One of the guys jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, “The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts to smile but he’s dead.

The reason it's so cheap is that proprietor Herve Dubourdieu doesn't like dealing with people, according to importer Kermit Lynch, so he lets Lynch import all 10,000 cases of his wine rather than deal with multiple distributors.

Quietness distinguished him, a stillness and self-sufficiency at odds with the motion he was otherwise constantly in. "He was outside the chaos," Cohen said. "Even if he never piched, he'd be mentioned. It's like he knew things. In the Jewish tradition, there is a luftmensch - a person with the capability to see things that more accustomed eyes miss. When you're different you think. Unbelonging makes you free."

For Koufax and his crew, sports was not so much an act of conforming as defying. It was not just a vehicle for assimilation, it was a way of saying no to the immigrant mentality their forebears had brought with them to Ellis Island - what Irving Howe, in World of Our Fathers, called "the suspicion of the physical, fear of hurt," and "anxiety over the sheer pointlessness of play."

If the lunch is truly free, the demand for free lunches will be large.

You had only to keep asking about the value and meaning of the next smaller unit to realize that taken together they would not add up to a sum, but rather that such calculations led to diminishment, obliteration, shrinkage, and annihilation.

I am useless until I have my morning turkey

The arms imply vanity and power: two things that make many women uncomfortable and yet are fundamental to self-confidence.

Acquisitiveness & indiscriminate display are pleasing to contemplate only in birds & savages & children.

Whites are mostly offstage too, but for these characters, as for many blacks in the upper middle class, there’s a constant worry about the white gaze. “You didn’t, for example, walk down Main Street with a watermelon under your arm. Even if you had a pretty good reason. Like, you were going to a potluck and each person had to bring an item and your item just happened to be a watermelon, luck of the draw, and you wrote this on a sign so everyone would understand the context, and as you walked down Main Street you held the sign in one hand and the explained watermelon in the other, all casual, perhaps nodding between the watermelon and the sign for extra emphasis if you made eye contact. This would not happen. We were on display.”

now whose review of that book is that?

Hometown Has Been Shutdown

He is tired, Harry, of summer, of golf, of the sun. When he was younger and just taking up the game twenty years ago and even when he took it up again eight years or so ago there were shots that seemed a miracle, straight as an edge of glass and longer than any power purely his could have produced, and it was for the sake of collaboration with this power that he kept playing, but as he improved and his handicap dwindled from sky's-the-limit to a sane sixteen, these super shots became rarer, even the best of his drives has a a little tail or were struck with a little scuff, and a shade off line one way or another, and the whole thing became more like work, pleasant work but work, a matter of approximations in the realm of the imperfect, with nothing breaking through but normal healthy happiness.

He had mistaken the two of them for one and entrusted to her this ghost of his alone. A mistake married people make.

correction (xpost): "even the best of his drives had a little tail"

Rabbit has always liked rain, it puts a roof on the world.

a pride of dandelions

I don't believe that anyone is only super-girly and purely feminine, and only wants to be shy. There are different sides to all our characters.

—but also a broad range of works by innovative but less well-known students, suggesting the collective nature of ideas.

And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself.

Psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex.

Mr. Schumer, pressing for his proposal, said: “It’s not that we want to punish wealthy people. We want to praise them. But they’re doing fine, and they’re not going to spend the money and stimulate the economy.”

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. - L. Page in the NYT

Real leadership creates the conditions and coalitions for others to step up as well [...]

And Holbrooke would flinch when Petraeus would warmly refer to him as his “wingman” — meaning it as a huge compliment — rather than seeing military force as the adjunct to diplomacy.

How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a treeful of rotten fruit. Nor do I believe in progress.

It is that oddest of oddities, an Arab war zone where foreign joggers are regarded, not with hostility or even that sympathetic puzzlement reserved for the insane, but with a friendly wave or a toot on the horn.

(for the ILX running running thread)

wildly good get

The enormous sun-filled room, where factory-grade tools serve as counters, feels like a neighborhood hangout, a place where you take the children or the parents.

As an eighth grader, Ms. Baldwin mediated a dispute between a neighbor of the school and students who were trampling her flower bed. The bipartisan solution: a fence.

Mr. Brown repeatedly has emphasized the need for frugality, saying recently that he had eaten a two-day-old tuna sandwich as proof of his personal commitment.

One of her unheralded contributions to the cause of American women in politics was to wear exactly that same outfit every day during her first campaign for Senate. After a while, nobody talked about her clothes anymore, and I envisioned a glorious future in which women running for office could just toss on their black pantsuit in the morning and head for the door.

And true enough I saw some big squat buildings all of glass, enormous dollhouses, inside which you could see men moving but hardly moving, as if they were struggling against something impossible. Was that Ford's?

Rostov rode to the attack against the French because he could not resist the wish to go galloping across a level field.

It seemed as if the Garden took the two children away and hid them: in all the water, the cistern, the rivers, the shallow inner bay; in all the green, the trees, the wood, the rosebushes on the hills and the forests behind the hills at the foot of the mountains---

And on the other side, the Garden which pulled her back across the outer bay to the blue movement of the inner bay, to its own deep green silence--where the two children, Himpies and Domingoes, were standing at the quay, hand in hand, waiting for her; a little farther down the old grandmother was waiting, and the faithful Sjeba, always--to all the jobs she liked to do, to all the money she earned with her work, and the feeling of security it gave her.

The sailor was not very tall, dark, lightly built, supple and yet strong--there was something open about him; space, sea with white-crested waves, and a high wind--a green depth of water with a silvery fish fleeting through; he could have been the fish!
And he was young.
Compared to him Constance's feet were too flatly on the ground now that she was standing still, and it was is if a stagnancy hung around her, of air under dense trees, smoke of the torches, dust, the sickly beating of drums.
She wasn't really young any more. And slowly, in her indifferent way, she began to bait the sailor:

correction: "[...] it was as if a stagnancy [...]"

As he took these steps, Peter stopped, put down his luggage and smiled. Bjorn Hansen gave a start. It was a younger version of himself. What a naked face, he thought. My own flesh and blood. Such a naked face! It's almost obscene.

through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms

What's with the CAUTION tape down the block? A garbage truck fell through the sidewalk!

The beautiful blind passion of running away is permitted only to children, convicts, and slaves. If you are subject to the truant officer and the Law of Bedtime there will be doorways that will shelter you and freight cars that will take you a long way from home. If you are a safecracker and cannot walk in a straight line for more than a hundred yards without coming face to face with a high stone wall, there are ways of tunneling under the wall, under the five-year sentence, and confederates waiting outside. If you cannot own property but are owned yourself, you may, hiding in the daytime and traveling across country by back roads at night, eventually reach the border. But if any free person tries to run away, he will discover sooner or later that he has been running all the while in a circle and that this circle is taking him inexorably back ... (for E. Kissin)

The first stage, on the other hand, is usually very brief, difficult to observe, and as a result of this had escaped his notice. The existence of this initial stage had already been noted in antiquity: in the third century BC, for example, Strato of Lampsacus observed that a falling stream of water breaks into drops, indicating that the drops accelerate on falling, just like a line of traffic that breaks up as the vehicles accelerate.

Once in her room, Anna was gripped by alarm. She stood inside the door, trembling violently, waiting, but Katri didn't come. Katri should have come. Finaally, Anna crept in under the coverlet and hid from her irrevocable decision -- to be alone no more. She was too warm. The silence lasted too long. Anna threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. The parlour was empty. In the hall, she tripped over the dog she wasn't used to, mumbled an apology, and was finally out in the snow.
The door banged hehind her in the wind. A few steps into the woods and the cold swept over her like a gentle warning. She stopped. Katri stood quietly in the kitchen window, waiting. Anna came back, the door slammed, and for a long moment there was quiet. Then Anna shouted loudly and very angrily, "Miss Kling! Your dog is shedding, there's hair everywhere. You need to comb your dog!"
Katri waited until Anna's steps moved on, then she drew a deep breath and continued washing the dishes in silence.

“The question is whether pessimist melancholy or volcanic anger prevails.”

Coming from California, which is oblivious of regret, approaching November whips me with the passion of the dying year.

― the passionfox, Monday, August 18, 2003

"My intention is to, gradually, get them to wear suits. Clothes have a power that cuts across social and economic lines. But I have to make it exciting. It’s gotten bad over there."

“They don’t want to unleash animal spirits too quickly here and have everyone go bananas,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

the sheer force of the nihilism and meanness

One man is a living soul, but two men are an indiarubber milking machine for a beer engine, and three men are noises off and four men are an asylum for cretins and five men are a committee and twenty-five are a meeting, and after that you get to the mummy-house at the British Museum, and the Sovereign People and Common Humanity and the Average and the Public and the Majority and the Life Force and Statistics and the Economic Man brainless, eyeless, wicked spawn of the universal toad sitting in the black bloody ditch of eternal night and croaking for its mate which is the spectre of Hell.

So the post-war period was gloomy and depressed after the light-hearted harvests of the first years. Many drew apart in a new iolation either in the world of their dreams or in some work or other that would provide them with a living; work taken up haphazardly or in haste which seemed petty and colourless after so much excitement, and in any case everybody dismissed from their thoughts that brief illusory participation in the life of our neighbours. Certainly for many years no one any longer practised his proper métier, but all thought that they could and should do a thousand other things together, and some time passed before each man took upon his shoulders his proper métier and accepted its weight and the daily fatigue and the daily solitude, which is the sole means we have of sharing in the life of our neighbour, who is lost and confined in a like solitude.