David Lodge Quotes

Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life's the other way round.

to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance. No doubt the Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history, which (thus far) it has been. Any election can be the last, or at least the last in the lifetime of the person casting the vote.

It's the only thing that keeps me going these days, travelling. Changes of scene, changes of faces

Perhaps that's what we're all looking for - desire undiluted by habit.

Intensity of experience is what we're looking for, I think. We know we won't find it at home any more, but there's always the hope that we'll find it abroad

Life, after all, should go forwards, not backwards.

I've been in love with you for weeks.' There's no such thing,' she says. 'It's a rhetorical device. It's a bourgeois fallacy.' Haven't you ever been in love, then?' When I was younger,' she says, 'I allowed myself to be constructed by the discourse of romantic love for a while, yes.' What the hell does that mean?' We aren't essences, Vic. We aren't unique individual essences existing prior to language. There is only language.

Information is the religion of the modern world.

wandering between two worlds, one lost, the other powerless to be born.

Literature is mostly about having sex and not having children. Life is the other way around

What are we all looking for? Happiness? One knows that doesn't last. Distraction, perhaps distraction from the ugly facts: that there is death, there is disease, there is impotence and senility ahead

In every one of us is the total of all we have ever been, the sullen child, the arrogant youth, the suckling babe. Every fear endured in childhood is lodged somewhere in here.' He tapped his temple. 'And every act of heroism or cowardice, generosity or meanness of spirit.

Universities are the cathedrals of the modern age. They shouldn't have to justify their existence by utilitarian criteria.

Every decoding is another encoding.

When does a novel begin? The question is almost as difficult to answer as the question, when does the human embryo become a person?

What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.

Jogging, I believe they call it. It seems to be an epidemic psychological illness afflicting Americans these days. A form of masochism, like the flagellantes in the Middle Ages.

but the creative juices dry up if they're not kept in circulation.

perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won't be like you think perhaps that won't matter perhaps

He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee.

How long does a recession have to last before it’s called a depression?

...my big depression. For six months I languished at the bottom of a deep hole, like the shaft of a waterless well, while kindly, puzzled people...peered down at me over the rim of the parapet and tried to cheer me up, or lowered drugs and advice in a bucket.

To some people, there is no noise on earth as exciting as the sound of three or four big fan-jet engines rising in pitch, as the plane they are sitting in swivels at the end of the runway and, straining against its brakes, prepares for takeoff. The very danger in the situation is inseparable from the exhilaration it yields. You are strapped into your seat now, there is no way back, you have delivered yourself into the power of modern technology. You might as well lie back and enjoy it.

J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a literary descendant of Huck Finn: more educated and sophisticated, the son of affluent New Yorkers, but like Huck a youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy, venality and, to use one of his own favourite words, phoniness. What particularly appals Holden is the eagerness of his peers to adopt that corrupt grownup behaviour.

We’re a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact. The mental unity of the individual is a fiction. There is simply, in the human machine, a multitude of loosely linked behaviour systems which take control of the body and participate in a common delusion of being one single self

He is well satisfied with his accommodation, which provides all modern amenities in a compact and convenient form, and leaves him the maximum amount of time free for his work. How much time people waste in walking from one room to another.... Space is time.

As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own — they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, ‘I want to raise some questions about so-and-so’, and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys.

In 1870, the Osage—expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?

(did anyone ever use a semi-colon in a suicide note?).

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don't know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that.

I wondered whether, if Kierkegaard had been a Catholic, they would have made him a saint by now, and built a basilica over his grave. He would make a good patron saint of neurotics.

When you feel sexual lust or desire for any woman, breathe deeply and allow the feeling of desire to magnify. And allow it to magnify more. Don’t let the energy become lodged in your head or genitals, but circulate it throughout your body. Using your breath as the instrument of circulation, bathe every cell in the stimulated energy. Inhale it into your heart, and then feel outward from your heart, feeling the world as if it were your lover. With an exhale, move into the world and penetrate it, skillfully and spontaneously, opening it into love.

But by 1925 Fawcett had filled his papers with reams of delirious writings about the end of the world and about a mystical Atlantean kingdom, which resembled the Garden of Eden. Z was transformed into “the cradle of all civilizations” and the center of one of Blavatsky’s “White Lodges,” where a group of higher spiritual beings helped to direct the fate of the universe.

Think of a ball of steel as large as the world, and a fly alighting on it once every million years. When the ball of steel is rubbed away by the friction, eternity will not even have begun.

For some days, now, the termperature had wavered between freezing and thawing and it was difficult to tell whether the sediment thickening the atmostphere was rain or sleet or smog. Through the murk the dull red eye of a sun that had scarcely been able to drag itself above roof level all day was sinking blearily beneath the horizon, spreading a rusty stain across the snow-covered surfaces. Read pathetic fallacy weather.

Our friends started life with too many beliefs -- the penalty of a Catholic upbringing. They were weighted down with beliefs, useless answers to non-questions. to work their way back to the fundamental ones -- what can we know? why is there anything at all? why not nothing? what may we hope? why are we here? what is it all about? -- they had to dismantle all that apparatus of superfluous belief and discard it piece by piece. But in matters of belief...it is nice question how far you can go in this process without throwing out something vital.

All praise to winter, then, was Henry's feeling. Let others have their sultry luxuries. How full of creative genius was the air in which these snow-crystals were generated. He could hardly have marveled more if real stars had fallen and lodged on his coat. What a world to live in, where myriads of these little discs, so beautiful to the most prying eye, were whirled down on every traveler's coat, on the restless squirrel's fur and on the far-stretching fields and forests, the wooded dells and mountain-tops,--these glorious spangles, the sweepings of heaven's floor.

Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word (suggesting "jazz" and "scat", as in "scat-singing", to the English ear) used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word.

It will be under the name David Talbot.” “My clothes. There’s a stash of them here under the name Isaac Rummel. Just a suitcase or two, and some coats. It’s really winter, isn’t it?” I gave him the key to the room. This was humiliating. Rather like making a servant of him. Perhaps he’d change his mind and put our new lodgings under the name of Renfield.

So they stood upon the shores of Faith and felt the old dogmas and certainties ebbing away rapidly under their feet and between their toes, sapping the foundations upon which they stood, a sensation both agreeably stilmulating and sightly unnerving

When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root, and bathed every vein of earth with that liquid by whose power the flowers are engendered; when the zephyr, too, with its dulcet breath, has breathed life into the tender new shoots in every copse and on every hearth, and the young sun has run half his course in the sign of the Ram, and the little birds that sleep all night with their eyes open give song (so Nature prompts them in their hearts), then, as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer observed many years ago, folk long to go on pilgrimages. Only, these days, professional people call them conferences. The modern conference resembles the pilgrimage of medieval Christendom in that it allows the participants to indulge themselves in all the pleasures and diversions of travel while appearing to be austerely bent on self-improvement. To be sure, there are certain penitential exercises to be performed - the presentation of a paper, perhaps, and certainly listening to papers of others.

The hero of a David Lodge novel says that you don’t know, when you make love for the last time, that you are making love for the last time. Voting is like that. Some of the Germans who voted for the Nazi Party in 1932 no doubt understood that this might be the last meaningfully free election for some time, but most did not. Some of the Czechs and Slovaks who voted for the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1946 probably realized that they were voting for the end of democracy, but most assumed they would have another chance.

In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

I mean, mentally you brace yourself for the ending of a novel. As you're reading, you're aware of the fact that there's only a page or two left in the book, and you get ready to close it. but with a film there's no way of telling, especially nowadays, when films are much more loosely structured, much more ambivalent, than they used to be. There's no way of telling which frame is going to be the last. The film is going along, just as life goes along, people are behaving, doing things, drinking, talking, and we're watching them, and at any point the director chooses, without warning, without anything being resolved, or explained, or wound up, it can just...end.

What was left was sex in the head, as D.H.Lawrence called it. ... Where else would the human subject have sex but in the head? Sexual desire was a play of signifiers, an infinite determent and displacement of anticipated pleasure which the brute coupling of the signifieds temporarily interrupted.

Marinus is leaning on the railing. "Warehouse number six needs rebuilding; there's a big hole in the seawall behind the guild; Constable Kosugi shall probably"--from Seawall Lane comes an almighty sigh and crash--"shall certainly be lodging elsewhere tonight, and I pissed my thigh from fear. Our glorious flag, as you see, is unhurt. Half of their shots flew over us"--the doctor looks landward--"and caused damage ashore. Quid non mortalia pectora cogis, Auri sacra fames.

The Osage had been assured by the U.S. government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege from settlers. Among them was the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who later wrote Little House on the Prairie based on her experiences. “Why don’t you like Indians, Ma?” Laura asks her mother in one scene. “I just don’t like them; and don’t lick your fingers, Laura.” “This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?” One evening, Laura’s father explains to her that the government will soon make the Osage move away: “That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.” Though, in the book, the Ingallses leave the reservation under threat of being removed by soldiers, many squatters began to take the land by force. In 1870, the Osage—expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?

One of the depressing things about depression is knowing that there are lots of people in the world with far more reason to feel depressed than you have, and finding that, so far from making you snap out of your depression, it only makes you despise yourself more and thus feel more depressed. The purest form of depression is when you can give absolutely no reason why you’re depressed. As B says, in Either/Or, “A person in sorrow or distress knows why he sorrows or is distressed. If you ask a melancholic what it is that weighs down on him, he will reply, ‘I don’t know what it is, I can’t explain it.’ Therein lies melancholy’s infinitude.

It is, as I say, easy enough to describe Holden's style of narration; but more difficult to explain how it holds our attention and gives us pleasure for the length of a whole novel. For, make no mistake, it's the style that makes the book interesting. The story it tells is episodic, inconclusive and largely made up of trivial events. Yet the language is, by normal literary criteria, very impoverished. Salinger, the invisible ventriloquist who speaks to us through Holden, must say everything he has to say about life and death and ultimate values within the limitations of a seventeen-year-old New Yorker's argot, eschewing poetic metaphors, periodic cadences, fine writing of any kind.

Nearly one-quarter of all orcas captured for display during the late sixties and early seventies showed signs of bullet wounds. Royal Canadian fighter pilots used to bomb orcas during practice runs, and in 1960, private fishing lodges on Vancouver Island persuaded the Canadian government to install a machine gun at Campbell River to cull the orca population.

Una curva de la calle puso ante su vista el campanario de la catedral de Westminster, la forma fálica más descarada del horizonte londinense.

from being born in a lodge on the wild prairie to being catapulted into a fortune to being terrorized as her family and other Osage were picked off one by one?

Analysis has a way of unravelling the self: the longer you pull on the thread, the more flaws you find.

Gray Horse, in the western part of the territory, consisted of little more than a cluster of newly built lodges, and it was here where Lizzie and Ne-kah-e-se-y, who married in 1874, settled.

What?’ he said. I’m sure he heard me perfectly well, but like most deaf people he’s got in the habit of saying ‘what?’ automatically to every conversational gambit - I notice myself doing it sometimes.

All I'm saying is that there is a generation gap, and I think it revolves around this public/private thing. Our generation -- we subscribe to the old liberal doctrine of the inviolate self. I'ts the great tradition of realistic fiction, it's what novels are all about. the private life in the foreground, history a distant rumble of gunfire, somewhere offstage. In Jane Austen not even a rumble. Well, the novel is dying, and us with it. No wonder I could never get anything out of my novel-writing class at Euphoric State. It's an unnatural medium for their experience. Those kids...are living a film, not a novel.

Song-Mi Lee,...her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought.

It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts... and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody's apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant garde theatre and Viet Nam.

The choice of the point(s) of view from which the story is told is arguably the most important single decision that the novelist has to make, for it fundamentally affects the way readers will respond, emotionally and morally, to the fictional characters and their actions. The story of an adultery, for instance - any adultery - will affect us differently according to whether it is presented primarily from the point of view of the unfaithful person, or the injured spouse, or the lover - or as observed by some fourth party. Madame Bovary narrated mainly from the point of view of Charles Bovary would be a very different book from the one we know.

The golden rule of fictional prose is that there are no rules - except the ones that each writer sets for him or herself. Repetition and simplicity worked (usually) for Hemingway's artistic purposes. Variation and decoration worked for Nabokov's, especially in Lolita. This novel takes the form of a brilliant piece of special pleading by a man whose attraction to a certain type of pubescent girl, whom he calls a "nymphet", leads him to commit evil deeds. The book aroused controversy on its first publication, and still disturbs, because it gives a seductive eloquence to a child-abuser and murderer. As Humbert Humbert himself says, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

It was said that the view through the open window above the urinal, straight across the Bay to the Silver Span, was the finest obtainable from such a position anywhere in the world, but today Philip kept his eyes down. Foreshortened, yes, definitely.

The mind was a capricious and undisciplined creature. You couldn't always keep it on a lead, and it was for ever dashing off into the undergrowth of the past, digging up some decayed bone of memory, and bringing it back, with tail wagging, to lay it at your feet.

London, December 1915. In the master bedroom (never was the estate agent's epithet more appropriate) of Flat 21, Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, the distinguished author is dying - slowly, but surely. In Flanders, less than two hundred miles away, other men are dying more quickly, more painfully, more pitifully - young men, mostly, with their lives still before them, blank pages that will never be filled. The author is seventy-two. He has had an interesting and varied life, written many books, travelled widely, enjoyed the arts, moved in society (one winter he dined out 107 times), and owns a charming old house in Rye as well as the lease of this spacious London flat with its fine view of the Thames. He has had deeply rewarding friendships with both men and women. If he has never experienced sexual intercourse, that was by his own choice, unlike the many young men in Flanders who died virgins either for lack of opportunity or because they hoped to marry and were keeping themselves chaste on principle.

t this point I would like to return to the question of the plot movement and the different narrative levels of the book. David Lodge raises a crucial issue when he asks 'how Charlotte Brontë created a literary structure in which the domestic and the mythical, the realistic world of social behaviour and the romantic world of passionate self-consciousness, could co-exist with only occasional lapses into incongruity.' As far as the plot and setting go, however, this states the question rather misleadingly, for in fact at Thornfield there begins a progressive plot movement from realism to fantasy. By 'realism' I do not mean the predominance of the every day and commonplace, or an authorial objectivity of treatment, but simply the use of material that the reader can accept as existing in the ordinary world as well, or of events of a kind that might happen in it without being viewed as extraordinary. That is, things that have a face-value currency of meaning prior to any concealed meaning they may hold or suggest. Thus while Gateshead and Lowood School fit neatly into, and contribute importantly to, the symbolic pattern of the book, they are perfectly believable places in their own right. Even the heavy-handed and obvious satire of Mr Brocklehurst and his family does not invalidate him as a credible conception. But with the beginning of the mystery of the Thornfield attic the plot starts moving away from this facevalue actuality.

It wasn't until the show was almost over that I figured out what it was: the crack above my David Onica that I had asked the doorman to tell the superintendent to fix. On my way out this morning, I stopped at the front desk, about to complain to the doorman, when I was confronted with a NEW doorman, my age but balding and homely and FAT. Three glazed jelly doughnuts AND two steaming cups of extra-dark HOT CHOCOLATE lay on the desk in front of him beside a copy of the Post opened to the comics and it struck me that I was infinitely better-looking, more successful and richer than this poor bastard would ever be and so with a passing rush of sympathy I smiled and nodded a curt though not impolite good morning without lodging a complaint.

La desgracia de Adam Appleby era que, en cuanto despertaba del sueño, su conciencia se inundaba inmediatamente de todo aquello en lo que menos deseaba pensar. Tenía la impresión de que otros hombres se enfrentaban a cada nuevo amanecer con la mente y el corazón renovados, llenos de optimismo y decisión; o bien de que se arrastraban ganduleando durante la primera hora del día en un estado de bendito sopor, incapaces de pensar en nada, ni agradable ni desagradable. Pero, agazapados como arpías en torno a su cama, los pensamientos desagradables esperaban para asaltarle tan pronto como Adam parpadease y abriera los ojos. En aquel momento se veía obligado, como alguien que se ahoga, a examinar su vida entera, dividido entre lamentaciones por el pasado y miedos futuros.

Adam había sacado la conclusión que, de todas las industrias del país, la reparación de vespas era la que representaba una mayor sobredemanda respecto a la oferta. En teoría, a quien se dispusiese a satisfacer esa demanda le esperaba una fortuna; pero en el fondo de su corazón Adam dudaba de que las vespas fuesen reparables, en el sentido normal del término; eran las mariposas de la carretera, organismos frágiles que tardaban mucho en ser fabricados y muy poco en morir.

In one sense the cause of suicide is simple: overwhelming pain. This overwhelming pain, however, is the aggregate of thousands of pains. Any hurt that we have ever suffered, if it remains consciously or unconsciously lodged within us, can contribute to suicide. This may range from being an incest victim 50 years ago, to losing a job 10 years ago, to having a car battery stolen yesterday. The pains come from everywhere: ill-health, family, peers, school, work, community, caregivers. For each suicide there was a finite point at which this aggregate became too much. Although "The straw that broke the back," is frequently an accurate metaphor, no one pain is ever the cause of suicide. Suicidal pain is decomposable into thousands of pains, and nearly all of these pains are decomposable into painful constituents. Sexual abuse, job loss, and personal theft each have numerous painful constituents. The search for the single cause is a fundamentally wrongheaded approach to the understanding and prevention of suicide. It is inaccurate to say simply that pain causes suicide, since a level of pain that is lethal for one person may not be lethal for someone with greater resources. Similarly, deficiency in resources cannot be regarded as the cause of suicide, since two people may have equal resources and unequal pain. Our resources may also come from everywhere; even such trivial distractions as going to a movie can contribute to coping with suicidal pain.

Though, in the book, the Ingallses leave the reservation under threat of being removed by soldiers, many squatters began to take the land by force. In 1870, the Osage—expelled from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage, mutilating their bodies and scalping them. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?

oficios, como escribió Julio Camba: «Yo sé de una señora que, deseando recobrar su perdida esbeltez, se sometió durante varios meses a un tra-tamiento intensivo de masaje, con el siguiente resultado: que ella se quedó como estaba, pero su masajista perdió cinco kilos de peso. Desde entonces, la buena señora le niega al masaje toda virtud terapéutica y, si nos coloca-mos en su punto de vista no tendremos más remedio 21/ Lodge, David. 2002. Op. cit. , p.52. que darle la razón; pero también tiene razón el masajista cuando afirma que el masaje es el mejor sistema de adel-gazamiento que existe en el mundo.»22

Mr. Micawber pressed my hand, and groaned, and afterwards shed tears. I was greatly touched, and disappointed too, for I had expected that we should be quite gay on this happy and long-looked-for occasion. But Mr. and Mrs. Micawber were so used to their old difficulties, I think, that they felt quite shipwrecked when they came to consider that they were released from them. All their elasticity was departed, and I never saw them half so wretched as on this night; insomuch that when the bell rang, and Mr. Micawber walked with me to the lodge, and parted from me there with a blessing, I felt quite afraid to leave him by himself, he was so profoundly miserable.

After the tail ( of a buffalo) was cut off - as a trophy for the conqueror- nothing was left to waste: the meat was dried, the heart smoked, the intestines made into sausages. Oils from the bison's brain were rubbed over the hide, which was then transformed into leather for robes and lodge coverings. And still there was more to reap: horns were turned into spoons, sinews into bowstrings, tallow into fuel for torches....In 1877, there were virtually no more American Buffalo to hunt- a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words os an army officer, "every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.

I could never feel like that about any public issue. Sometimes I wish I could. For me, if I'm honest, politics is background, news, almost entertainment. Something you switch on and off, like the TV. What I really worry about, what I can't switch off at will is, oh, sex, or dying or losing my hair. Private things. We're private people, aren't we, our generation? We make a clear distinction between private and public life; and the important things, the things that make us happy or unhappy are private. Live is private. Property is private. Parts are private. That's why the young radicals call for fucking in the streets. It's not just a cheap shock-tactic. It's a serious revolutionary proposition.

Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel cosiderable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn't about how the guy wanted to kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought Jane Austen's novels were about finding Mr Right).

I am not speaking strictly of slavery here, but of that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable--that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt. Slavery is just the logical end-point, the most extreme from of such disentanglement. But for that reason it provides us with a window on the process as a whole. What's more, owing to its historical role, slavery has shaped our basic assumptions and institutions in ways that we are no longer aware of and whose influence we would probably never wish to acknowledge if we were. If we have become a debt society, it is because the legacy of war, conquest, and slavery has never completely gone away. It's still there, lodged in our most intimate conceptions of honor, property, even freedom. It's just that we can no longer see that it's there.

The Osage had been assured by the U.S. government that their Kansas territory would remain their home forever, but before long they were under siege from settlers. Among them was the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who later wrote Little House on the Prairie based on her experiences. “Why don’t you like Indians, Ma?” Laura asks her mother in one scene. “I just don’t like them; and don’t lick your fingers, Laura.” “This is Indian country, isn’t it?” Laura said. “What did we come to their country for, if you don’t like them?” One evening, Laura’s father explains to her that the government will soon make the Osage move away: “That’s why we’re here, Laura. White people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get here first and take our pick.” Though, in the book, the Ingallses leave the reservation under threat of being removed by soldiers, many squatters began to take the land by force. In 1870, the Osage—driven from their lodges, their graves plundered—agreed to sell their Kansas lands to settlers for $1.25 an acre. Nevertheless, impatient settlers massacred several of the Osage. An Indian Affairs agent said, “The question will suggest itself, which of these people are the savages?

Niciodata n-am visat mult. Ceea ce inseamna din cate inteleg ca pur si simplu nu-mi amintesc visele, fiindca de visat visam tot timpul cat dormim sau cel putin asa se spune. E ca si cum as avea un televizor la care nu se uita nimeni si care imi palpaie in cap cat e noaptea de lunga. Canalul viselor. As vrea sa pot sa trag toata chestia asta pe video. Poate ca atunci mi-as da cat de cat seama ce se intampla cu mine. Si nu ma refer la genunchi, ci la cap. La minte. La suflet.

Cica in fiecare grasan se afla cate-un slabanog care se lupta sa iasa la lumina, iar eu unul ii aud strigatele inabusite ori de cate ori ma uit in oglinda.

Cambiando de postura en el sillín, Adam pensó que la forma en que su humilde vida seguía los moldes de la literatura tenía algo como de metempsicosis. ¿O quizá -se preguntó, hurgándose la nariz- era consecuencia de estudiar tan detenidamente las estructuras de las frases de los novelistas ingleses? Uno se había resignado a no tener ya un lenguaje privado, pero se aferraba melancólicamente a la ilusión de poseer los hechos de su vida.

She locked eyes with Jase. And said his middle name. “David.” Simultaneously, she fired her weapon. Jase wrenched himself to the side. The bullet lodged in Turner’s brain before Jase even hit the ground.

But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they’re in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs.

Şi cum te simţi acum, că trăieşti în Germania? – Ce vrei să spui? – Păi, după tot ce s-a întîmplat cu evreii. – Nu mă gîndesc prea mult la asta. Nu-mi face plăcere. – Da, dar ar trebui s-o faci, insistă el. – Pare de necrezut. Nu pot să cred că aşa ceva chiar s-a întîmplat. – Tocmai de-aia oamenii ar trebui să se gîndească la toată povestea, spuse băiatul. În primul rînd, fiindcă din cauza asta s-a şi întîmplat - fiindcă oamenilor nu le venea să creadă că s-a întîmplat. Şi evreilor li se părea de necrezut. Şi-au făcut coadă la camerele de gazare. – Încetează, scînci fata. – Ştii, am eu o teorie, cum că lucrurile cele mai urî te care se întîmplă sînt exact cele despre care crezi că nu se vor întîmplă niciodată. – O, nu! Chestiile cele mai frumoase vin pe neaşteptate. Cum a fost întîlnirea noastră pe vaporaş. Nu m-am aşteptat la ea. – Eu da. Ţi-am spus doar. De-aia am şi venit la petrecere. – Mai spune-mi o dată, zise Gloria, cuibărindu-se confortabil la pieptul lui. – Stai un pic. Prinsese un capăt de idee între degete şi nu voia să-l piardă. Era ceva ce nu mai exprimase niciodată în cuvinte. – Nu crezi că atunci cînd se întîmplă ceva cu adevărat nasol, e mult mai rău dacă nu te aştepţi la aşa ceva? Adică dacă-i o surpriză urîtă? – Mmm... cred că da, recunoscu ea. – Şi nu încerci să împiedici dinainte lucrurile nasoale să se întîmple gîndindu-te că ele s-ar putea să se întîmple? – Şi cum să le împiedici? Dacă ceva e sortit să se întîmple, se întîmplă şi gata. – Nu ştiu, dar eu am avut întotdeauna senzaţia că poţi. De exemplu, la examene. Îmi spun întotdeauna că nu m-am descurcat şi de obicei mă descurc destul de bine. Gloria rîse şi zise: – Eu cred întotdeauna că m-am descurcat OK şi de obicei pic examenul. – Data viitoare încearcă sistemul meu, o sfătui Timothy cu toată seriozitatea. – Nu-ţi foloseşte la nimic dacă n-ai minte! rîse ea iar. Eu cred că sistemul tău e-o ţicneală. – Nu-i o ţicneală! – Ba da, e. Ce-ncerci tu să-mi spui e că dacă te gîndeşti la toate momentele nasoale de pe lume, atunci nici unul dintre ele n-o să se mai întîmple vreodată. – Dacă ştii suficient de multe ca să te poţi gîndi la toate... Ei, acum nu zic chiar că nici unul dintre ele n-o să se întîmple vreodată, dar tot sînt de părere că poţi împiedica destul de multe. Fata chicoti uşor. – Cum ar fi, de exemplu, dimineaţa de azi. Îmi ziceam tot timpul că n-o să vii. Şi uite c-ai venit. – Voiam să vin. – Dar s-ar fi putut să nu vii. – Dar asta n-ar fi avut nimic de-a face cu ceea ce gîndeai tu. – Şi cum poţi să mi-o dovedeşti? Gloria îşi ţinu o clipă răsuflarea, scotocindu-şi mintea după un răspuns, apoi izbucni brusc într-un rîs exploziv: – E evident. Che sara, sara. – Ce-i asta? – E-n italiană. Ce va fi, va fi. – Eşti o fatalistă. – Şi tu un superstiţios. – Nu, nu sînt. Nu cred în numere norocoase. Şi trec întotdeauna în mod intenţionat pe sub scări. – Sistemul tău e superstiţios. – Nu e. Se bazează pe raţiune. Trebuie să ai capacitatea de a gîndi, de a judeca lucrurile. – Tu gîndeşti tot timpul? – Sigur. Nu poţi să nu gîndeşti. Cogito, ergo sum. – Ce-i asta? – E-n latină. Gîndesc, deci exist, rînji Timothy, apoi adăugă: Iată, asta înseamnă măcar unu' din noi. – Timothy... – Da? – Gîndeai şi mai înainte, cînd ne pipăiam? – La sfîrşit nu. – Numai la sfîrşit? Presupun că din cauza asta te-ai simţit prost după aceea. Te temi să te-opreşti din gîndit. – Într-un fel, da, mă tem, recunoscu el. Gloria îl privi cu seriozitate în ochi. – Dar exact aici e toată chestia între băieţi şi fete. Să simţi şi să nu mai gîndeşti. Cîteodată e ceva bun. – Da, zise Timothy, uşor nesigur. Îmi dau seama. Dar dacă eşti adult. Şi căsătorit.

This massive medical tourism to seek health services was unprecedented in American history. Never before had tens of thousands of patients traveled such great distances for medical services. The cost of transportation, food, and lodging while in transit delayed services and added to the cost. As a result, follow-up care in case of complications became more complex.9 Women endured substantial financial and personal hardships during these journeys in order to obtain safe, legal abortions that were not available locally.

The diagnosis of high-frequency deafness cast a faint shadow over his happiness, but their mutual enjoyment of sex was not much affected, the sounds which accompany it being mostly non-verbal and low frequency in wavelength. Inevitably,

After twenty-one chapters in which I have, as best I could, tried to right the wrongs shown in his film, I would like to ask some questions of Hicks. Why did he feel it necessary, after referring to David as “a stray dog” in the film, to further defame people with whom he hasn’t even had the courtesy to speak, by telling a large gathering of journalists that David was “lying and dying on the floor” before he met Gillian? Why did he deny the existence of David’s first wife, Claire, who did so much for David? Why doesn’t his film pay tribute to the Reverend Robert Fairman, who has received parliamentary citations for his tireless work for the mentally ill and the excellent standards he has maintained at his lodges? Why did he not show David’s close friend of eight years, Dot, taking David to concerts, as she often did?

Henry Cabot Lodge was like medicine, good for you, but hard to take. – Teddy White

There are really two essential things in campaigning. First, you must be in good humor. If you're going to be a raffle, you are to stay home. Second, you are to make sense in your speeches. These aren't the two things you must do. Unless you're saying, if you can be in good humor when you're exhausted. – Henry Cabot Lodge

Maybe, in the unfathomable reaches of the male psyche, men have always been frightened of women - or at least frightened of the feminine qualities within themselves: those qualities that point inwards, to that place where our deepest feelings are lodged, but which centuries of masculine culture have repressed or removed. Perhaps, this is the place where violence against women begins: in the shutting down of this inner world where relationships and connection truly reside, because the models we've been given for manhood fail to recognise a fundamental truth, which is that nothing meaningful in life ever happens without the ability to be vulnerable.

That night after returning from the meeting I got further bad news. David told me he was resigning to go to England. He had met an attractive young British guest at the lodge, whom I noticed had kept extending her stay.

The four known for targeting humans are transmitted from person to person by Anopheles mosquitoes. These four parasites possess wondrously complicated life histories, encompassing multiple metamorphoses and different forms in series: an asexual stage known as the sporozoite, which enters the human skin during a mosquito bite and migrates to the human liver; another asexual stage known as the merozoite, which emerges from the liver and reproduces in red blood cells; a stage known as the trophozoite, feeding and growing inside the blood cells, each of which fattens as a schizont and then bursts, releasing more merozoites to further multiply in the blood, and causing a spike of fever; a sexual stage known as the gametocyte, differentiated into male and female versions, which emerge from a later round of infected red blood cells, enter the bloodstream en masse, and are taken up within a blood meal by the next mosquito; a fertilized sexual stage known as the ookinete, which lodges in the gut lining of the mosquito, each ookinete ripening into a sort of egg sac filled with sporozoites; and then come the sporozoites again, bursting out of the egg sac and migrating to the mosquito’s salivary glands, where they lurk, ready to surge down the mosquito’s proboscis into another host.

2066 is the year white people will supposedly become a minority in Britain. Oxford Professor David Coleman is the man who estimated that date. In 2016, he wrote in a Daily Mail

They had slept on the ridge after we saw them, and next morning, in sheer wantonness, fired their lodgings,—their slaves had evidently carried the fire along from their lodgings, and set fire to houses of villages in their route as a sort of horrid Moslem Nigger joke; it was done only because they could do it without danger of punishment: it was such fun to make the Mashensé, as they call all natives, houseless. Men are worse than beasts of prey, if indeed it is lawful to call Zanzibar slaves men. It is monstrous injustice to compare free Africans living under their own chiefs and laws, and cultivating their own free lands, with what slaves afterwards become at Zanzibar and elsewhere.

In this book the reader will find, I hope, an antidote for historical amnesia. To this day, the public remembers the Revolution mostly in its enshrined, mythic form. This is peculiar in a democratic society because the sacralized story of the founding fathers, the men of marble, mostly concerns the uppermost slice of American revolutionary society. That is what has lodged in our minds, and this is the fable that millions of people in other countries know about the American Revolution. I ask readers to expand their conception of revolutionary American society and to consider the multiple agendas—the stuff of ideas, dreams, and aspirations—that sprang from its highly diverse and fragmented character. It is not hard today to understand that American people in all their diversity entertain a variety of ideas about what they want their nation to be and what sort of America they want for their children. Much the same was true two centuries ago. But from a distance of more than two centuries we don’t think about our nation’s birth that way. It is more comforting to think about united colonists rising up as a unified body to get the British lion’s paw off the backs of their necks. That is a noble and inspiring David and Goliath story, but it is not what actually happened. It is assuredly not the story of radical democracy’s work during the Revolution. This book presents a people’s revolution, an upheaval among the most heterogeneous people to be found anywhere along the Atlantic littoral in the eighteenth century. The book’s thrust is to complicate the well-established core narrative by putting before the reader bold figures, ideas, and movements, highlighting the true radicalism of the American Revolution that was indispensable to the origins, conduct, character, and outcome of the world-shaking event.

is modeled after the floor of the Temple of Solomon, which featured alternating black and white tiles. The Masons copied the pattern — the floors of all Masonic temples and lodges are also in a chessboard pattern.

Why did you come back?” she asked. “You hate them as much as I do.” There was no point denying it. “Because it’s home,” I said simply. It wasn’t true, but it could have been. Most people find it hard to abandon the country of their birth. “For better or worse,” she murmured. I was lying when I said I’d come back to Germany because it was home, but this house of theirs feels increasingly like one. I’ve lived in many places over the years, and some of them—the Hotel Lux in Moscow; sundry lodgings in Canton, Sofia, and Rio—have come to feel like somewhere I belonged. We all used to say that the party was our real home, but it isn’t. Those who work in the Comintern’s external sections spend most of their time as cuckoos in others’ nests. I’m a cuckoo in this house, of course. One who feels more and more at home in his foreign nest. Maybe all cuckoos are prone to this delusion, but I should know better.

The little plantations at Weymouth, Hull, and Mount Wollaston, although within the limits of Boston Bay, nevertheless do not concern us here so much as the solitary men who had made homes for themselves upon the land now actually part of the modern city. On an island in the harbour was settled David Thomson, "Gent.," an attorney for Gorges, with his family. Thomson died in 1628, leaving to his family his island and to the island his name, which it has borne ever since.

Human beings seem to take a perverse delight in making life more difficult for themselves than it is already

Satisfaction lodges in my heart when I accept the boundaries of my creaturely existence and accept the seasons of my life as coming from His good and wise hands.

prayers to answer? Why would he cure my cancer, and let other poor buggers with the same condition die, not to mention the kids with leukaemia in the children’s ward? Once he starts intervening in the course of nature, how does he decide when to stop?