Jim > Recent Status Updates

Chasing a nighttime mirage on a rain-swept highway has no happy ending for either the quick or the dead.

The truth is most [members of the Mafia] are stupid and at best capable of holding only menial jobs. They use dog-pack intimidation to get what they want, whether it involves preferential seating in a restaurant or taking over a labor union. On a personal level their sexual habits are adolescent or misogynistic, their social behavior inept and laughable.

Wake up, big mon. Rich guys don't care whether the rest of us believe them or not. That's why they're great liars.

This is a portrait of a special place in a special time -- an imaginary city, as i have suggested -- and yet it was the dream factory of the 1940's that created much of what Americans today regard as reality.

It is classical music, and is considered the best and most puzzling ever manufactured. You're supposed to like ir, whether you do or not, and if you don't, the proper thing is to look as if you did. Understand?

O King of Gods, I have known the dreadful dissolution of the universe. I have seen all perish, again and again, at the end of every cycle. At that terrible time, every single atom dissolves into the primal pure waters of eternity, whence originally all arose.

That man is the richest whose pleasures are the cheapest. (March 11, 1856)

I have no time to read newspapers. If you chance to live and move and have your being in that thin stratum in which the events which make the news transpire -- thinner than the paper on which it is printed -- then these things will fill the world for you; but if you soar above or dive below that plane, you cannot remember nor be reminded of them.

Ah, dear nature, the mere remembrance, after a short forgetfulness, of the pine woods! I come to it as a hungry man to a crust of bread.

Notwithstanding a sense of unworthiness which possesses me, not without reason, notwithstanding that I regard myself as a good deal of a scamp, yet for the most part the spirit of the universe is unaccountably kind to me, and I enjoy perhaps an unusual share of happiness.

In winter, when fodder runs short, the Kashmiris pack their [sacred cows] together in a confined space until they begin to sweat, then turn them out into the snow, in the hope that they will catch pneumonia and die.

All around me men and women, stiff as mummies, drank their tea in silence, eyes fixed on the Promenade des Anglais. Maybe they, too, were on the lookout for silhouettes from their past amid this crowd passing before their eyes.

All around me men and women, stiff as mummies, drank their tea in silence, eyes fixed on the Promenade des Anglais. Maybe they, too, were on the lookout for silhouettes from their past amid this crowd passing before their eyes.

There are also impersonal drawings [in the Babylon Lottery], of undefined purpose: one drawing will decree that a sapphire from Taprobane be thrown into the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a bird be released from a tower roof; another, that a grain of sand be withdrawn (or added) to the innumerable grains on a beach. The consequences, sometimes, are terrifying.

It had been stupid of me to answer the phone. It would be the same old story all over again. We'd talk, I'd submit again to nthe power she always had over me, we'd have a brief false idyll, I'd have all kinds of illusions, and when least expected she would disappear and I'd be left battered and bewildered, licking my wounds.... Until the next chapter!

We went fishing the first morning. I felt the same damp moss covering the worms in the bait can, and saw the dragonfly alight on the tip of my rod as it hovered a few inches from the surface of the water, It was the arrival of this fly that convinced me beyond any doubt that everything was as it always has been, that the years were a mirage and that there had been no years.

In the kitchen cabinet is a bag of oranges for morning juice. Each orange is stamped 'Color Added.' The dyeing of an orange to make it orange is man's most impudent gesture to date. It is really an appalling piece of effrontery, carrying the clear implication that Nature doesn't know what she is up to.

The impression one gets from campaign oratory is that the sun revolves around the earth, the earth revolves around the United States, and the United States revolves around whichever city the speaker happens to be in at the moment. This is what a friend of mind used to call the Un-Copernican system.

[Titu Cusi and Manco Inca had resisted] only after the Spaniards had attacked and occupied Tawantinsuyu [what the Inca called their empire], which, from the Incas' point of view, the Spaniards had no right to rule.

With the collapse of the Spanish-Inca military alliance, however, Pizarro and his fellow Spaniards were now exposed for what they really were: a relatively tiny group of increasingly desperate foreign invaders.

According to the logic of sixteenth-century Spanish jurisprudence, by refusing to submit to the Spaniards and by throwing to the ground a black object with fine squiggles [a breviary] on its leaves that he had no way of understanding, Atahualpa had immediately forfeited his rights to the Inca empire.

Humans are export destroyers, because we've developed so many efficient ways to kill things off. We slaughter them outright, as we did with the woolly mammoth. We destroy their habitat by turning forests into farmland and paving meadows into strip malls.

... the realization that knowledge led either to wholesale illusion or to irrational depression ...

[T]he whole of human history is no more than the histrionics of of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success.

Contrary to what anyone might think, it had not escaped Valuska's notice, the evidence being so readily available, that everyone he met was preoccupied by the notion of 'the collapse into anarchy,' a state that, in the general opinion, was no longer avoidable.

[P]eople were liable to detect traces of an equally passionate drift towards chaos, and —quite rightly—suspect that the powers unleashed, instead of protecting that which was irrecoverably dead and buried, would smash it to pieces in the good cause of replacing the featureless boredom of their selfish lives with 'the elevating passion of communal action.'

Her eyes were extraordinarily light, a clearer blue even than Valentine's, but as empty as the sky earlier when Maigret had hoped to see the green ray.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine.

In the end, nearly all our roads lead us to Troy. Agamemnon of Mycenae, Menelaus of Sparta, Diomedes of Argos, Nestor of Pylos, Achilles of Phthia, and Odysseus of Ithaca fought to capture it. Iphigenia was sacrificed to gain fair winds for Troy.