Cheques Quotes

Well, it seems a bit silly, looking there,” said Will. “It’s not like Mortmain’s going to lodge a complaint against the Shadow-hunters through official channels. ‘Very upset Shadowhunters refused to all die when I wanted them to. Demand recompense. Please mail cheque to A. Mortmain, 18 Kensington Road—

Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

He sagged to his knees. He ached all over. It wasn't just that his brain was writing cheques that his body couldn't cash. It had gone beyond that. Now his feet were borrowing money that his legs hadn't got, and his back muscles were looking for loose change under the sofa cushions.

I used to think that loving somebody meant sacrificing anything for them. I thought it meant writing them a blank cheque. I thought it meant that you would die without each other. But it turns out that death and a broken heart are not he same. These days, I think that love is not so dramatic as all that. Maybe loving somebody means simply they bring out the best in you, and you bring out the best in them - so that together, you are always the best possible versions of yourselves.

All remember about my mother," Nibs told them, "is that she often said to my father, 'Oh, how I wish I had a cheque-book of my own!' I don't know what a cheque-book is, but I should just love to give my mother one.

A blank cheque kills creativity.

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more then they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

She couldn’t understand a vocation. Some people can’t; at best, work’s about status and pay cheques for them, it hasn’t got value in itself.

After the PM presented me with the award and cheque, I presented him with a long list of demands.

How strange it is that the house of these hedonic stalwarts is filled with all the luxuries of life, right from plasma televisions to Swiss bank cheque books. So how will they notice the tonnes of food grains rotting in the northern belt?

money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. And it does not seem to matter much where it is inscribed: on silver, on clay, on paper, on a liquid crystal display.

It may be all right, you may have talked about it and agreed it was all right, but that’s not how sex works, is it? It’s where the unsayable is king; it’s where madness and surprise rule; it’s where the cheques you write for ecstasy are drawn on the bank of despair.

I got quite used to changing that cheque, because you can get used to anything. You think: I'll never do that; and you find yourself doing it.

ANY general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

We pay people and reward them for greed and sleaze . When a sex tape gets made a star is born with a publicity agent on speed dial a six figure pay cheque and a tacky lingerie line....selling filth so you can get your face on Time magazine... From Jukebox

My obsession is with the macabre. I didn't write any of the stories which follow for money, although some of them were sold to magazines before they appeared here and I never once returned a cheque uncashed. I may be obsessional but I'm not crazy. Yet I repeat: I didn't write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not so lucky.

I left the bank because they wouldn’t deposit my cheque of poems. So I went to the store, but they didn’t accept my currency of words. So I boxed all my stories and took them to charity. But they refused my donation and asked me to give blood instead. I opened the notebooks and made them look, 'What do you think I wrote these in?

People don't understand Socialism, when they think about Socialism they think about unions and welfare cheques, but that's not Socialism, Socialism is the name of the term for the process of transforming a society, the revolutionary process of creating a new civilization, always with force of arms, Constantine, Charlemagne or Qin Shi Huang are just as much a Socialist as Hitler, Lenin, Stalin or Mao.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

In a well-balanced, reasoning mind there is no such thing as an intuition - an inspired guess! You can guess, of course - and a guess is either right or wrong. If it is right you can call it an intuition. If it is wrong you usually do not speak of it again. But what is often called an intuition is really impression based on logical deduction or experience. When an expert feels that there is something wrong about a picture or a piece of furniture or the signature on a cheque he is really basing that feeling on a host of a small signs and details. He has no need to go into them minutely - his experience obviates that - the net result is the definite impression that something is wrong. But it is not a guess, it is an impression based on experience.

but what he liked above everything else was a cheque. "It is a thing," he used to say, "to which it is not easy to find an equivalent; it requires no food, it does not take up much room, it stays in one's pocket, and if it falls, it is not broken.

I will work out exactly how - with my no money, no money at all, until I actually receive my first, dawdling pay-cheque - I will get to Birmingham later. Perhaps Birmingham will, in the next week, move closer to Wolverhampton, and I can simply walk there!

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

It wasn't sealed - she opened the flap. Inside was a cheque for a thousand dollars. Made out to her. From Daniel. It was a colossal slap in the face.

All a publisher has to do is write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.

Good sits in a corner, collects a cheque, and pays a mortgage. Evil builds empires.

Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads.” “All right, Uncle George, I’ll tell her, but it won’t have any effect. Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.

This police commissary was a great patron of all the arts and industries; but what he liked above everything else was a cheque. “That’s the thing,” he used to say, “to which it is not easy to find an equivalent; it requires no food, it does not take up much room, it stays in one's pocket, and if it falls, it is not broken.

Cheerfulness is a direct and immediate gain,–the very coin, as it were, of happiness, and not, like all else, merely a cheque upon the bank; for it alone makes us immediately happy in the present moment, and that is the highest blessing for beings like us, whose existence is but an infinitesimal moment between two eternities.

I will, I do, Amen, Here Here, Let's eat, drink and be merry. Marriage is the public spectacle of private parts: cheque-books and genitals, house-wares, fainthearts, all doubts becalmed by kissing aunt, a priest's safe homily, those tinkling glasses tightening those ties that truly bind us together forever, dressed to the nines. Darling, I reckon maybe thirty years, given our ages and expectancies. Barring the tragic or untimely, say, ten thousand mornings, ten thousand evenings, please God, ten thousand moistened nights like this, when, mindless of these vows, our opposites, nonetheless, attract. Thus, love's subtactraction: the timeless from the ordinary times -- nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine.

After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street, and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of Temple Bar.

That pretty much nailed that, and it was pretty late by now, so I dragged myself upstairs and got into my office – or… my bed – and tried to work on the figures for the café. I run a guinea-pig-themed café. But it’s out of cash and it’s going to close unless a cheque falls out of the sky, or a banker comes on my arse, but neither are going to happen, and I don’t want to dignify the banker-man with a proper mention so I’m not going to talk about him or how I do sometimes wish I could own up to not having morals and just let him come on my arse for ten thousand pounds, but apparently we’re ‘not supposed to do that’, so okay. I won’t. Even though it would solve everything. I won’t.

If you are a self-possessed man with a healthy sense of detachment from your bank account and someone writes you a cheque for tens of millions of dollars you probably behave as if you have won a sweepstake, kicking your feet in the air and laughing yourself to sleep at night at the miracle of your good fortune. But if your sense of self-worth is morbidly wrapped up in your financial success you probably believe you deserve everything you get. You take it as a reflection of something grand inside you. You acquire gravitas,

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

la monstruosa, la tormentosa, la irresistible capital del cheque. Rodeada de islas menores, tiene cerca a Jersey; y agarrada a Brooklyn

La mayoría de la gente está tan ocupada trabajando para conseguir un cheque de nómina, que no tiene tiempo para volverse rica.

Two years later, when Lara sold out her real estate holdings, she had a certified cheque for three million dollars. She was twenty-one years old.

Don't let your mouth write cheques that your talent can't cash.

Will not the publishers be kind? If they knew what happiness lurked in embryo within their foolish cheque-books!

It ain't really Czechoslovakian,' I said, coughing. 'We used to call it the Cheque. Like, you drink it up now, you pay for it later.

Argentina & Iraq have been decimated by the same process with different weapons; an IMF cheque & cruise missiles.

«Si no está la mitad del país en la cárcel por corrupción es porque Pablo pagó siempre en efectivo, nunca en cheques»,

Crushing hangovers turn even the simplest tasks – taking a cheque to the bank or buying food for dinner – into arduous nightmares.

Spasm couldn’t get laid if you sent him to a brothel with a blank cheque. He had his Lou Reed and his Bob Hope, but never his Nat King Cole.

A Person spends a whole day, five days a week or more, working hard to make money, but few ever think beyond this fact. They live from pay cheque to pay cheque, drifting through life, and only realize too late that what they have been doing was not wise at all. As individuals it is now time we take charge of our money and plan for it, otherwise it will plan for you.

That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him—rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion.

The fact that you can sit down and write something, and that then it passes direct from you to someone else, is a much happier and more natural feeling than handing out cheques or things of that kind.

Put on what weary negligence you please, You and your fellows; I'll have it come to question: If he dislike it, let him to our sister, Whose mind and mine, I know, in that are one, Not to be over-ruled. Idle old man, That still would manage those authorities That he hath given away! Now, by my life, Old fools are babes again; and must be used With cheques as flatteries,--when they are seen abused. Remember what I tell you.

Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered.

Dear Daddy-Long-Legs, I meant to write to you before and thank you for your Christmas cheque, but life in the McBride household is very absorbing, and I don't seem able to find two consecutive minutes to spend at a desk. I

Anyone wishing to buy the film rights for a rather large sum can contact my publisher and anyone wishing to put me in the top 100 wealthiest people in the UK, please send cheques or Postal Orders to me care of my publisher.

In any case, that book snagged his first-ever prize. He’d pretended to view it with indifference, even disdain – what were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment? – but he’d cashed the cheque.

Yeah, working doesn't make you working class. Spending half of your pay cheque on rent, not owning any property, getting exploited by your boss, none of it makes you working class, right? So what does, having a certain accent, is it?

On Monday I received a letter from Golden Days, a Philadelphia juvenile, accepting a short story I had sent there and enclosing a cheque for five dollars. It was the first money my pen had ever earned; I did not squander it in riotous living, neither did I invest it in necessary boots and gloves. I went up town and bought five volumes of poetry with it -- Tennyson, Byron, Milton, Longfellow, Whittier. I wanted something I could keep for ever in memory of having "arrived.

Thereafter, he [Bob Ewell] resumed his regular weekly appearances at the welfare office for his cheque, and received it with no grace amid obscure mutterings that the bastards who thought they ran this town wouldn't permit an honest man to make a living.

It is an obvious fact that the banks and big monopolies are now dependent on the state for their survival. As soon as they were in difficulties, the same people who used to insist that the state must play no role in the economy, ran to the government with their hands out, demanding huge sums of money. And the government immediately gave them a blank cheque. Trillions of pounds of public money has been handed over to the banks, totalling some $14 trillion. But the crisis continues to deepen. All that has been achieved in the last four years is to transform what was a black hole in the finances of the banks into a black hole in public finances. In order to save the bankers, everybody is expected to sacrifice, but for the bankers and capitalists no sacrifices are demanded. They pay themselves lavish bonuses with the money of the taxpayer. This is Robin Hood in reverse.

The Three-Decker "The three-volume novel is extinct." Full thirty foot she towered from waterline to rail. It cost a watch to steer her, and a week to shorten sail; But, spite all modern notions, I found her first and best— The only certain packet for the Islands of the Blest. Fair held the breeze behind us—’twas warm with lovers’ prayers. We’d stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs. They shipped as Able Bastards till the Wicked Nurse confessed, And they worked the old three-decker to the Islands of the Blest. By ways no gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of Cook, Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed, And a Church of England parson for the Islands of the Blest. We asked no social questions—we pumped no hidden shame— We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came: We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell. We weren’t exactly Yussufs, but—Zuleika didn’t tell. No moral doubt assailed us, so when the port we neared, The villain had his flogging at the gangway, and we cheered. ’Twas fiddle in the forc’s’le—’twas garlands on the mast, For every one got married, and I went ashore at last. I left ’em all in couples a-kissing on the decks. I left the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques. In endless English comfort by county-folk caressed, I left the old three-decker at the Islands of the Blest! That route is barred to steamers: you’ll never lift again Our purple-painted headlands or the lordly keeps of Spain. They’re just beyond your skyline, howe’er so far you cruise In a ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking screws. Swing round your aching search-light—’twill show no haven’s peace. Ay, blow your shrieking sirens to the deaf, gray-bearded seas! Boom out the dripping oil-bags to skin the deep’s unrest— And you aren’t one knot the nearer to the Islands of the Blest! But when you’re threshing, crippled, with broken bridge and rail, At a drogue of dead convictions to hold you head to gale, Calm as the Flying Dutchman, from truck to taffrail dressed, You’ll see the old three-decker for the Islands of the Blest. You’ll see her tiering canvas in sheeted silver spread; You’ll hear the long-drawn thunder ’neath her leaping figure-head; While far, so far above you, her tall poop-lanterns shine Unvexed by wind or weather like the candles round a shrine! Hull down—hull down and under—she dwindles to a speck, With noise of pleasant music and dancing on her deck. All’s well—all’s well aboard her—she’s left you far behind, With a scent of old-world roses through the fog that ties you blind. Her crew are babes or madmen? Her port is all to make? You’re manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming’s sake? Well, tinker up your engines—you know your business best— She’s taking tired people to the Islands of the Blest!

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

The modern mind is like the eye of a man who is too tired to see the difference between blue and green. It fails in the quality that is truly called distinction; and,being incapable of distinction, it falls back on generalisation. The man, instead of having the sense to say he is tired, says he is emancipated and enlightened and liberal and universal.... ...we find it less trouble to let in a jungle of generalisations than to keep watch upon a logical frontier. But this shapeless assimilation is not only found in accepting things in the lump; it is also found in condemning them in the lump. When the same modern mind does begin to be intolerant, it is just as universally intolerant as it was universally tolerant. It sends things in batches to the gallows just as it admitted them in mobs to the sanctuary. It cannot limit its limitations any more than its license....There are...lunatics now having power to lay down the law, who have somehow got it into their heads that any artistic representation of anything wicked must be forbidden as encouraging wickedness. This would obviously be a veto on any tragedy and practically on any tale. But a moment's thought...would show them that this is simply an illogical generalisation from the particular problem of sex. All dignified civilisations conceal sexual things, for the perfectly sensible reason that their mere exhibition does affect the passions. But seeing another man forge a cheque does not make me want to forge a cheque. Seeing the tools for burgling a safe does not arouse an appetite for being a burglar. But the intelligence in question cannot stop itself from stopping anything. It is automatically autocratic; and its very prohibition proceeds in a sort of absence of mind. Indeed, that is the most exact word for it; it is emphatically absence of mind. For the mind exists to make those very distinctions and definitions which these people refuse. They refuse to draw the line anywhere; and drawing a line is the beginning of all philosophy, as it is the beginning of all art. They are the people who are content to say that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and are condemned to pass their lives in looking for eggs from the cock as well as the hen.

From Little Britain, I went, with my cheque in my pocket, to Miss Skiffins's brother, the accountant; and Miss Skiffins's brother, the accountant, going straight to Clarriker's and bringing Clarriker to me, I had the great satisfaction of concluding that arrangement. It was the only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done since I was first apprised of my great expectations.

―La democracia es una broma. ―Sí. Muy incisivo ―dijo Jackson, satisfecho―. Una buena tesis también. En teoría es posible que el cincuenta y uno por ciento de la población desplume todo lo que puede al otro cuarenta y nueve por ciento. Ese tipo de Venezuela, ¿cómo se llama? Howard Chávez, algo así. Así hace él las cosas. En serio, él sólo envía cheques a los marginados. Les das a los gorrones dinero ajeno y después te votan.

For though I had affected to consider that the ancestor's scheme for melting L. P. Runkle was the goods, I didn't really believe it would work. You don't get anywhere filling with rich foods a bloke who wears a Panama hat like his: the only way of inducing the L. P. Runkle type of man to part with cash is to kidnap him, take him to the cellar beneath the lonely mill and stick lighted matches between his toes. And even then he would probably give you a dud cheque.

Todo puede comprarse, es cierto. Desde los parlamentarios hasta los juicios, desde el poder hasta el éxito: todo tiene un precio. Pero no el conocimiento: el precio que debe pagarse por conocer es de una naturaleza muy distinta. Ni siquiera un cheque en blanco nos permitirá adquirir mecánicamente lo que sólo puede ser fruto de un esfuerzo individual y una inagotable pasión. Nadie, en definitiva, podrá realizar en nuestro lugar el fatigoso recorrido que nos permitirá aprender.

I remember your saying once that where is a fatality about good resolutions - that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were." "Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

I zoned out while staring at the bright jade beads that clung to her neck on a twist of thick silver. They looked expensive. Probably a gift after one of Tobias’s infidelities. I wanted that timeline: tennis bracelet for the bartender at King Size, a Mercedes-Benz S-Class for the stripper in Basel, an Oscar de la Renta gown after the stewardess over the Atlantic – or more likely Claire had a contract drawn up demanding a cheque be deposited in her personal bank account for each indiscretion.

But that wasn't the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn't reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks' thoughts. I'd known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could and used foul language; we had one or two had hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber cheques and was sent to prison for six months; it wasn't altogether his fault; he'd never had any money before, and when he got more than he'd ever dreamt of having, it went to his head. I'd known had men in Paris and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn't help, or to their environment, which they didn't choose: I'm not sure that society wasn't more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I'd been God I couldn't have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation. Father Esheim was broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God's presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, he created men, if he so created them that ti was possible for them to sin, it was because he willed it. If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into by back yard, it wouldn't be fair to beat him when he did so. If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive his grace. It seem to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn't prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn't common sense. I didn't see why you shouldn't believe in a God who hadn't created the world, buyt had to make the best of the bad job he'd found, a being enormously better, wiser and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn't made and who might be hoped in the end to overcome it. But on the other hand I didn't see why you should.

This kitchen had been the home to my beloved kitchen utensils too. There was the hundred-year-old pestle and mortar that belonged to my late grandmother, a container made of Japanese cypress that I'd used for keeping rice, a Le Creuset enamel pot I'd bought with my first pay cheque, a set of long-serving chopsticks with extra fine tips I'd found in a specialty shop in Kyoto, an Italian paring knife given to me on my twentieth birthday by the owner of an organic-vegetables shop, a comfortable cotton apron, jade gravel I used for making pickled aubergine, and the traditional cast-iron nambu frying pan I'd travelled as far north as Morioka to buy. It was a collection of quality items built to last a lifetime.

A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel's face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books... He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years' standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.

This individual, who, either in his own person or in that of some member of his family, seemed to be always in trouble (which in that place meant Newgate), called to announce that his eldest daughter was taken up on suspicion of shoplifting. As he imparted this melancholy circumstance to Wemmick, Mr Jaggers standing magisterially before the fire and taking no share in the proceedings, Mike’s eye happened to twinkle with a tear. ‘What are you about?’ demanded Wemmick, with the utmost indignation. ‘What do you come snivelling here for?’ ‘I did’t go to do it, Mr Wemmick.’ ‘You did,’ said Wemmick. ‘How dare you? You’re not in a fit state to come here, if you can’t come here without spluttering like a bad pen. What do you mean by it?’ ‘A man can’t help his feelings, Mr Wemmick,’ pleaded Mike. ‘His what?’ demanded Wemmick, quite savagely. ‘Say that again!’ ‘Now, look here my man,’ said Mr Jaggers, advancing a step, and pointing to the door. ‘Get out of this office. I’ll have no feelings here. Get out.’ ‘It serves you right,’ said Wemmick. ‘Get out.’ So the unfortunate Mike very humbly withdrew, and Mr Jaggers and Wemmick appeared to have re-established their good understanding, and went to work again with an air of refreshment upon them as if they had just had lunch. Chapter Thirteen From Little Britain, I went, with my cheque in my pocket, to Miss Skiffins’s brother, the accountant; and Miss Skiffins’s brother, the accountant, going straight to Clarriker’s and bringing Clarriker to me, I had the great satisfaction of concluding that arrangement.

Well, it seems a bit silly, looking there," said Will. It's not like Mortmain's going to lodge a complaint against the Shadowhunters through official channels. 'Very upset Shadowhunters refused to all die when I wanted them to. Demand response. Please mail cheque to A. Mortmain, 18 Kensington Road-'" "Enough persiflage," said Jem. "Maybe he hasn't always hated the Shadowhunters. Maybe there was a time where he did attempt to gain compensation through the official system and it failed him. What's the harm in asking? The worst thing that could happen is that we turn up nothing, which is exactly what we're turning up right now," he rose to his feet, pushing his silvery hair back. "I'm off to catch Charlotte before Brother Enoch leaves and ask her to have the Silent Brothers check the archives.

Uncharles, those who decreed the Central Library Archive are long dust, but this they foresaw. That an end was coming. That it was their duty to preserve the most precious flower of human civilization for whomsoever should rise again from these ashes. And, because they were people who had studied history to learn its mistakes, and because they had a sense of their own gravitas, and most importantly because they had been given a blank cheque, they constructed us as we are. Monks, labouring to preserve the words of the past even as the new dark age comes upon us. Warrior clerics, who go out into the world on our righteous mission to recover learning, to prevent its destruction or wilful mis-editing. We are as you see us, an order following our mandate with the faith of saints, and though as robots we cannot be pleased, it does not displease us to appear so.

It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx. It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall. But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism. This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.

El problema no era su trabajo, que me parecía magnífico, sino su gusto musical. (...) Del walkman salía a todo volumen una música horrenda de cualquiera de esos grupos que los veinteañeros suelen escuchar. Mientras que pudiera probarse científicamente que su música era inferior a lo que escuchábamos los de mi generación, todo estaba bien (...) Sonic Youth durante horas, y, de repente, el Beethoven tardío. Después, Grand Ole Opry, catos gregrorianos, Shostakovich, John Coltrane. (...) Estaba dedicándose a gastarse los primeros cheques de su vida en una exploración metódica de nuevos tipos de música, escuchándolos con atención, formándose distintas opiniones sobre ellos, odiando algunos y disfrutando de todo el proceso. Era así en todos los demás aspectos de su vida. Tenía barba y pelo medio largo, y un día sin ningún miramiento, se lo afeitó todo y apareció calvo: "Pensé que sería interesante probar este aspecto algún tiempo, ver si la forma en la que la gente interactúa conmigo cambia". Era irritante lo abierto que estaba a todo y lo dispuesto a probar cualquier novedad; además, era deprimente porque me hacía darme cuenta de mi propia cerrazón mental.

In a dream I sometimes have, I am frantically trying to save as much as I can from my childhood home before I am forced to leave forever because of some disaster. In this dream, from which I awake with my jaw clenched like a fist, I grab whatever I can reach, take whatever I can carry. Always my childhood books and our family photo albums, but sometimes also the silver candlesticks, the things on my father's desk, the paintings on the walls. Maybe it comes from the speed with which my family changed shape one day, maybe it comes from moving, maybe it comes from my grandmother's hinted horror of losing everything in the Holocaust, but I cannot part with a dented pot that I remember my mother putting on the stove each week. Or the sofa my father bought with his first pay cheque, which was never comfortable when I was growing up and is not comfortable now. I cannot part with the lipstick I found softly rolling in an empty drawer months after my mother left. Or a shopping list on an envelope in her handwriting. In a world that changes so quickly, and where everyone eventually leaves, our stuff is the one thing we can trust. It testifies, through the mute medium of Things, that we were part of something greater than ourselves.

Economics is a notoriously complicated subject. To make things easier, let’s imagine a simple example. Samuel Greedy, a shrewd financier, founds a bank in El Dorado, California. A. A. Stone, an up-and-coming contractor in El Dorado, finishes his first big job, receiving payment in cash to the tune of $1 million. He deposits this sum in Mr Greedy’s bank. The bank now has $1 million in capital. In the meantime, Jane McDoughnut, an experienced but impecunious El Dorado chef, thinks she sees a business opportunity – there’s no really good bakery in her part of town. But she doesn’t have enough money of her own to buy a proper facility complete with industrial ovens, sinks, knives and pots. She goes to the bank, presents her business plan to Greedy, and persuades him that it’s a worthwhile investment. He issues her a $1 million loan, by crediting her account in the bank with that sum. McDoughnut now hires Stone, the contractor, to build and furnish her bakery. His price is $1,000,000. When she pays him, with a cheque drawn on her account, Stone deposits it in his account in the Greedy bank. So how much money does Stone have in his bank account? Right, $2 million. How much money, cash, is actually located in the bank’s safe? Yes, $1 million. It doesn’t stop there. As contractors are wont to do, two months into the job Stone informs McDoughnut that, due to unforeseen problems and expenses, the bill for constructing the bakery will actually be $2 million. Mrs McDoughnut is not pleased, but she can hardly stop the job in the middle. So she pays another visit to the bank, convinces Mr Greedy to give her an additional loan, and he puts another $1 million in her account. She transfers the money to the contractor’s account. How much money does Stone have in his account now? He’s got $3 million. But how much money is actually sitting in the bank? Still just $1 million. In fact, the same $1 million that’s been in the bank all along. Current US banking law permits the bank to repeat this exercise seven more times. The contractor would eventually have $10 million in his account, even though the bank still has but $1 million in its vaults. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.2 If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all other banks in the world. It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud. The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.

- Filhinha, se você confunde a poesia com a política, não demora muito a ser mãe solteira. O que te disse ele? Beatriz tinha a palavra na ponta da língua, mas temperou-a uns segundos com a sua quente saliva. – Metáforas. A mãe agarrou-se à maçaneta da sua rústica cama de bronze, apertando-a até se convencer de que conseguia derretê-la. – O que tem, mãe? O que ficou a pensar? A mulher veio para junto da rapariga, deixou-se cair em cima da cama, e com a voz a desvanecer-se disse: – Nunca te ouvi uma palavra tão grande. Que “metáforas” te disse? – Disse-me… Disse-me que o meu sorriso se estende como uma mariposa no meu rosto. – E que mais? – Bem, quando disse isto eu ri-me. – E então? – Então ele disse uma coisa do meu riso. Disse que o meu riso era uma rosa, uma lança que se desembainha, uma água que estoira. Disse que o meu riso era uma repentina onda de prata. A mulher humedeceu os lábios com a língua trémula. – E então o que fizeste? – Fiquei calada. – E ele? – O que mais me disse? – Não, filhinha. O que mais te fez! Porque o seu carteiro além de boca há-de ter mãos. – Nunca me tocou. Disse que estava feliz de estar deitado junto de uma jovem pura, como à beira de um oceano branco. – E tu? – Eu fiquei calada a pensar. – E ele? – Disse-me que gostava de mim quando ficava calada, porque estava como que ausente. – E tu? – Eu olhei para ele. – E ele? – Ele olhou também para mim. E depois deixou de olhar-me nos olhos e ficou muito tempo a olhar para o meu cabelo, sem dizer nada, como se estivesse a pensar. E então disse-me “falta-me tempo para celebrar os teus cabelos, um por um devo contá-los e louvá-los”. A mãe pôs-se de pé e cruzou diante do peito as palmas das mãos, horizontais como as lâminas de uma guilhotina. – Filhinha, não me conte mais nada. estamos perante um caso muito perigoso. Todos os homens que primeiro tocam com a palavra, chegam depois mais longe com as mãos. – Que mal têm as palavras! – disse Beatriz abraçando-se à almofada. – Não há pior droga que o blá-blá. Faz uma taberneira de aldeia sentir-se como uma princesa veneziana. E depois, quando chega a hora da verdade, o regresso à realidade, reparas que as palavras são um cheque sem cobertura. Prefiro mil vezes que um bêbedo te apalpe o cu no bar, a que te digam que o teu sorriso voa mais alto que uma mariposa! – Estende-se como uma mariposa! – saltou Beatriz. – Que voe ou que se estenda vem a dar o mesmo! E sabes porquê? Porque por trás das palavras não há nada. São fogos de artifício que se desfazem no ar. – As palavras que me disse Mario não se desfizeram no ar. Sei-as de cor e gosto de pensar nelas quando trabalho. (...) - Primeiro, nota-se à légua que as coisas que te disse foi copiá-las a Neruda. - Não, mãe! Ele olhava para mim e as palavras saíam-lhe como pássaros da boca.

Porém, é plausível dizer que os dilemas atuais sejam mais complexos do que qualquer outro que o ser humano já tenha se deparado no decorrer de sua história, impulsionados principalmente pela tecnologia que avança a níveis inimagináveis e que podem colocar a própria condição humana em cheque. Ou, dependendo do ponto de vista, salvá-la (eis mais um dilema). São muitos os contrastes que abastecem esses dilemas, mas podemos citar alguns: escassez dos recursos naturais x desenvolvimento econômico, globalização x identidades regionais, Direita x Esquerda (antigo, mas ainda muito presente), poucos bilionários x muitos miseráveis, entre tantos outros.

But the recipients of the compensation for the dissolution of a significant money-making industry were not those who had been enslaved. Instead it was the 46,000 British slave-owning citizens who received cheques for their financial losses.

Never accept medals unless they come printed on the back of a cheque. They only benefit those who give them.

My eagerness to criticize myself took all the fight out of him. He ended up by taking me to lunch; and before we parted, he gave me a cheque and another commission.

We stretched the possibilities to the evident delight of others, who took my similar cries or used the business tool to move to fresh ground that stirred their own passions (or maybe demons), that gave their workforce a feeling of vitality and difference beyond 'let's turn up for next week's pay cheque'.

Los problemas de la vida suelen ser síntomas de algo mucho más profundo. Tu deuda no es el problema. Tu jefe no es el problema. Tu cónyuge no es el problema. Tu enfermedad no es el problema. El milagro que Dios quiere hacer en tu vida a menudo es mucho más grande que un cheque, una persona o una píldora.

Mucha gente tiene problemas financieros porque permite que sus emociones controlen su vida. En lugar de enfrentar sus miedos, se esconden de ellos. Así como muchos empleados se ocultan bajo el cobijo del cheque constante y el empleo seguro.

political order, and political decay, presciently drawing attention to perceived faultlines in American society. the American political system has decayed over time because its traditional system of cheques and balances has deepened and become incessantly rigid. with sharp political polarisation, this decentralised system is less and less able to represent majority interests, but gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organisations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people.

Unlike the alleged Good Woman of the Bible, I'm not above rubies. When found, by the way, she must have been rather a problem at Christmas-time; nothing short of a blank cheque would have fitted the situation. Perhaps it's as well that she's died out.

No século XIX, no entanto, com o desenvolvimento do sistema bancário moderno e a melhoria dos métodos de comunicação, os indivíduos podiam fazer transações com papel-moeda e cheques lastreados em ouro nos tesouros de seus bancos e bancos centrais. Isso possibilitou transações lastreadas em ouro em qualquer escala,

The AFSPA gives a blank cheque to the security forces. The Act has to be repealed in order to usher in normalcy in the state. The UGs [underground groups] too might calm down. Now everyone has lost their balance — the security forces as well as the UGs.

I freewheel a lot. I get an idea to do something, and, hey, why not, I do it. I reckon I’ll become President of the Galaxy, and it just happens, it’s easy. I decide to steal this ship. I decide to look for Magrathea, and it all just happens. Yeah, I work out how it can best be done, right, but it always works out. It’s like having a Galacticredit card which keeps on working though you never send off the cheques.

Padecemos alergia por las rosas, por los claros de luna, por los valses y las declaraciones amorosas por carta. A nadie se le ocurre morir tuberculoso ni escalar los balcones ni suspirar en vano. Ya no somos románticos. Es la generación moderna y problemática que toma coca-cola y que habla por teléfono y que escribe poemas en el dorso de un cheque. Somos la raza estrangulada por la inteligencia, “la insuperable, mundialmente famosa trapecista que ejecuta sin mácula triple salto mortal en el vacío”. (La inteligencia es una prostituta que se vende por un poco de brillo y que no sabe ya ruborizarse.)

To say that you have given enough love cheque to your wife on Friday morning, she will confirm that at the counter bank on Sunday morning.

Todavía podéis bajaros del mundo. Podéis ser autosuficientes, cultivar vuestra propia comida, construir vuestra propia casa, hacer vuestro propio jabón, pan, ropa, riqueza. Podéis dejaros de pajas mentales y de teles de plasma que os tratan como si ya no os funcionara el cerebro, de interminables torres de oficinas en los que os jodéis la vida reordenando abstracciones ajenas, de terrorismos terroríficos que no hacen ni la mitad de muertos al año que vuestras queridas carreteras, de atentados supuestamente perpetrados unos personajes sobre los que no entendéis nada. Podéis rechazar un mundo que pasa sus días pidiendo prestado para consumir recursos con los que producir toda esa estúpida basura. Mascotas electrónicas. Interiorismo impersonal. Sexo virtual. Cheques regalo. Realities irreales. Comida con la que enfermar.

Picking up the papers, I discovered two cheques for the amount of $2,000.00, each. One cheque was made out to me and the other was Andy’s. Aziz Haashim’s signature was on both cheques. I

I stammered, “There’s a cheque and a proposal letter.” The men waited for me to continue. I reached into my shoulder bag, pulled out an envelope and handed to my lover.               Andy read the contents out loud:               Young, You are a handsome boy. I’m enamoured by your youthful intelligence and masterful lovemaking skills. You possess an innocent naturalness I find difficult to resist. I’m beguiled by you. The short time we spent together was an analeptic sexual rejuvenation for me. I had not felt such virility for years. I’m not the type of person who makes ex tempore decisions, but your sensual sexuality had smitten me to inscribe this proposal for your consideration. I hope you will consider this proposition seriously. ●       I will purchase a London flat in your name if you agree to be my beau. This will be my gift for your loyalty. ●       In order for you to travel around the country with ease, a city car together with regular maintenance will also be gifted to you. ●       To ensure financial security on your part and in the event of my untimely demise, a monthly stipend will be deposited into a Swiss bank account in your name. In return, I ask for your confidentiality - never to reveal the nature of our relationship to anyone. Our dalliance must be kept a secret. Please be mindful that I will not hesitate to take legal action against any slanderous aspersions inflicted upon me or my family.               Please consider my offer. You can reach me at my private number… I look forward to your speedy response.   Yours sincerely, Ernest O.M.

El tiempo perdido. Los jóvenes no sabían que eso era imposible. Que se nace con un cheque en el que está apuntada la duración de la vida y que, segundo a segundo, minuto a minuto, hora a hora, día a día... se va gastando, sin vuelta atrás.

I want words which are scalpel sharp and shiny; poems keen enough to gut a fish and clean it. Poems labelled not for domestic use. The kind you keep on the top shelf away from the thieving hands of children. And I want to feed you warmly scented words; small loaves of wholemeal bread so you will remember the kitchens where you stood in a slant of sunlight and listened to the radio crooning somewhere above. I want to rock you with my mothering songs. I want my poems to fly out of your pockets--- a troupe of magician's doves, somersaulting in the air, a perfect explosion of soft fireworks. I want them to follow you; like Valentine's cards or bad cheques constantly re-addressed. These poems are birthed from some deep place. They wear that bruised look of the newborn. They will find their way into your sleep with their naked hands and greed. They will come to you like a lover, saying: let me bring you inside into the circle made by my tongues of fire.

Answer me this my fellow humans—are we really on this earth to work an eight-hour shift, to have the productions of our blood and labour taken, to live pay-cheque to pay-cheque while balancing on a line of credit, to give forty years to a mortgaged existence, to sweat for the system when the financial chains will remain regardless, and to thirst strictly for the weekends?

He rewarded Andy and me handsomely for mentoring his favorite grandson. Our Eid Mubarak greeting card read: “Please accept this gift and a week's vacation to anywhere you’d like as a token of my appreciation for the friendship and guidance you so kindly provided to my grandson. The Simorgh and the Kahyy'am are at your disposal. (Signed) Hadrah Hakim.” Enclosed were two cheques for $3,000 each.