Gef Quotes

Sebastian stayed seated at his computer chair and pondered. Time travel … I don’t have the time to time travel! he moaned.

You are now on a journey, not just an outer journey, but an inner journey of growth and self-discovery.

A closed heart only creates misery and sadness. An open heart creates love and happiness.

In a remarkable book called Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, the historian Modris Eksteins anatomizes the metabolism of the sentimentality that underwrites Keynes’s embrace of guilt as an instrument of policy. Eksteins shows how sentimentality and a species of extravagant mythmaking mark the points of contact between avant-garde culture and burgeoning totalitarianism. This was especially true in Germany, the country that had advanced the radical program of the avant-garde most enthusiastically. England, by contrast, was a conservative power. Where Germany started the war to transform the world, England fought the war to preserve a world and the culture that defined it. A key difference lies in the aestheticization of life: treating life, that is to say, as if it were a work of art devoid of human reality. On the continent, as the historian Carl Schorske put it in his classic study offin-de-siècle Vienna, “the usual moralistic culture of the European bourgeoisie was . . . both overlaid and undermined by an amoral Gef ühlskultur [sentimental culture].” This revolution in sensibility amounted to a crisis of morality—what the novelist Hermann Broch called a “value vacuum”—that quickly precipitated a crisis in liberal cultural and political life. “Narcissism and a hypertrophy of the life of feeling were the consequence,” Schorske wrote.

The former head of this operation, Gary Wendt, who is credited with much of the enormous success of GEFS, used his personal agenda as a simple but inordinately powerful tool for growing the business into ever new entrepreneurial arenas. Over the years, he used his personal agenda to make it unequivocally clear that he expected entrepreneurial business growth from every member of management. At every major meeting, the topic of business development was on the agenda (usually in the number one spot). In every annual review, managers were asked to demonstrate the revenues they had created from businesses that did not exist five years before. From division heads to newly hired analysts, everyone was held accountable for some set of activities having to do with creating entrepreneurial revenue and profit streams. In short, no one who worked in the organization could avoid the unremitting focus on new business development. You need to make sure that you are similarly consistent, predictable, and focused, and that you sustain this emphasis over a long period. Pressure applied only once is soon forgotten, and alternating pressure (as in flavor-of-the-month management) will cause people to be confused, disillusioned, or angry. Wendt’s consistent, visible, and predictable attention to business development created a pressure in GEFS for entrepreneurial business growth that took it from the $300 million installment loan portfolio we looked at in chapter 6 to a financial services behemoth with $250 billion in assets under management when he left in 1998. Examples of Wendt’s single-minded determination to drive growth through entrepreneurial transformation at GEFS are numerous. Years ago, for instance, he was asked whether his agenda would change if someone rushed in and told him that the computer room was on fire (implying that his business could be completely destroyed). Wendt replied that he employed firefighters to handle such emergencies. As the leader, his most important job was to keep people focused on business development. Since business development is an uncomfortable and unpredictable process, Wendt knew that if he allowed it to appear to be a low priority for him, all those working for him would heave a sigh of relief and go back to business as usual, with new businesses struggling to find a place on the priority list. In fact, as he remarked, even if he did try to get involved in putting out the fire, he would probably only interfere with the efforts of the highly competent people employed to do so.

I was certain that the hissing, clicking noise he made every time I screamed was his version of laughter. Evil, conniving bug laughter. I did not like Gef.

The mongoose took a while to warm to the family, at least enough that he did not as often threaten their life and livestock.

The only reason mongooses don’t speak regularly is that they are shy.

Underneath all their deserved frustration with the mongoose is often the sort of love one might have for the black sheep of one’s family, a kind of He may be obnoxious, but he is ours.

Squirrels are not indigenous to the Isle of Man, though quibbling about native species does seem bold when dealing with the reality of a talking mongoose.

Now, people would no doubt pay richly for the chance to spend the night at a remote home potentially occupied by a verbal varmint, but this attitude was a half-century away from the Irvings’ occupancy.

127. I counsel you, Loddfáfnir, if you’ll take my advice, you’ll profit if you learn it, it’ll do you good if you remember it: When you recognize evil, call it evil, and give your enemies no peace. Ráðum’k þér, [Loddfáfnir, at þú ráð nemir, njóta mundu ef þú nemr,þér munu góð ef þú getr:]Hvar’s þú bǫl kannt, kveðu þat bǫlvi at, ok gef-at þínum fjándum frið.

Gef’s story, which would have been nonsense even if it had not come from the mouth of a talking mongoose, was that he was born in New Delhi on June 7th, 1852. This meant he was at least eighty when he met the Irvings. On average, mongooses live twenty years, though this is the lifespan of a nonverbal mongoose. No one has yet established the longevity of one given the power of speech, but we may assume it is at least ninety.

Physiologically, Gef was not a mongoose. He did not possess the almost canine forepaws of his supposed species but tiny articulated, three-fingered (and a thumb) appendages that could manipulate items and, as occasion demanded, squeeze the life out of the rabbits he would gift.

Gef had no message for the world other than tweaking the nose of believers and doubters alike and demanding to be left alone with his family. Aside from potentially existing at all, Gef performed no miracle.

Gef became the receptacle of all Irving’s misspent wants and frustrations, a focal point for the things the family could not say aloud. He could have Jim’s broader knowledge, Voirrey’s adolescence, and Margaret’s witchery. He could be the son from whom Jim had become estranged, the friend Voirrey did not find in Peel, the desirous confidante that Margaret could not find in her husband.

A talking mongoose, one must admit, is a more captivating figure than the typical Charlie McCarthy knockoff.

One can point to countless Sasquatches and their morphological kin, ghosts by the bushel, and aliens by the mothership load, but Gef existed just this once.

Þá hætti framkvæmdastjórinn að gráta, spratt á fætur, greip hönd Ólafs Kárasonar, þrýsti hana fast og sagði á bjagaðri íslensku: Þú sem ert vegalaus, gáttu inní mitt hjarta. Ef þú ert svángur, þá held ég þér veislu. Ef þú átt hvergi heima, þá gef ég þér höll. Kærleikurinn er það eina sem borgar sig. Mitt nafn er Three Horses.