Ulla Gomez > Recent Status Updates

People can hurt only our feelings, not our thinking—not unless we let go of the independence of our minds.

Argentinos are Italians who speak Spanish and think they are British

he greatly enjoyed “the fist act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever It witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide."

The more Iwain tancied himselt a Political philosopher, the more he felt stifled by fiction's limitations and wished to express himself directly, yet it was fiction that gave him license to tear off the gag that muzzled him on many topics. The further back in time he went, the greater his freedom to skewer the contemporary world.

It does seem like the machines took all the good jobs, where a man could be true to hisself and false to nobody else, and left all the silly ones.

And another nice thing about war—not that anything about war is nice, I guess—is that while it's going on and you're in it, you never worry about doing the right thing.
See? Up there, fighting and all, you couldn't be righter. You could of been a heller at home and made a lot of people unhappy and all, and been a dumb, mean bastard, but you're king over there—-king to everybody, and especially to your-self.

He would revolutionize the American novel by scrapping the omniscient, third-person narrator and allow. ing the unlettered Huck to tell the tale in his own voice, showing how expressive colloquial language could be.

Doctor Paul Proteus was a man with a secret. Most of the time it was an exhilarating secret, and he extracted momentary highs of joy from it while dealing with fellow members of the system in the course of his job. At the beginning and close of each item of business he thought, "To hell with you."

Twain shows that ordinary people have a native vigor and intelligence often lacking in their supposed betters.

It isn't knowledge that's making trouble, but the uses it's put to.

For generations they've been built up to worship competition and the market, productivity and economic usefulness, and the envy of their fellow men—and boom! it's all yanked out from under them. They can't participate, can't be useful any more

Their superiority is what gets me, this damn hierarchy that measures men against ma-chines. It's a pretty unimpressive kind of man that comes out on top.

Here Bud's graph was high for theory, there low for administration, here low for creativity, and so on, up and down across the page to the last quality— personality. In mysterious, unnamed units of measure, each graduate was credited with having a high, medium, or low personality.

It was a so-called Achievement and Aptitude Profile, and every college graduate got one along with his sheepskin.
And the sheepskin was nothing, and the graph was every-thing. When time for graduation came, a machine took a student's grades and other performances and integrated them into one graph-the profile.

For all the souls who had come over to this country were now at the end of this winter of horror starved, and many of the very stoutest had hungered and shat and coughed themselves into the final kingdom of death, and even the most vicious of the men who had come across the ocean had weakened and become strangely indolent, lying on their cots all day and staring blankly at the gray and ice-pissing ice-shitting skies.

Twain would suffer the lifelong financial anxiety of someone whose family fortunes had crashed in early life.

Elena metió todo ahí dentro. Todo menos la ropa; la ropa no pudo, conservaba su olor, el olor de su hija. La ropa siempre conserva el olor que tuvo en vida el muerto, Elena sabe, aunque se la lave mil veces con distintos jabones, un olor que no responde a un perfume determinado, ni a un desodorante, ni al jabon blanco con el que se lavaba cuando todavía había quien la ensuciara.

Humor proved a survival strategy with a humorless father. Where Judge Clemens gravitated to the safety of courts, railroads, and libraries, his son would become a confirmed renegade against institutions and pride himself on a wild, lawless streak.

The father who found humor in nothing spawned a son who found humor in everything. It is easy to see how the aloof Judge Clemens, who hated disorder and was emotionally remote, produced a rebellious, devil-may-care son and left him with an enduring ambivalence toward authority figures.

Billy coughed when the door was opened, an when he coughed he shit thin gruel. This was in accordanc with the Third Law of Motion according to Sir Isaac Newton

This law tells us that for every action there is a reaction which is equal and opposite in direction.
This can be useful in rocketry.

This was a fairly pretty girl, except tha she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano.

How many generations ever had a true chronicler at the deep heart's core?"

…and a sizable group of American writers had by 1934 decided that the cure for what ailed them was solidarity with the working class, the overthrow of the capitalist system, and some kind of revolution, however ill-defined.

Every book of value reflects the prevailing temper of the time during which it was written

Strange to think that we could leave, just as we pleased, stepping on what had been ocean. Animals might come and go, and we could walk across the sea, but the ice led to vaster wilderness, and we were not strong enough to carry our supplies.

“We thought we had set aside great stores, but this winter was longer, colder, and darker than any we had known. We finished our salted meat and rationed our dried cod. As other creatures do in winter, we ate less and slept longer. The nights were so long that it seemed the whole world was asleep.”

I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. For many years, the seasons had largely passed me by, my perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life.

“Maybe the hare's dubious reputation, I thought, has less to do with the hare itself than our habit as humans of persecuting the things that we do not understand, and our own conflicted natures.”

“each day the leveret enchanted me with its even, gentle temper and unwavering sweetness of character”