Cuffie Quotes

Deacon Cuffy Lambkins of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.

Gridavamo siamo angeli, possiamo lanciarci senza distruggerci, abbiamo le ali nei muscoli, siamo spaziali. Noi andremo a vivere sulla Tour Eiffel, e ogni notte raggiungeremo la luna, con le cuffie, e Venus degli Air a tutto volume. Il nostro letto sarà un cratere, e al risveglio lanceremo sulla terra le fragole, una pioggia di fragole con il nostro nome dipinto, e un bigliettino legato a ciascuna, con sopra scritto: noi siamo sulla luna, abbiamo le stelle nel cuore, e il nostro amore è una supernova, che illumina tutti i baci del mondo

Era incredibile quanto poco bastasse per fuggire. La gente si affannava a correre dietro a treni e aerei, cercava di andare il più lontano possibile, ma il più delle volte finiva per portare con sé anche i propri pensieri, e allora scappare non serviva più a nulla, perché non esisteva posto al mondo abbastanza lontano per sfuggire ai pensieri. Era questo che la gente non capiva: la fuga è prima di tutto uno stato mentale. Lui era fortunato ad avere la musica, perché anche quando non c’erano altre vie d’uscita, a lui bastavano un paio di cuffie e la sua chitarra per approdare in un rifugio sicuro.

...supposing the present government to be overthrown, the limited choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new ministry, would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle--supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can't offer him the Presidency of the Council; that is reserved for Poodle. You can't put him in the Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces (as is made manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock) because you can't provide for Noodle! On the other hand, the Right Honourable William Buffy, M.P., contends across the table with some one else that the shipwreck of the country--about which there is no doubt; it is only the manner of it that is in question--is attributable to Cuffy. If you had done with Cuffy what you ought to have done when he first came into Parliament, and had prevented him from going over to Duffy, you would have got him into alliance with Fuffy, you would have had with you the weight attaching as a smart debater to Guffy, you would have brought to bear upon the elections the wealth of Huffy, you would have got in for three counties Juffy, Kuffy, and Luffy, and you would have strengthened your administration by the official knowledge and the business habits of Muffy. All this, instead of being as you now are, dependent on the mere caprice of Puffy!

Lo sfrigolio delle foglie di una vecchia quercia riempiva il silenzio che galleggiava intorno. L’odore dell’erba saturava le narici fin quasi a inebriare la mente. Il corpo giaceva rilassato alla frescura dell’austero tronco, immerso nell’aria serena della primavera. Karen, sdraiata accanto a lui, si avvicinò al suo orecchio, sorridendogli dolce. «Jonathan, è ora di svegliarsi» sussurrò. «Devi andare al lavoro». L’uomo si destò, aprendo gli occhi nella penombra della stanza metallica. Fece un lungo sospiro, riempiendosi i polmoni di aria stagnante prima di sedersi sul letto e togliersi le cuffie telepatiche che controllavano il sonno. Guardò la moglie distesa accanto a lui, ancora beatamente immersa nel sogno immaginario; aveva programmato la sveglia olografica con le sue fattezze per rendersi più dolce il risveglio in una realtà così diversa.

Nikdo už nepoznal, jaký podíl na všeobecném rozkladu mají upřímní lidumilové a jaký nepokrytí gangsteři, kde probíhá rabování na popud Eugenů Lawsonů a jejich neuhasitelné žízně po dobročinnosti a kde na popud Cuffy Meigsů a jejich nezřízené hrabivosti, které obce padly za oběť těm, jimž nástup hladomoru hrozil o týden dříve, a které musely padnout, protože kterýsi překupník zatoužil po nové jachtě. Záleželo snad na tom? Obě pohnutky vedly ke stejnému výsledku, obě byly duševně spřízněné, neboť obě vycházely z přesvědčení, že pokud člověk něco potřebuje, má právo si to vzít. Obě jednaly v souladu s týmž mravním řádem. Obě hlásaly povinnost sebeobětování – a také ji důkladně vymáhaly. Dokonce již ani neexistoval rozdíl mezi kanibalem a obětí. Občané, kteří bez váhání přijali zkonfiskované šatstvo a palivo z města pár kilometrů na východ, neboť byli přesvědčeni, že na něj mají právoplatný nárok, za týden zjistili, že jim stát zabavil sýpky, aby nasytil město pár kilometrů na západ. Lidé konečně dosáhli ideálu, o který usilovali celá staletí, v celé jeho bezmezné, bezvýhradné dokonalosti – potřebnost se konečně stala jejich svrchovaným pánem a vládcem, přednostním právem na jejich majetek, jediným měřítkem hodnoty, nejcennějším platidlem v zemi, posvátnějším než právo či život. Nechali se vlákat do temné jámy, kde nyní jeden přes druhého křičeli, že každý je strážcem svého bratra, zatímco se vespolek okrádali, kde se každý oháněl svým nárokem na nezasloužené, zatímco ustavičně naříkal, že z něj druzí sdírají kůži, kde se všichni navzájem požírali, zatímco vřeštěli hrůzou, že se svět rozpadá působením jakéhosi neznámého zla.

Oliver!” cried Cuffy. “Not in your underwear!

The truth is, sometimes I wanted him gone. He frightened me a little, my brother. As much as I loved him, I knew something was wrong with him. I knew he did drugs, but there was always something else. He could be moody, lethargic one moment and giddy the next. He could be buoyant, and sometimes his liveliness had an indescribable edge of rage to it, so that when he picked me up and spun me around, I wasn't entirely sure where he was giving me flight or preparing to throw me.

The truth is, sometimes I wanted him gone. He frightened me a little, my brother. As much as I loved him, I knew something was wrong with him. I knew he did drugs, but there was always something else. He could be moody, lethargic one moment and giddy the next. He could be buoyant, and sometimes his liveliness had an indescribable edge of rage to it, so that when he picked me up and spun me around, I wasn't entirely sure whether he was giving me flight or preparing to throw me

The men at the Division Headquarters of Taggart Transcontinental avoided looking at one another, when the break of the telephone line was discovered and reported. They made statements painfully miscalculated to seem to refer to the problem, yet to state nothing, none fooling the others. They knew that copper wire was a vanishing commodity, more precious than gold or honor; they knew that the division storekeeper had sold their stock of wire weeks ago, to unknown dealers who came by night and were not businessmen in the daytime, but only men who had friends in Sacramento and in Washington—just as the storekeeper, recently appointed to the division, had a friend in New York, named Cuffy Meigs, about whom one asked no questions. They knew that the man who would now assume the responsibility of ordering repairs and initiating the action which would lead to the discovery that the repairs could not be made, would incur retaliation from unknown enemies, that his fellow workers would become mysteriously silent and would not testify to help him, that he would prove nothing, and if he attempted to do his job, it would not be his any longer. They did not know what was safe or dangerous these days, when the guilty were not punished, but the accusers were; and, like animals, they knew that immobility was the only protection when in doubt and in danger. They remained immobile; they spoke about the appropriate procedure of sending reports to the appropriate authorities on the appropriate dates.

Did it matter—she thought, looking at the map—which part of the corpse had been consumed by which type of maggot, by those who gorged themselves or by those who gave the food to other maggots? So long as living flesh was prey to be devoured, did it matter whose stomachs it had gone to fill? There was no way to tell which devastation had been accomplished by the humanitarians and which by undisguised gangsters. There was no way to tell which acts of plunder had been prompted by the charity-lust of the Lawsons and which by the gluttony of Cuffy Meigs—no way to tell which communities had been immolated to feed another community one week closer to starvation and which to provide yachts for the pull-peddlers. Did it matter? Both were alike in fact as they were alike in spirit, both were in need and need was regarded as sole title to property, both were acting in strictest accordance with the same code of morality. Both held the immolation of men as proper and both were achieving it. There wasn’t even any way to tell who were the cannibals and who the victims—the communities that accepted as their rightful due the confiscated clothing or fuel of a town to the east of them, found, next week, their granaries confiscated to feed a town to the west—men had achieved the ideal of the centuries, they were practicing it in unobstructed perfection, they were serving need as their highest ruler, need as first claim upon them, need as their standard of value, as the coin of their realm, as more sacred than right and life. Men had been pushed into a pit where, shouting that man is his brother’s keeper, each was devouring his neighbor and was being devoured by his neighbor’s brother, each was proclaiming the righteousness of the unearned and wondering who was stripping the skin off his back, each was devouring himself, while screaming in terror that some unknowable evil was destroying the earth.

There, she thought, was the ultimate goal of all that loose academic prattle which businessmen had ignored for years, the goal of all the slipshod definitions, the sloppy generalities, the soupy abstractions, all claiming that obedience to objective reality is the same as the obedience to the State, that there is no difference between a law of nature and a bureaucrat’s directive, that a hungry man is not free, that man must be released from the tyranny of food, shelter and clothing—all of it, for years, that the day might come when Nat Taggart, the realist, would be asked to consider the will of Cuffy Meigs as a fact of nature, irrevocable and absolute like steel, rails and gravitation, to accept the Meigs-made world as an objective, unchangeable reality—then to continue producing abundance in that world. There was the goal of all those con men of library and classroom, who sold their revelations as reason, their “instincts” as science, their cravings as knowledge, the goal of all the savages of the non-objective, the non-absolute, the relative, the tentative, the probable—the savages who, seeing a farmer gather a harvest, can consider it only as a mystic phenomenon unbound by the law of causality and created by the farmers’ omnipotent whim, who then proceed to seize the farmer, to chain him, to deprive him of tools, of seeds, of water, of soil, to push him out on a barren rock and to command: “Now grow a harvest and feed us!

Have your friends left any means, methods, rules or agencies of proof?” “Then don’t talk about it, don’t be theoretical, we’ve got to deal with facts! We’ve got to deal with facts as they are today . . . I mean, we’ve got to be realistic and devise some practical means to protect our supplies under existing conditions, not under unprovable assumptions, which—” She chuckled. There was the form of the formless, she thought, there was the method of his consciousness: he wanted her to protect him from Cuffy Meigs without acknowledging Meigs’ existence, to fight it without admitting its reality, to defeat it without disturbing its game. “What do you find so damn funny?” he snapped angrily. “You know it.” “I don’t know what’s the matter with you! I don’t know what’s happened to you . . . in the last two months . . . ever since you came back. . . . You’ve never been so uncooperative!” “Why, Jim, I haven’t argued with you in the last two months.” “That’s what I mean!” He caught himself hastily, but not fast enough to miss her smile. “I mean, I wanted to have a conference, I wanted to know your view of the situation—” “You know it.” “But you haven’t said a word!” “I said everything I had to say, three years ago. I told you where your course would take you. It has.” “Now there you go again! What’s the use of theorizing? We’re here, we’re not back three years ago. We’ve got to deal with the present, not the past. Maybe things would have been different, if we had followed your opinion, maybe, but the fact is that we didn’t—and we’ve got to deal with facts. We’ve got to take reality as it is now, today!

In the long run, we’ll all be dead,” snapped Cuffy Meigs. He was pacing restlessly. “Retrenching, hell! There’s plenty of pickings left in California and Oregon and all those places. What I’ve been thinking is, we ought to think of expanding—the way things are, there’s nobody to stop us, it’s there for the taking—Mexico, and Canada maybe—it ought to be a cinch.” Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away—the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature’s rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems.

It was no use. She said it as many times, with as many details, statistics, figures, proofs, as she could force out of her weary mind into their evasive hearing. It was no use. They neither refuted nor agreed; they merely looked as if her arguments were beside the point. There was a sound of hidden emphasis in their answers, as if they were giving her an explanation, but in a code to which she had no key. “There’s trouble in California,” said Wesley Mouch sullenly. “Their state legislature’s been acting pretty huffy. There’s talk of seceding from the Union.” “Oregon is overrun by gangs of deserters,” said Clem Weatherby cautiously. “They murdered two tax collectors within the last three months.” “The importance of industry to a civilization has been grossly overemphasized,” said Dr. Ferris dreamily. “What is now known as the People’s State of India has existed for centuries without any industrial development whatever.” “People could do with fewer material gadgets and a sterner discipline of privations,” said Eugene Lawson eagerly. “It would be good for them.” “Oh hell, are you going to let that dame talk you into letting the richest country on earth slip through your fingers?” said Cuffy Meigs, leaping to his feet. “It’s a fine time to give up a whole continent—and in exchange for what? For a dinky little state that’s milked dry, anyway! I say ditch Minnesota, but hold onto your transcontinental dragnet. With trouble and the riots everywhere, you won’t be able to keep people in line unless you have transportation—troop transportation—unless you hold your soldiers within a few days’ journey of any point on the continent. This is no time to retrench. Don’t get yellow, listening to all that talk. You’ve got the country in your pocket. Just keep it there.

And yet there were men—and she knew it—who were able to obtain transportation whenever they wished, as by a mystic secret, as by the grace of some power which one was not to question or explain. They were the men whose dealings with Cuffy Meigs were regarded by people as that unknowable of mystic creeds which smites the observer for the sin of looking, so people kept their eyes closed, dreading, not ignorance, but knowledge. She knew that deals were made whereby those men sold a commodity known as “transportation pull”—a term which all understood, but none would dare define. She knew that these were the men of the emergency specials, the men who could cancel her scheduled trains and send them to any random spot of the continent which they chose to strike with their voodoo stamp, the stamp superseding contract, property, justice, reason and lives, the stamp stating that “the public welfare” required the immediate salvation of that spot. These were the men who sent trains to the relief of the Smather Brothers and their grapefruit in Arizona—to the relief of a factory in Florida engaged in the production of pin-ball machines—to the relief of a horse farm in Kentucky—to the relief of Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel.

Ebbene, guardando questi ragazzi con le cuffie peruviane che abbracciano gli alberi, mi chiedo anche: come mai gli accenti di verità, il peso dell’esperienza e perfino il godimento estetico sono con tanta evidenza dalla parte di Orwell e non da quella di Ram Dass né di nessuna delle autoproclamatesi guide spirituali che recitano i loro sempiterni discorsi sull’espansione della coscienza, sul potere del qui e ora e sulla pace interiore? Perché i loro pensieri mancano a tal punto di gravitas? Perché nessuno di loro supera la prova della bellezza? Perché i loro libri dalle copertine rosa o azzurre, che in ogni libreria new age balzano agli occhi come l’incenso alle narici, sono così brutti, così stupidi?

Hands off, give me his badge before I horse you in cuffy.

Seleziono Avril Lavigne “ILove you” e faccio partire la canzone. Sento iniziare la musica, e l’emozione inizia a scorrere nelle mie vene mentre lui alza il volume e posso sentire le parole della canzone anche da dove sono seduta sul suo grembo. So che potrebbe non ricordarselo domani. So che i suoi occhi sono scuri, e fargli ascoltare questo brano potrebbe non contare come averlo detto a parole, ma abbiamo passato così tante notti insieme. Emozionata dalle parole sento la musica continuare e osservo il suo viso, morsicandomi il labbro mentre studio la sua espressione. Ogni parola è così perfetta, l’intera canzone è rivolta a noi due, incluso il ritornello che spero di ascoltare proprio ora: "You're so beautiful But that's not why I love you I'm not sure you know That the reason I love you is you Being you Just youYeah the reason I love you Is all that we've been through And that's why I love you" Lui l’ascolta mentre valuta il mio viso, la sua espressione intenta mentre studia il mio volto. Le mie labbra piene. I miei occhi color ambra. "Falla ripartire ancora " La sua voce suona così aspra, che devo quasi leggere le sue labbra per capire quello che ha detto. Clicco sul pulsante per riprodurre il brano, ma invece di ascoltare la canzone nuovamente come mi aspettavo, mi tira su e mi rivolta sulla schiena, quindi sposta le cuffie sulla mia testa e li adegua al mio viso più piccolo appena la canzone inizia. E nel secondo successivo, sto ascoltando la canzone "ILove You", che ho appena fatto sentire a lui. Brooke Dumas

I fili delle cuffie in fondo al tuo zaino che facevano sempre l'amore. Scomposte come le nostre prime volte.

I loves you for God’s sake, Cuffy Lambkin. Not for my sake. Not for your sake. But for God’s sake.