Quotation Time

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.