Cheap Thrills Quotes

I enjoy the wild things, Call me at 3 am and tell me you're waiting at my door. Give me sunsets in different cities and road trips on dirt tracks not sighted on maps. Whiskey for breakfast & cheap thrills for dinner. Give me happiness in a smile and nothing of certainty but the way we make eachother feel. There so much life in living while you're alive & id give absolutely anything to have it all with you.

People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jack rabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then....No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

It’s normal to like guys who seem to like you; it’s normal to want to be loved.” Kami raised her eyebrows. “I’m sixteen,” she said. “I’m not looking for love.” “Oh,” said Liz. “Uh, what are you looking for?” “Cheap thrills, mostly,” said Kami.

Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.

I surveyed the others, who had all stopped in their tracks. "So what was the plan, boys? You were all going to get a fuck in? The very definition of sloppy seconds - hell, sloppy thirds and fourths and fifths. Than what? Slit my throat? Leave me for dead? Let some school janitor find me stuffed in a dumpster? You would deny my children their mother for one night of cheap thrills?

Is This Happiness" High up in the Hollywood Hills taking violet pills Writing all of my songs about my cheap thrills You're a hard man to love and I'm A hard woman to keep track of You like to rage, don't do that You want your way, you make me so mad Got your gun, I've got my dad Is this happiness? Is this happiness? Is this happiness? Is this happiness? High up in the Hollywood Hills crushing violet pills You've been trying to write a novel about your cheap thrills You think you're Hunter S. Thompson I think you're fucking crazy as the day's long Man to man, heart to heart I love you but you drive me so far Wish you well on that star Is this happiness? Is this happiness? Is this happiness? Is this happiness? Witch Hazel, Witch Hazel Betrayal, betrayal One gun on the table Headshot if you're able Is this happiness? Is this happiness? Is this happiness? Is this happiness?

We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose: It drives us to accumulate better data. This attitude is the difference between science and so much else. Science offers little in the way of cheap thrills. The standards of evidence are strict. But when followed they allow us to see far, illuminating even a great darkness.

Let us not neglect the forbidden. Let us not sophisticate ourselves out of the cheap thrill and chill of it: the story told for perversity's sake, and all the better for that; the image created because an artist gets tired of reasons sometimes, and wants to dredge up some picture he's been haunted by, and parade it like a new tattoo. I go with it, readily.

I am crouched in the trashy novel section, looking for cheap thrills and deep skills.

You say glory, necessity, pride; I say barbarity, greed, arrogance. War is a search for glory, for that particular sense of joy and satisfaction that comes from staking one's life on the outcome of a gamble. The search for a cheap thrill, with a cost too dear for Midas, and on a pretext that, more or less, amounts to 'My neighbour has a thing. I want it.

And what exactly are we starting?” I ask. “Don’t play games right now, Melissa. Babe, you know just as good as I do that me and you are happening. This isn’t some cheap thrill. You feel it, but if you need me to remind you, just let me know.

Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

The chase and the cheap thrills don't last long.

This is Nightside," said Deadboy. "We do ten impossible things before breakfast, just fora cheap thrill. Abandon all taboos, ye who enter here.

It may very well be that the frotteurist is a helpless victim in the clutches of his obsession, but it’s equally possible that he’s simply a bored creep looking for a cheap thrill.

A daffodil bulb will divide and redivide endlessly. That's why, like the peony, it is one of the few flowers you can find around abandoned farmhouses, still blooming and increasing in numbers fifty years after the farmer and his wife have moved to heaven, or the other place, Boca Raton. If you dig up a clump when no one is nearby and there is no danger of being shot, you'll find that there are scores of little bulbs in each clump, the progeny of a dozen or so planted by the farmer's wife in 1942. If you take these home, separate them, and plant them in your own yard, within a couple of years, you'll have a hundred daffodils for the mere price of a trespassing fine or imprisonment or both. I had this adventure once, and I consider it one of the great cheap thrills of my gardening career. I am not advocating trespassing, especially on my property, but there is no law against having a shovel in the trunk of your car.

I’ve spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives . . . No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenaline rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.

I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody -- you're all so bored. You've 'ad nature explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the living body explained to you and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the universe explained to you and you're bored with it. So now you just want cheap thrills and like plenty of 'em, and it dun't matter 'ow tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new, as long as it's new, as long as it flashes and fuckin' bleeps in forty fuckin' different colours. Well, whatever else you can say about me, I'm not fuckin' bored!

Public displays of inappropriate behavior are a favorite hobby of mine, a cheap thrill.

Exceptional men don't cheat on their wives. They don't have affairs. They don't put a cheap thrill ahead of their children.

Countless souls are starving to death around the world, yet you keep wasting heaps of money on alcohol, cigarettes and cheap thrills - how can you be so nonchalant, my friend!

He’s also likely to try and get into your knickers, so be warned.” It had been a while since anyone had been in my knickers aside from me, and the thought gave me a cheap thrill.

Metal is starter-pack rock. It works as both a gateway to other forms of modern pop, via volume, speed, and power, and as a model of pure escapism—the roar of the fairground, the cheap thrills of the slasher movie, sex, and horror. Besides,

You know what goes on in this world. They don't understand. They don't see that long after their laughter subsides, in search of the next cheap thrill, their victims are still hearing the taunts in their heads. A cacophony of degrading noise, poisoning perception.

Was I bored? No, I wasn't fuckin' bored. I'm never bored. That's the trouble with everybody – you're all so bored. You've 'ad nature explained to you, and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the living body explained to you, and you're bored with it. You've 'ad the universe explained to you, and you're bored with it. So now you just want cheap thrills and like plenty of 'em, and it dun matter 'ow tawdry or vacuous they are as long as it's new, as long as it's new, as long as it flashes and fucking bleeps in forty different colours.

But if you cross me again Akil, so-help-me, I’ll find a way to kill you this time.” His eyes lit up at the prospect, as though he’d accepted a challenge I didn’t even know I’d laid down. “I’d expect nothing less.” Demons; only they can get a cheap thrill from a death threat.

Those who say traveling is expensive, are just ill-informed.

Would you like to tie my hands and drag me out like your prisoner? You’ll look like the hero, and I might get a cheap thrill. - Kip to Abbey -

When it came to Lydia, boys just wanted a cheap thrill: to meet a beautiful, crazy girl in the dark and hope she didn’t bring an axe.

If some pleasure is promised to you and it seductively calls to you, step back and give yourself some time before mindlessly jumping at it. Dispassionately turn the matter over in your mind: Will this pleasure bring but a momentary delight, or real, lasting satisfaction? It makes a difference in the quality of our life and the kind of person we become when we learn how to distinguish between cheap thrills and meaningful, lasting rewards.

and downcast, as many compromisers are. They want to be blessed, but they don’t choose to do what is right, and they live with the burden of a guilty conscience. They want the rewards of righteousness and the momentary fleshly pleasure of sin, which is not possible. People sometimes pay a high price for a cheap thrill.

A cowboy is someone who loves his work. Since the hours are long—ten to fifteen hours a day—and the pay is $30 he has to. What's required of him is an odd mixture of physical vigor and maternalism. His part of the beef-raising industry is to birth and nurture calves and take care of their mothers. For the most part his work is done on horseback and in a lifetime he sees and comes to know more animals than people. The iconic myth surrounding him is built on American notions of heroism: the index of a man's value as measured in physical courage. Such ideas have perverted manliness into a self-absorbed race for cheap thrills. In a rancher's world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting spontaneously—usually on behalf of an animal or another rider. If a cow is stuck in a bog hole he throws a loop around her neck, takes his dally (a half hitch around the saddle horn), and pulls her out with horsepower. If a calf is born sick, he may take her home, warm her in front of the kitchen fire, and massage her legs until dawn. One friend, whose favorite horse was trying to swim a lake with hobbles on, dove under water and cut her legs loose with a knife, then swam her to shore, his arm around her neck lifeguard-style, and saved her from drowning. Because these incidents are usually linked to someone or something outside himself, the westerner's courage is selfless, a form of compassion.

Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over. They’re shallow, empty, boring people who couldn’t give you five minutes of interesting conversation if you had the piss-poor luck to be at a party full of them. Maybe some can be monkey-clever some of the time, but they aren’t hardly ever smart. God must surely want us to laugh at these fools, because

The whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion. The history of the garden says it all, beautifully. There’s an engraving of Sidley Park in 1730 that makes you want to weep. Paradise in the age of reason. By 1760 everything had gone – the topiary, pools and terraces, fountains, an avenue of limes – the whole sublime geometry was ploughed under by Capability Brown. The grass went from the doorstep to the horizon and the best box hedge in Derbyshire was dug up for the ha-ha so that the fools could pretend they were living in God’s countryside. And then Richard Noakes came in to bring God up to date. By the time he’d finished it looked like this (the sketch book). The decline from thinking to feeling, you see.

The winds of change blew through the dream factories of make-believe, tore at its crinoline tatters ... The hedonists, the homosexuals, the hemophiliac bleeding hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who substituted shock for talent, all cried: "Shake 'em! Rattle 'em! God is dead. Long live pleasure! Nudity? Yea! Wife-swapping? Yea! Liberate the world from prudery. Emancipate our films from morality!" ... Kill for thrill—shock! Shock! To hell with the good in man, Dredge up his evil—shock! Shock! "Practically all the Hollywood film-making of today is stooping to cheap salacious pornography in a crazy bastardization of a great art to compete for the 'patronage' of deviates and masturbators.

The universe gives what the universe gives, yes. Cheap thrills, plenty of those, enough to get you through until Halloween when the Catholic school girls come out in full force and wink as they ask you to spank them (they’ve been very naughty). I’m going to sleep now and dream of deeper waters with treasure at the bottom. This junk has rendered me catatonic. I’m a mermaid, goddamn it, not the tooth fairy existing solely to place silver dollars beneath your crybaby pillow.

I took the elevator to the fourth floor, walked down the cheap green paint hallways and found the dark-red peeling wooden door of 4G. I put the key in the lock, opened the door and felt the thrill of impending adulthood and freedom. For all of thirty seconds.

Now she could look back down the long years and see herself in green flowered dimity, standing in the sunshine at Tara, thrilled by the young horseman with his blond hair shining like a silver helmet. She could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers. And so he, too, would have become cheap if, in those first far-away days, she had ever had the satisfaction of refusing to marry him. If she had ever had him at her mercy, seen him grown passionate, importunate, jealous, sulky, pleading, like the other boys, the wild infatuation which had possessed her would have passed, blowing away as lightly as mist before sunshine and light wind when she met a new man.

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It’s not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It’s not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It’s not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it’s the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn’t matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they’re what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books – for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We’re part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you’re surrounded by this shit – to every side a reminder that we don’t want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you’re buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff – history, science, economics – provided they can stick ‘pop.’ in front of it, they’ll stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It’s the new world – we don’t want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they’re on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they’re somewhere between gallery and museum.

The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them—smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Why? Because they want to! They derive pleasure from it, or a thrill, or just a break from the daily humdrum. And getting them to change their behavior, even with a fiercely rational argument, isn’t easy.

popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

Not all love is comprehended in such a description, but the sickening obsession which thrills the nervous frames of the heroines of great love-affairs whether in cheap ‘romance’ comic-papers or in hard-back novels of passionate wooing is just that. Women must recognize in the cheap ideology of being in love the essential persuasion to take an irrational and self-destructive step. Such obsession has nothing to do with love, for love is not swoon, possession or mania, but ‘a cognitive act, indeed the only way to grasp the innermost core of personality.

The Emperor believed that these tyrannical methods had been necessary in order to forge the thriving, modern nation that France had finally become. He was so proud of his various accomplishments that he had even taken notes for a novel that he planned to write about a grocer named Benoit who returns to France after many years in America to discover the jaw-dropping wonders and Utopian delights of the Second Empire. Expecting to find misery and poverty, Benoit is thrilled and impressed by France's universal suffrage, by its cheap consumer products, its telegraph and railway systems, its well-paid soldiers, convalescent homes, pensions for disabled priests, and by any number of other enlightened social policies overseen by the Emperor."11

Don't Stop Believing Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world She took the midnight train goin' anywhere... Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit He took the midnight train goin' anywhere... A singer in a smoky room, the smell of wine and cheap perfume For a smile they can share the night It goes on and on and on and on... Strangers, waiting, up and down the boulevard Their shadows searching in the night Streetlight people, living just to find emotion Hiding, somewhere in the night Working hard to get my fill, everybody wants a thrill Payin' anything to roll the dice, Just one more time Some will win, some will lose Some were born to sing the blues Oh, the movie never ends It goes on and on and on and on Strangers, waiting, up and down the boulevard Their shadows searching in the night Streetlight people, living just to find emotion Hiding, somewhere in the night Don't stop believin' Hold on to that feelin' Streetlight people Don't stop believin' Hold on to that feelin' Streetlight people Don't stop believin' Hold on to that feelin' Streetlight people

Once upon a time I'd left Los Angeles and been swallowed down the throat of a life in which my sole loyalty was to my tongue. My belly. Myself. My mother called me selfish and so selfish I became. From nineteen to twenty-five I was a mouth, sating. For myself I made three-day braises and chose the most marbled meats, I played loose with butter and cream. My arteries were young, my life pooling before me, and I lapped, luxurious, from it. I drank, smoked, flew cheap red-eyes around Europe, I lived in thrilling shitholes, I found pills that made nights pass in a blink or expanded time to a soap bubble, floating, luminous, warm. Time seemed infinite, then. I begged famous chefs for the chance to learn from them. I entered competitions and placed in a few. I volunteered to work brunch, turn artichokes, clean the grease trap. I flung my body at all of it: the smoke and singe of the grill station, a duck's breast split open like a geode, two hundred oysters shucked in the walk-in, sex in the walk-in, drunken rides around Paris on a rickety motorcycle and no helmet, a white truffle I stole and shaved in secret over a bowl of Kraft mac n' cheese for me, just me, as my body strummed the high taut selfish song of youth. On my twenty-fifth birthday I served black-market fugu to my guests, the neurotoxin stinging sweetly on my lips as I waited to see if I would, by eating, die. At that age I believed I knew what death was: a thrill, like brushing by a friend who might become a lover.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

There is a high price for cheap thrills.

This is not a game, and I am tired of people around here forgetting where they put their nuts!’ Frank draws the attention of the officers gawking at the TV set; waiting for Connor to start streaming again.

The cheap thrill. The ball through the goal posts. The titillation of bosoms on the Internet. These are easy ways to fleeting, surface rreaction. Art does not come cheaply, ladies and gentlemen. One must nurture the soul in order to grow ones appreciation for beauty. For aesthetic. If we care more about sport than the very foundation of humanity, we are doomed.

It was not the money that was my main motive; it was the challenge and the thrill where I got my kicks. Armed robbery to me was like a sport. To take on an armored vehicle with two armed security guards—it was like an athlete attending the Olympic Games.

Since Esmond had died, she'd been wary about 'dating'. Having not done it for so long she was unsure what was expected. Two adults, well past their teenage years, could behave as promiscuously as they chose, only she wanted to have love in the mix of seduction, not just a cheap thrill. Was that asking too much?

Prayer frees us from FOMO, the busybody life. It is liberating when we realize that the burden of all-knowing is one we were never meant to bear, one we can resist and let go as we rest in the joy of knowing God and being known by him.8 The serpent’s lie doesn’t lead us toward joy but toward a restless life of wanting, but never finding, control. God, in Christ, offers us a deep rest. We don’t have to worry about missing a conversation or a conflict. We can lay down the futile attempt to be the most informed person in the room. Because the quick thrill of being in the know is a cheap substitute for the peace of knowing the One who created us and rescues us from our fruitless pursuits and is leading us toward a place where our longings to know and be known will be fully realized.

The Abu Ghraib debacle showed American soldiers not as liberators but as tormentors, not as professionals but as sadists getting cheap thrills.

You know what I mean. You were a pro athlete. You probably had a lot of women. I thought maybe, well, it would be a fun fling. A physical thing. And then, afterwards, maybe I’d find someone nice. Does that make sense?” “I think so,” Myron said. “You just wanted me for my body.” “Pretty much, yeah.” “I feel so cheap,” he said. “Or is it thrilled? Let’s go with thrilled.” That made her smile. “Please don’t take offense.” “No offense taken.” Then: “Hussy.” She laughed. The sound was melodic.

I want you to fight for my heart just like I’m going to fight for yours. I don’t want a cheap thrill with you. I just want to show you what’s real and I want it in return because that’s what I’ve been looking for.” “But

With cheap thrills, you get what you pay for—here today, gone tomorrow. Life

Mass culture or the New culture is Fake culture. It is devoid of meaning. It provides one with an illusory sense of liberty, making us believe that one is throwing off old shackles but it is in no way liberation. Mass culture tells people to just give up, go along, smile and 'be happy'. Perhaps on some level for some, this can be happiness, for those who do not have an inclination to strive for something more. But there are many people whose hearts cannot be bought by cheap thrills, or religion, or New Age, the crypto-media, mass education, the Left-Right paradigm, or limited hangout conspiracy theories. This is a corrupt system of lies which is oiled by the blood, sweat, and tears of their deceived and their deceased. The system is a web, and as time moves on, it becomes perfected, until it eventually becomes a net that catches us within its grasp so that we won't get out. One must have a strong inner fire, a strong inner space, not a weak inner space, to save yourself. Play the long game. Do the right thing. True success is survival. Culture is steel. It explores the greater depths of the Mystery, in the Universe, and in the Soul – Matter and Spirit. It is a shared inner space of a Folk creating the outer world through its radiance. A strong inner space that brings value and perspective. It is opposed to the weak inner space of today which is of trivia and degeneracy. We must be in a state of resurgence to find our real culture. We must find it in the universe and in ourselves.

I never saw God, nor do I pretend to have any special insights. What you will see in this book are snapshots of God, not a complete film. This book is presented in an omnibus style and does not have to be read in precise, sequential order. What you will see is one man’s glimpses of God—images along the road of life. I do not represent myself as a theologian or a guru. There are no cheap thrills here for the spiritually bankrupt masses. It is my scrapbook of the highest power through dreams, memories, and stories, much like the ancient texts.

The Germans, anyway a hysterical race, are now almost maddened by overwork—particularly in the management class. They spend their days in their offices and then roar off down the autobahns. They fall asleep at eighty miles an hour, and their cars tear across the middle section, head-on into cars in the opposite lane, or dive off the shoulders of the roads into the trees. To prevent this, the drivers munch Pervitin or Preludin to keep themselves awake, thus submerging their exhaustion and heightening their tension. Heart disease, accelerated by over-eating food cooked in the universal cheap frying-fat, carries them off in their early fifties,

Ascribing meaning to life, if not sincere, is nothing more than a cheap thrill-ride for the soul.

LIFE AND DEATH ARE CHEAP BUT THRILLING; MONEY AND SMILE ARE CHEAP BUT THRILLING; ANGER AND FRIENDSHIP ARE CHEAP BUT THRILLING; LOVE AND MEMORY ARE CHEAP BUT THRILLING; PLEASURE AND RAINBOW ARE CHEAP BUT THRILLING; PAST AND FAILURE ARE CHEAP BUT THRILLING; GHOST AND FEAR ARE CHEAP BUT THRILLING

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

It was no wonder Dustin immersed himself in his horror movies. It was something different, something to distract him from the boredom — a cheap thrill.

can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries. This one smelled unlike any book I’d ever held. Cinnamon and coal smoke, catacombs and loam. Damp seaside evenings and sweat-slick noontimes beneath palm fronds. It smelled as if it had been in the mail for longer than any one parcel could be, circling the world for years and accumulating layers of smells like a tramp wearing too many clothes. It smelled like adventure itself had been harvested in the wild, distilled to a fine wine, and splashed across each page.

Life Lessons Everything begins with an intention. Our destiny is shaped by our earnest intentions. Our intentions are shaped by our deepest desires. Every building was initially only an intention in the mind of the architect. That is why it is said that we build our destiny using the bricks of our intentions. To change one’s destiny, one should begin by inspecting the seed of one’s intentions. After all, intentions are more important than actions. When you sow the seed of your intention in the field of possibilities, you can grow the crop of your destiny. Many people lament a bad crop of destiny. This is because they have never spent time curating their intentions. When you plant bad seeds, you harvest a bad crop. We often set out to do something but get distracted from our goals over cheap thrills. Good intentions come from focussing on the goal, not on cheap thrills. Distractions destroy true intentions.

So willing — eager, almost — to shed our rich culture for the cheap thrill of being seen as American. Thinking that if one day they accumulated enough stuff, if they learned to act the right way, they could be seen as the same. And because of course, white America will never see them as equal, they die owning lots of things, but having lost themselves.

The soil, where family seeds are laid in this city, is rotten. Boys and men still believe in the illusion that their crowning achievements are sleeping with as many women as they can. The more women, the more they are revered as a man. They are left in the dark, completely oblivious to the truth that a part of them is given away or dies with every meaningless sexual exploit. The ignorant remain content until one day, and that day may come when they are on their deathbed, where the veil is removed and the harsh reality slaps them with a sobering truth. And that truth, wrapped with regret, sucks the nectar out of all the names, the faces, the bodies, the women who they thought they conquered. They are left free-falling in a never-ending pit. It could be in a flash, and time and space no longer hold ground. That split second will feel like their entire lifetime. That never-ending pit is their hell. As for the girls and women, they too are lost souls. They dive into a virtual world of selfies, likes, hearts and fire emojis. They get chased by men, their sense of self-worth builds to a crescendo, filling them with a sense of desire. A sense of being wanted. The dopamine, the deceitful dopamine, gives them a false sense of value. They lose sight of the difficult “real world” questions: What am I worth? What is my purpose? What are my principles? They lose themselves in pixels and scrolls. It starts with a selfie and pouchy lips. Then a collarbone. Then the breasts. Then the ass. This never-ending loop of reward tricks them into baring themselves naked, physically and emotionally, for men behind a screen to admire. They buy into the idea that every man desires them. They entertain them. And they do. Only for a brief period of time. Then time starts plotting. They get old. The same breasts that got likes and drooling emoji faces from men start to sag. Her ass no longer the peach standard emoji. Her womb, no longer able to bear children. She is left empty. Hollow. All of those likes, comments and meaningless nights with men who do not even remember her name leave her shattered. They gave in their youth for cheap thrills unaware that Father Time comes after every living soul. They then too plunge into that never-ending pit with the men they lived a lie in. That also becomes their hell.

Whatever your politics, whatever you think about the outcome of the election, we as Americans must all agree on this. Donald Trump’s conduct on January sixth was a supreme violation of his oath of office and a complete dereliction of his duty to our nation. It is a stain on our history. It is a dishonor to all those who have sacrificed and died in service of our democracy. When we present our full findings, we will recommend changes to laws and policies to guard against another January sixth. The reason that’s imperative is that the forces Donald Trump ignited that day have not gone away. The militant, intolerant ideologies, the militias, the alienation and the disaffection, the weird fantasies and disinformation, they’re all still out there ready to go. That’s the elephant in the room. But if January sixth has reminded us of anything, I pray it reminded us of this: laws are just words on paper. They mean nothing without public servants dedicated to the rule of law and who are held accountable by a public that believes oaths matter—oaths matter more than party tribalism or the cheap thrill of scoring political points. We the people must demand more of our politicians and ourselves. Oaths matter.

those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles—understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn’t about reading the words; it’s about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-color prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, of literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

In a way, the boys- is- what makes a girl popular… to a point; and the popular girls are what displays which guys you want to be with. Yes, like girls want to have what is already been taken, it’s the challenge of taking them away from another girl. Just like girls that have popular girlfriends, before you… they can get you higher up on the invisible list if you fall for them as they want, and by hooking you up. Why because they have been there already. How you get popular is all on you. Plus, what you’re willing to do and willing to give up. If you have no friends or don’t know the predominant boys in your life, then you’re not going to be as prevalent in high school. If you fall to your knees and party your ass off, you just might rank on the list. Like I said- what you give, is what you get. Popularity and hooking up, all go hand and hand. (#-Hashtag: cheap thrills, one-night stands, and what happened to just hold hands)

In a way, the boys- is- what makes a girl popular… to a point; and the popular girls are what displays which guys you want to be with. Yes, like girls want to have what is already been taken, it’s the challenge of taking them away from another girl. Just like girls that have popular girlfriends, before you… they can get you higher up on the invisible list if you fall for them as they want, and by hooking you up. Why because they have been there already. How you get popular is all on you. Plus, what you’re willing to do and willing to give up. If you have no friends or don’t know the predominant boys in your life, then you’re not going to be as prevalent in high school. If you fall to your knees and party your ass off, you just might rank on the list. Like I said- what you give, is what you get. Popularity and hooking up, all go hand and hand. (#-Hashtag: cheap thrills, one-night stands, and what happened to just holding hands)

When Ethel Merman belted out “You’re the Top” even though Uncle Joe and I were two miles away in the cheap seats, it was thrilling but maybe a little too loud. What a voice! They said she could hold a note longer than the Chase National Bank.

In the 1920s, Anglo-American medicine was praised for its political independence...especially in comparison to the USSR and Lysenkoism. In the 2020s, Anglo-American science is mocked around the world for exchanging empirical observation for the cheap thrill of political relevance.

If your pre-Frugal Hedonism socialising revolved mostly around eating out, bars, and movies, it’s time to seed your social life with a whole new crop of cheap thrills. Bring people wild berry picking with you! Invite them along to catch a train to the beach for a day. Hold a story-telling night. Play ultimate Frisbee, or chess. Take a long ramble with a friend and a dog – maybe make a date to do it weekly. Invite people round for casual dinners, lunches, breakfast and picnics. Offer to ask someone you know for help with taking up the cuffs on a pair of pants, an IT problem, or a trombone lesson. Then eat lunch together.

Much of Brennan’s early work was on the Universal Pictures lot, including Spangles (November 7, 1926), in which he plays a lunch counterman. More importantly, he was able to watch, for the first time, the great Cecil B. DeMille in action. A decade later the director would award Brennan one of his best roles in The Buccaneer. Although Universal made high quality films using important filmmakers like DeMille, it was better known as a producer of “programmers,” cheap action films with lots of thrills. Established in 1912, Universal was the oldest studio, and, as film historian Thomas Schatz puts it, “a world unto itself, a self-contained municipality devoted exclusively to making motion pictures. There were restaurants and shops and even a police force.” Universal had factory-size production facilities, including a shooting stage sixty-five feet by three hundred feet. There was no better place for Walter Brennan to get work and learn his trade in every kind of genre film.

Jesus prevents us from thinking that life is a matter of ideas to ponder or concepts to discuss. Jesus saves us from wasting our lives in the pursuit of cheap thrills and trivializing diversions. Jesus enables us to take seriously who we are and where we are without being seduced by the intimidating lies and illusions that fill the air, so that we needn't be someone else or somewhere else. Jesus keeps our feet on the ground, attentive to children, in conversation with ordinary people, sharing meals with friends and strangers, listening to the wind, observing the wildflowers, touching the sick and wounded, praying simply and unselfconsciously. Jesus insists that we deal with God right here and now, in the place we find ourselves and with the people we are with. Jesus is God here and now.

Reading, the cheapest adventure money can buy...

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

I have often tried in dreams to be the kind of imposing individual the Romantics imagined themselves to be, and whenever I have, I’ve always ended up laughing out loud at myself for even giving house-room to such an idea. After all, the homme fatal exists in the dreams of all ordinary men, and romanticism is merely the turning inside out of our normal daily selves. In the most secret part of their being, all men dream of ruling over a great empire, with all men their subjects, all women theirs for the asking, adored by all the people and (if they are inferior men) of all ages … Few are as accustomed to dreaming as I am and so are not lucid enough to laugh at the aesthetic possibility of nurturing such dreams. The most serious criticism of romanticism has not yet been made, namely, that it represents the inner truth of human nature, an externalization of what lies deepest in the human soul, but made concrete, visible, even possible, if being possible depends on something other than Fate, and its excesses, its absurdities, its various ploys for moving and seducing people, all stem from that. Even I who laugh at the seductive traps laid by the imagination often find myself imagining how wonderful it would be to be famous, how gratifying to be loved, how thrilling to be a success! And yet I can never manage to see myself in those exulted roles without hearing a guffaw from the other “I” I always keep as close to me as a street in the Baixa. Do I imagine myself famous? Only as a famous bookkeeper. Do I fancy myself raised up onto the thrones of celebrity? This fantasy only ever comes upon me in the office in Rua dos Douradores, and my colleagues inevitably ruin the effect. Do I hear the applause of the most variegated multitudes? That applause comes from the cheap fourth-floor room where I live and clashes horribly with the shabby furnishings, with the surrounding vulgarity, humiliating both me and the dream. I never even had any castles in Spain, like those Spaniards we Portuguese have always feared. My castles were built out of an incomplete deck of grubby playing cards; and they didn’t collapse of their own accord, but had to be demolished with a sweeping gesture of the hand, the impatient gesture of an elderly maid wanting to restore the tablecloth and reset the table, because teatime was calling like some fateful curse. Even that vision is of little worth, because I don’t have a house in the provinces or old aunts at whose table, at the end of a family gathering, I sit sipping a cup of tea that tastes to me of repose. My dream failed even in its metaphors and figurations. My empire didn’t even go as far as a pack of old playing cards. My victory didn’t even include a teapot or an ancient cat. I will die as I lived, among the bric-a-brac of my room, sold off by weight among the postscripts of things lost. May I at least take with me into the immense possibilities to be found in the abyss of everything the glory of my disillusion as if it were that of a great dream, the splendor of my unbelief like a flag of defeat — a flag held aloft by feeble hands, but dragged through the mud and blood of the weak and held on high as we sink into the shifting sands, whether in protest or defiance or despair no one knows … No one knows because no one knows anything, and the sands swallow up those with flags and those without … And the sands cover everything, my life, my prose, my eternity. I carry with me the knowledge of my defeat as if it were a flag of victory

One thing I can say after experience with both sides of the coin is that all humans get their kicks in the same careless way. Poor as dirt or rich as a king. Lacking in any worldly knowledge or as educated as a bloody encyclopedia. Crude and filthy or refined as diamonds. Free drinks and cheap music and easy thrills will make animals of the worst and the best of men. Sin does us all the same, and that is one of the truest things I have learned in my life. The simple genius of the devil is to trick you into thinking he has a different method for every man. I wish you knew how exceptionally lacking in imagination the devil actually is.

As space enthusiasts started to learn about the new company, they didn’t really obsess over whether Musk’s delivery schedule sounded realistic or not. They were just thrilled that someone had decided to take the cheap and fast approach.

But over time, all new toys—big, small, expensive, or cheap—get old. They get boring. The body ignores them as the eye no longer sees it, or generates a thrill as it once did for the owner. It’s the reason why wives keep getting younger, yachts keep getting bigger, planes keep getting fancier, and why one exotic car never, ever seems to be enough.