Joshua West > Recent Status Updates

'Perhaps they were right in putting love into books,' he thought quietly. 'Perhaps it could not live anywhere else.'

Perhaps the nothingness astonished him a little, but not much, and not for long.

How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him---he has known a fear beyond every other.

The people in flight from the terror behind---strange things happen to them, some bitterly cruel and some so beautiful that the faith is refired forever.

I heard the last coin fall into the bowels of the public phone, the sound of leaves, the wind whipping dead leaves, a sound like cables tangling and untangling and then slipping apart in the void. Poetic misery.

...the white-footed Mexico City night, a night that endlessly announces her arrival, I'm coming, I'm coming, but is a long time coming, as if she too, the devil, had stayed behind to watch the sunset, the incomparable sunsets of Mexico, the peacock sunsets, as Cesarea would say when Cesarea lived her and was our friend...

Drink up, boys, drink up and don't worry, if we finish the bottle we'll go down and buy another one. Of course, it won't be the same as the one we've got now, but it'll be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don't make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

In the climacteric of their martyrdom , Gazans chose to die resisting rather than to live expiring under an inhuman blockade. The resistance was mostly notional, as the rudimentary projectiles caused little damage. So the ultimate question is, Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?

It is not enough for him to perform his function in a way he knows to be in keeping with the teaching of his masters and the ancient traditions...If he is to feel full satisfaction at the moment when Time lifts his own severed head by the hair, he must add to the execution some feature however small that is entirely his own and that he will never repeat. Only thus can he feel himself a free artist.

“What do you think of the rebels?” Asked Franz. “Will they win?”
The driver shrugged. “Quine sabes, senor? Who knows what side God is on?”
“The communists don’t believe in God.”
“Perhaps,” said the driver. “But what matters is if God believes in them.”

That’s the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it’s the only difference.

"And now you know [life's} not like that. Right? It's more like smoking a cigarette. The first few puffs it tastes wonderful, and you don't even think of its ever being used up. Then you begin taking it for granted. Suddenly you realize it's nearly burned down to the end. And then's when you're conscious of the bitter taste."

We dont move through the days, Squire. They move through us. Until the last cruel crank of the ratchet.

Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep--if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching--need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national family.

In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians and lie about it.

This is what he had prepared her for -- to inherit his own entanglement in the world, and now, with this perhaps demented Karmology hustle of Takeshi's, with the past as well, and the crimes behind the world, the thousand bloody arroyos in the hinterlands of time that stretched somberly inland from the honky-tonk coast of Now.

In time there came to be at least four Apache raiders who were called by the name Geronimo, either Mexican soldiers or the gringos. The tribal people here were all very aware that the whites put great store in names. But once the whites had a name for a thing, they seemed unable ever again to recognize the thing itself.

Do you mean that the world itself might be possessed of something like a will?
Something like. And would that really be good news? That every dumb creature that ever found itself called into being in order to trek its way across a landscape of pain and want to its ultimate eternal extinction is that will’s handiwork?

How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?

Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecording's themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it—it will reassemble in the same form.

Here is a story. The last of all men who stands alone in the universe while it darkens about him. Who sorrows all things with a single sorrow. Out of the pitiable and exhausted remnants of what was once his soul he’ll find nothing from which to craft the least thing godlike to guide him in these last of days.

The abyss of the past into which the world is falling. Everything vanishing as if it had never been. We would hardly wish to know ourselves again as once we were and yet we mourn the days.

There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated.

What is happily ever after, after all, but a fall into the ordinary, into human weakness, gathering despair, a fall into death?

We are all, each of us, the stinging, bloody fragments of a God that was torn into pieces by the birth-wail of Eternity. When all the days are done, She who is Bride and Mother unto all of us shall gather every scrap of scattered being up into one place, where we shall know again what we knew at the start of things, before that dreadful sundering.