Lorna > Recent Status Updates

“The fog of San Francisco, that cold, identity-cleansing mist that rolls over the city every day, explains better than anything else why that city is what it is.”

“The architecture of Middlesex was an attempt to rediscover pure origins.”

“In the distance, lit by the rising sun, was the skyline of New York. It wasn’t the right shape for a city—no domes, no minarets—it took them a minute to process the tall geometric forms. Most curled off the bay. A million pink windowpanes glittered. Closer, crowned with her own sun rays and dressed like a classical Greek, the Statue of Liberty welcomed them.”

“Pauline believed that marriage was an interweaving of souls, while Michael viewed it as two people traveling side by side but separately.”

“I’m singing from the heart of Mississippi!” she cried. “One of the former slave capitals of this country. The state that made the great Ms. Nina Simone sing ‘Mississippi Goddamn’! Don’t tell me to go slow no more! I don’t have the time.”

”She knew that the estates as old as Tranquility—whether they stood in the North or the South—away held secrets.”

“ . . . It was John Cummings, a Louisiana trial lawyer, who first tried this on a large scale, with the Whitney Plantation near New Orleans. That was a sugar plantation. . . They’ve done some powerful work down there, especially with sculpture to portray how slavery affected children. It’ll take your breath away. People have no clue what slavery truly was in this country.”

“Anyway the thing was done. He supposed he felt a sort of Shakespearean conviction about the rightness of his actions on this day. For if a man wasn’t willing to kill to be king. . . He had no business on the throne.”

“That’s Neil Young. ‘Southern Man.’”

“But I have so often found in the South, mysteries that date back more than 150 years retain the power to wreck families and destroy fortunes, even today, when almost ever vice is permitted. In so doing, they teach us things we desperately need to learn. This is one of those tales.”

We must heed Thomas Jefferson, who said: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

“This duty always to reflect on your rulings is not indecision. It is fidelity to your oath.”

“Judges must endeavor to understand what is at stake in our decisions, no matter how complex the issue.”

“It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”

“In this wonderful and intoxicating way all of Paris defiled past them like a great glittering toy, a splendid map of rich, luxurious shops and great cafes, an animated and beautiful design of a million gay and fascinating people, all bent on pleasure, all filled with joy, all with something so
vivid, bright, particular and incomparable about them that the whole vast pattern resolved . . . “

“More and more I am convinced that to be a great writer a man must be something of an ass. I read of Tolstoy that he read no newspapers, that he went away and lived among peasants for 7 years at a time, and that for six years he read nothing except the novels of Dumas. Yet such a man could write great books. I almost think that because of this that he did.”

“Such a man is Samuel Taylor Coleridge. To me, he is not one of the great English poets. He is The Poet. To me he has not to make obeisance at the throne of any other monarch—he is there by Shakespeare and Milton and Spenser.”

”So did that great treasure of unread, purchased, and forgotten books speak to him in the silent watches of the night, as they stood there, lonely, small and bought, obn a rich man’s shelf.”

“And above all else, the Hudson River was like the light—oh, more than anything it was the light, the light, the tone, the texture of the magic light in which he had seen the city as a child, that made the Hudson River wonderful.”

“So had their hundred voices welled up from the earth and called to him, their son and brother, above the pounding of the mighty wheels that roared above them. And the memory of their words, their triumphant tongue of deathless silence, and the full weight of the inheritance . . out of the earth into the swarming canyons and the million tongues of the unceasing, the fabulous, the million-footed city.”

“It was the beginning of that dark time of blood and crime, and terror which the years of prohibition brought and which was to leave its hideous mutilation not only upon the soul and conscience of the nation, but upon the lives of millions of people—particularly the young everywhere.”

“The great hands had a stony sculptured and yet living strength and vitality, as if Michelangelo had carved them.”