Jim > Recent Status Updates

There is something flame-like and anti-constructive in the Arab, with his pastoral habits and contempt of forethought.

And here they kneel, candle in hand, on the wet flags of this foetid and malodorous cave, gazing in rapture upon the blandly beaming idol, their sensibilities tickled by resplendent priests reciting full-mouthed Latin phrases, while the organ overhead plays wheezy extracts from “La Forza del Destino” or the Waltz out of Boito’s “Mefistofele”... for sure, it must be a foretaste of Heaven!

And Bianca was a blonde with no inhibitions, married to the Marquis de La Froid-Désire. Bianca was also utterly naive about men—a rare woman, indeed. So rare in fact that, defying the basic prejudices of a Catholic country, she had permitted herself to become mistress to a bishop.

We ourselves may never see this cottonwood reach maturity, probably will never take pleasure in its shade or birds or witness the pale gold of its autumn leaves. But somebody will. Something will.

“If you will take me for your wife, Walter, I will love you dearly. If
you will let me go with you, Walter, I will go to the world’s end
without fear. I can give up nothing for you—I have nothing to resign,
and no one to forsake; but all my love and life shall be devoted to
you, and with my last breath I will breathe your name to God if I have
sense and memory left.”

The wind was blowing drearily. The lamps looked pale, and shook as if
they were cold. There was a distant glimmer of something that was not
quite darkness, rather than of light, in the sky; and foreboding night
was shivering and restless, as the dying are who make a troubled end.

The dress had savage retribution in
it as such dresses ever have, and made her infinitely older and more
hideous than her greasy flannel gown. But Mrs Skewton tried it on with
mincing satisfaction; smirked at her cadaverous self in the glass, as
she thought of its killing effect upon the Major; and suffering her
maid to take it off again, and to prepare her for repose, tumbled into
ruins like a house of painted cards

Thus, with no one to advise her—for she could advise with no one
without seeming to complain against him—gentle Florence tossed on an
uneasy sea of doubt and hope; and Mr Carker, like a scaly monster of
the deep, swam down below, and kept his shining eye upon her.

Florence lived alone in the great dreary house, and day succeeded day, and still she lived alone; and the blank walls looked down upon her with a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare her youth and beauty into stone.

Day after day, old Sol and Captain Cuttle kept her reckoning in the
little back parlour and worked out her course, with the chart spread
before them on the round table. At night, when old Sol climbed
upstairs, so lonely, to the attic where it sometimes blew great guns,
he looked up at the stars and listened to the wind, and kept a longer
watch than would have fallen to his lot on board the ship.

There was no light nonsense about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore spectacles. She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages. None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead—stone dead—and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul.

Polly, old 'ooman, whatever you do, my darling, hold up your head and fight low. That's the only rule as I know on, that'll carry anyone through life.

"How came my father, Harry Shelton, by his death?"
"I tell you I know not."
"Then ye shall die unshriven. Here am I, and here shall stay. There shall no priest come near you, rest assured. For of what avail is penitence, an ye have no mind to right those wrongs ye had a hand in? and without penitence, confession is but mockery."

If you really want a woman to love you, then you have to dance. And if you don't want to dance, then you're going to have to work extra hard to make a woman love you forever, and you will always run the risk that she will leave you at any second for a man who knows how to tango.

The trouble was, the trolls up in the plaza probably weren't bad trolls, and the dwarfs down in the square probably weren't bad dwarfs, either. People who probably weren't bad could kill you.

Do not ... what do they call it ,,, go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. Then go postal. But with precision.

I'm watching Ronald Jumps the Train speed-shop through Safeway. He crams his cart with all the quick-to-cook, quickly eaten, and sweetish crap that crystal meth tweakers often devour.

One time in Siverskaya I saw an airplane taking off from a poorly mown field. As it sped up along the runway, the aviator drove around potholes, bounced on hillocks, and—oh, joy!—suddenly ended up in the air. Watching that machine move spasmodically around the field, frankly, nobody expected flight. But the aviator took off.

Thinking about my thawing, I—in light of the number of years that passed—ask myself: did my thawing become the resurrection of an entire generation? After all, any detail that I can now recall automatically becomes a detail of the time. And perhaps this is not a matter of detail but the whole? Maybe I really was resurrected in order that all of us grasp once again what happened to us....

'You have only two paths,' Muromtsev uttered in a monotone, 'and both appear to lead to death.'
At least he was honest. I shrugged my shoulders.
'All paths lead to death.'

Paradise is the absence of time. If time stops, there will be no more events. Nonevents will remain. The pine trees will remain, brown and gnarled below, smooth and amber at the top. The squeak of the gate, a child's muffled crying at the next dacha, the first pounding of rain on the veranda roof ... all the things that changes in government and the falls of empires do not wipe out.

'It seems the struggle for happiness doesn't inspire you much, does it?' Valentina asked me.
'Basically, only tragedy comes from that,' I said.

Raoul de Frescas is a young man who, in our pig-stye, has remained as pure and undefiled as an angel. He is our conscience; then again he is my creation; I am, all in one, his father and mother, and his Providence to boot.

One day the Sheath and the Dagger got into a quarrel. The Dagger said to the Sheath: "Sheath, my darling, you are a tart, for every day you keep receiving new daggers." The Sheath replied to the Dagger: "My friend Dagger, it is you who are the rascal for every day you change Sheaths." "Sheath, this is not at all what you promised me." "Dagger, you deceived me first."

It's quite evident that I'm not writing a novel for I neglect to use what no novelist would fail to use.He who takes what I am writing for the truth will be, perhaps, less in error than he who takes it for a fable.

He loved being in the city of New Orleans, away from his daddy and his older brother; though they'd never bother a soul again, since Elmer had destroyed both of them . He had chopped his daddy and brother into a total of exactly 100 pieces and buried one piece per acre on the land Herschel Burt owned in Evangeline Parish by Bayou Nezpique.

I was 29. I had survived the 7-year run of inhaler wads and psychoses. I quit booze, weed and pharmaceutical uppers. My new regime was abstinence. It boded horrific. I quit shoplifting and breaking into houses. I had not a spiritual awakening. Brain-screening women's faces had almost killed me.

If the sea's ebb tide has its times (exact to the second), then the ebb tide of being (though not a daily event) must also have its favorite hours, minutes, and even seconds.

Deftly Mia's mother gives the knife another swipe or two beneath the faucet, then places it in the dishwasher, which is two-thirds full of dishes and silverware. No problem for Mia's mother to rapidly punch in the controls, SANITIZE, EXTRA RINSE, set the dishwasher thrumming.

When you are adopted, it is not in your best interest to ask questions why.
To know that you are adopted is the answer to any question you might ask about your adoption.