Goon Quotes

I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.

I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced." [Books vs. Goons, L.A. Times, April 24, 2005]

If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.

Sure, everything is ending," Jules said, "but not yet.

The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn't really over, so you're relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.

There's a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hours - days, if I have to.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out.

There are so many ways to go wrong. All we've got are metaphors, and they're never exactly right. You can never just Say. The. Thing.

Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

Everybody sounds stoned, because they're e-mailing people the whole time they're talking to you.

I’m done. I’m old, I’m sad - that’s on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I don’t want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.

I think, The world is actually huge. That's the part no one can really explain.

Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

Redemption, transformation--God how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didn't everyone?

Learn to drive?" "Never," said Quentin. "My mission in life is to be a passenger.

It doesn’t matter if I’m off the beat. It doesn’t matter if I’m snapping to the rhythm. It doesn’t matter if I look like a complete goon when I dance. It is my dance. It is my moment. It is mine. And dance I will. Try and stop me. You’ll probably get kicked in the face.

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

I can't tell if she's actually real, or if she's stopped caring if she's real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

This book will prove the following ten facts: 1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there. 2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch. 3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity. 4. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object, the result is a family fight. 5. Music does not always sooth the troubled beast. 6. An Englishman's home is his castle. 7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male. 8. One black eye deserves another. 9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm. 10. It pays to increase your word power.

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?

She was clean": no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

That we have some history together that hasn’t happened yet.

We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.

Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

You said you were a fairy princess You said you were a shooting star You said we'd go to Bora Bora Now look at where the fuck we are

See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.

Go on till you come to the end; then stop.

The answers were maddeningly absent—it was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back.

th blu nyt th stRs u can't c th hum tht nevr gOs awy

The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Don’t listen to them—listen to me. And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if it's happened?

Every single person is a fool, insane, a failure, or a bad person to at least ten people.

Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase "meant to be"--usually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people.

I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

Inej cleared her throat. “You do look a bit …” “Enchanting,” said Matthias. Nina was about to snap that she didn’t appreciate the sarcasm when she saw the expression on his face. He looked like someone had just given him a tuba full of puppies. “You could be a maiden on the first day of Roennigsdjel.” “What is Roennigsdjel?” asked Kuwei. “Some festival,” replied Nina. “I can’t remember. But I’m pretty sure it involves eating a lot of elk. Let’s go, you big goon—and I’m supposed to be your sister, stop looking at me like that.” “Like what?” “Like I’m made of ice cream.” “I don’t care for ice cream.” “Matthias,” Nina said, “I’m not sure we can continue to spend time together.” But she couldn’t quite keep the satisfaction from her voice. Apparently she was going to have to stock up on ugly knitwear.

This is the music business. 'Five years is five hundred years' - your words.

I am a free soul, singing my heart out by myself no matter where I go and I call strangers my friends because I learn things and find ways to fit them into my own world. I hear what people say, rearrange it, take away and tear apart until it finds value in my reality and there I make it work. I find spaces in between the cracks and cuts where it feels empty and there I make it work.

You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha's sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I'm sorry and I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!

and the question is, which one is really “you,

What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

The legend of my mom is that she can’t be stopped. Not when you hit her. Not when a whole country full of goons puts her in a cage. Not even if you make her poor and try to kill her slowly in the little-by-little poison of sadness. And the legend is true. I think because she’s fixed her eyes on something beyond the rivers of blood, to a beautiful place on the other side. How else would anybody do it?

Dad: Honey, have you seen my glasses? I can"t find them. Mom: I haven't seen them. Calvin: (with glasses, to Dad) Calvin, go do something you hate! Being miserable builds character!

Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now and I think like where will I be standing when I look back Will right now look like the beginning of a great life or... or what

Bah." Morpheus snags a paintbrush. "She should be draped in starlight and clouds, lace and softness. Nothing less should touch her skin." He points the bristles at Jeb. "I saw what you put Thomas in. You are not painting her into one of those goon suits. She is royalty. Dress her like royalty. Give her some glitter... some glitz. And a crown.

Calvin: I'm a genius. I can't believe how smart I am. ...I've got more brains than I know what to do with. Hobbes: So I've noticed.

I know I'm famous and irresitible - a combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivity - and I know that you in this room are helpless against me.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. "I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. "You grew up, Alex," he said, "just like the rest of us.

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?

The feel of arms around me, in comfort rather than as restraint or in harmful intent, undoes me. I cry for all the years of mocking and teasing received at the hands of my peers, for having been born to hateful, careless parents. I cry for the fact that this one good, kind boy has joined the game. And That makes me think it’s hopeless to find any goon in anyone, which only makes me cry harder.

The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law-they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood!

Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection;

What a goon, except it really is funny, me trying to sneeze a hot dog through my nose, and we're both laughing like total morons.

You’re lonely,” they say, but it doesn’t scare me anymore for it teaches me, and maybe that’s the biggest win from these years: I don’t need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore, like I always thought I would. I don’t break mirrors anymore, like I always thought I would. I can finally stand myself, and I never thought I would.

bullshit job into five categories. I will call these: flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, and taskmasters.

time's a goon

What are they teaching these thugs? -Why are there so many of them? -What is the Institute for Higher Aeronautics? -How many of the are there? There are only six of us! Why? -Why is DC public transportation so weird? -Why don't we mug those Eraser goons for money more often? -Fang's Blog

I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.

But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

-Hardly knowing what i was doing, i began to hit the table with one hand as i sang in a low voice. Big cows" -thump- "lumps of meat" -thump. His widened. "Give me milk" -thump- "warm and sweet." I stopped abruptly, pressing my lips together as I realized what I had just sung. The ridiculousness of it struck me forcibly and I knew I could not goon without laughing. We stared at each other,locked in a stalemate, his eyes brimming with laughter, his lips trembling. My chin quivered. Against my will, a sound burst from me. It was a very unladylike snort.-

Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.

One foot in front of the other was all she could manage.

if thr r childrn thr mst be a fUtr rt?

Kaz settled his hands over his cane, his back to the city. “We all want different things from this day. Freedom, redemption—” “Cold hard cash?” suggested Jesper. “Plenty of that. There are lots of people looking to stand in our way. Van Eck. The Merchant Council. Pekka Rollins and his goons, a few different countries, and most of this Saintsforsaken town.” “Is this supposed to be encouraging?” asked Nina. “They don’t know who we are. Not really. They don’t know what we’ve done, what we’ve managed together.” Kaz rapped his cane on the ground. “So let’s go show them they picked the wrong damn fight.

So what, you her daddy or something?” the little goon laughs at Tank. Tank steps around me right up to the guy. Tank’s got a good eighty pounds and nine inches on him. The little goon looks even smaller standing by Tank. “Only when I'm fuckin' her,” Tank retorts with a satisfied smile.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in switch licour Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye (So Priketh hem Nature in hir corages), Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke

She looks like someone I want to know, or maybe even be.

some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.

Let it rain on some days, Let yourself shiver on some cold nights, So when it's Spring you'll know why it was all worth going through.

Excuse me? "I am not a damsel in distress. If I were, do you think I could do that?" I point to the two unconscious goons I had taken out." "You're not an average damsel in distress, I'll give you that.

The sky was electric blue above the trees but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldn't. The feeling was too deep.

It was quite a beautiful thing, the way we simply just came to be. With no effort or trying, just slowly finding each other’s hands in the dark. No chains or promises, just a simple sign of hope that things will go on and get better.

Calvin: ME TARZAN! KING OF JUNGLE! Suzy: Nice underpants. Does your mom know you're over here like this? Calvin:...I don't think Jane EVER said that to Tarzan.

There are few things less comforting than a tiger who's been up too late.

Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; she’d hit him twice across the face; she’d run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; she’d wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He’d presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; she’d forgotten and was happy — had never not been happy — and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.

Success and failure can both make you lose appetite and concentration, don't let it bother or over-excite you, just think them away as a mere thing that had just happened, and get along with your life.

Do not be afraid to walk the path that you must go just because you cannot see the end. The path becomes clearer as you continue to go on.

It's turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth.

So you see, you have nothing to be afraid of." Oh no, thought Otto, just squads of hired goons wandering around with experimental energy weapons. Nothing to be afraid of at all.

Destroy if all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn't make messes; mankind was the mess.

I picture it like Judgement Day,' he says finally, his eyes on the water. 'We'll rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. We'll meet in that new place, all of us together, and first it'll seem strange, and pretty soon it'll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.

According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we.

and it’s all kind of moving and sweet except that you’re not completely there—a part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking,

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh.

People tend to think that money makes them strong, but it's those that learn to survive without it, are truly the stronger.

Vinegar: that's what fear smells like.

I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life.

happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being “inside” and being “outside,” that it all came down to X’s and O’s that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

If no one had an army, armies would not be needed. But the same can be said of most lobbyists, PR specialists, telemarketers, and corporate lawyers. Also, like literal goons, they have a largely negative impact on society. I think almost anyone would concur that, were all telemarketers to disappear, the world would be a better place.

I understood that expensive shirts looked better than cheap shirts. The fabric wasn't shiny, no - shiny would be cheap. But it glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside. It was a fucking beautiful shirt, is what I'm saying

A man don't need to act tough if he is. Men that put on a show are spineless more often than not.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didn’t expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and...

Things had gotten -- what's the word? Dry. Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working as a city janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the WIlliamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

No one is waiting for me. In this story, I'm the girl no one is waiting for.

...real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you...

My father was my greatest inspiration. He was a lunatic.

Time's a goon right?You gonna let that goon push you around?

I'll sue for everything they're worth. But all the rights and privileges of fair practice are theirs. Humankind is a thug. The law is a goon.

Nothing feels as awful as pouring your heart out to some talk therapist, then realizing this so-called professional is actually vastly stupid and you've just professed your most secret secrets to some goon who's wearing one brown sock and one blue sock.

People are going to break promises, and they will have every right to till the point you realize that you don't change plans based on someone else's words.

And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon--my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

Too Clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was "digitization" which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. "An aesthetic holocaust!

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?

A bit of theory as we settle down for lunch: the waiter's treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm.

he looked like something more than human, or something less.

a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff

reach isn’t describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: it’s simultaneous.

What I Suddenly Understand My job is to make people uncomfortable. + I will do it all my life. ---> My mother, Sasha Blake, is my first victim.

It's finished. Everything went past, without me.

I’m like America ” he said. Stephanie swung around to look at him unnerved. “What are you talking about ” she said. “Are you off your meds ” “Our hands are dirty ” Jules said.

I had to work so hard to find myself again, Alexandr." There was pain in her voice. "I was so lost without you. You left me raw and wounded and trapped in a dark place with no windows or doors. I didn't know how to live without you. I didn't know how to smile or feel or be. It took almost two years before I really accepted that it was over and I had to find a way to go on. I made myself strong. I'm alive again. I can wake up some mornings and be happy. I can look at the ocean and find peace again. Now you're asking me to risk everything all over again and I'm not certain I could survive if it all came crashing down.

I spent days and nights staring at the blank page, searching the deepest corners of my mind: who have I been, what have I seen, what did I learn? I thought about all the nights I've spent outside, all the times I laid down to cry and how I took a deep breath every morning and decided to simply go on. Because what else is there to do? Decide that this is it? I quit, I'm done? Oh if I could find words to justify those feelings I've carried. I could write the thickest of books with explosions of emotions from a young girl's lost heart. I could make you see, make you hear, make you feel, at least a tiny fragment of what's out there.

You must always confront your fears,” Goon said as though she hadn’t spoken. “Then skulking monsters become merely unfamiliar shadows, thrown by a tree bough. Whispering voices are just the wind. The wild flare of panic is merely a burst of emotion, not a terror spell cast by some evil witch.

He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. They'd been in Lou's house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idol's famous face and thought, You're finished. Nostalgia was the end - everyone knew that.

You can do it alone. But it's going to be so much harder.

You should open these doors with care and caution-but, first, you must know how to close them. And above all, you must know which doors should be left unopened...

I have failed and go on, therefore I am

They were snobs or idiots or both...yet she was inexplicably crushed by their coldness.

Oh we'll know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.

...water laughing softly down a black stone wall.

She'd risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.

All power corrupts, but we need electricity.

Show me you’re a Derby horse and you’ll go—only then will you go!” became Henry’s attitude.

Figures you’d fall in love. A goon always recognizes the goon in another,

She ran her gaze over his chest with frank appreciation. Then he shivered, realizing he hadn't really considered the weather. It was forty-five degrees max, but Chloe was giving him a go-on gesture with her hand. "All I have left is my pants," he said. "Yes, please." "It's cold, Chloe." She tilted her head. "Are you worried about shrinkage?" Well, he was now. -Chloe and Sawyer

I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down Jules said angrily. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someone's office. Everybody sounds stoned because they're emailing people the whole time they're talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people...And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck - Jules Jones

Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.

Jules turned to her, incredulous. 'Do you socialize with Republicans?' "'It happens, Jules.

Mindy felt a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist.

A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasn't that a fairly accurate description of lust?

I loathe popular pulp, I loathe go-go gangs, I loathe jungle music, I loathe science fiction with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories. I especially loathe vulgar movies—cripples raping nuns under tables, or naked-girl breasts squeezing against the tanned torsos of repulsive young males. And, really, I don't think I mock popular trash more often than do other authors who believe with me that a good laugh is the best pesticide.

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them.

Well'm, faith ain't no magic wand or money-back gar'ntee, either one. Hit's jest a way a'livin'. Hit means you don't worry th'ew the days. Hit means you go'on be holdin' on to God in good or bad times, and you accept whatever happens. Hit means you respect life like it is - like God made it- even when it ain't what you'd order from the wholesale house. Faith don't mean the Lord go'n make lions lay down with lambs jest cause you ast him to, or make fire not burn. Some folks, when they pray to git well and don't even git better, they say God let'm down. But I say that warn't even what Jesus was a-talkin' bout. When Jesus said ast and you'll git it, He was givin' a gar'ntee a-spiritual healin, not body healin'. He was sayin' thet if'n you git beat down - scairt to death you cain't do what you got to, or scairt you go'n die, ir scairt folks won't like you- why, all you got to do is put yore hand in God's and He'll lift you up.

অমিতব্যয়িতা আমার স্বভাব, ব্যক্তিগত জীবনে এবং স্বভাবতই কবিতাতেও। কবিতা কী? জানিনে। ছন্দ কাকে বলে - ভালো করে বুঝিনে। কাব্য বিচারের মানদন্ড কী? - আমি নিরুত্তর। আমি শুধু উড়নচণ্ডি প্রেমিকের মতো অবিবেচক, যুক্তিহীন এবং ব্যক্তিগত। আমার কাছে কবিতা তা-ই, আমি যা লিখি। অন্যের কাছে সেটা গল্প হলেও ক্ষতি নেই, এলজাব্রা হলেও না।

And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he'd felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire. Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light. "See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine.

I will never leave you, I'll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life

The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows.

That's how New York looked: like a gorgeous, easy thing to have, even for me.

Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her-purple, green, pink-like a face painted by Lucian Freud.

...our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood.

I like you, too!" she blubbered at the top of her voice. "I do, I do. You're a lovely Goon. You're my favourite Goon in all the world!

He was dealing with well-trained individuals. They were still goons, to be sure, but they’d clearly graduated with honors from a top-flight goon school

The Goon Show,

I kind of felt bad for them. Getting punched out by a dame was not going to pad their goon résumés.

I say to myself—sometimes, Clov, you must learn to suffer better than that if you want them to weary of punishing you—one day. I say to myself—sometimes, Clov, you must be better than that if you want them to let you go—one day. But I feel too old, and too far, to form new habits. Good, it'll never end, I'll never go.

*After Skulduggery kills Valkyrie* Skulduggery: This has been a good day so far, all things considered, I have the location of the Grotesquey and I got to kill Valkyrie, which admittedly is something I've been wanting to do since I met her, she can be incredibly annoying Scapegrace: Um Skulduggery: She hardly ever shut up, I pretended to be the friends with her, but honestly, I just felt sorry for the poor girl. Not the brightest you know. Valkyrie: You're such a goon.

Sasha's green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. "In Naples," she said, "there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what they'd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will." ... You opened your eyes, which you hadn't realized were shut again. "what I'm saying is, We're the survivors," Sasha said. ... "Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?

Stu walked Bennie over to Chris in the chair and parted his hair to reveal some tan little creatures the size of poppy seeds moving around on his scalp. Bennie felt himself grow faint.'Lice' the barber whispered.'They get it at school'. 'But he goes to private school' Bernie had blurted.'In Crandale,New York!

Is there anything else you haven't told me?" My head spun. So much had happened and we still needed to stop a powerful magician. Death was a real possibility. I needed Valek to know how I felt. "I love you" Valek wrapped me in his arms. "My love has been yours since the fire festival. If those goons had killed you, I knew then that I would never be the same. I didn't want or expect this. But I couldn't resist you.

Come with me if you want to live,” I said. “Excuse me?” “No time,” I said. “It isn’t your fault, but you’re into some bad business, Harvey. There’s a woman with two hired goons about to come up your back steps, and they aren’t here to sell you a magazine subscription.” “What?” he said. “Do you have an appointment?

They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but ted hadn't found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond at moonlight, their bare feet digging in the carpet....

The site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door he’d installed a lock to keep his sons out. They gathered wistfully outside it, his boys, with their chipped, heartbreaking faces. They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but Ted hadn’t found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond in moonlight, their bare feet digging at the carpet, their fingers sweating on the walls, leaving spoors of grease that Ted would point out each week to Elsa, the cleaning woman. He would sit in his office, listening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his despair, that often he couldn’t think about art. He thought about nothing at all.

Moonlight does things to a street scene that no other natural or man-made phenomenon can effect. People walk slower, their smiles lingering on contended faces. Horses that usually move along fast enough to stir up the dust off the street plod lazily in the clear, cool night. And in dark corners where people forget to look, the goons come out.

Keep going. No matter what you do, no matter how many times you screw up and think to yourself "there's no point to carry on", no matter how many people tell you that you can't do it - keep going. Don't quit. Don't quit because a month from now you will be that much closer to your goal than you are now. Yesterday you said tomorrow. Make today count.

Let’s go, you big goon—and I’m supposed to be your sister, stop looking at me like that.” “Like what?” “Like I’m made of ice cream.” “I don’t care for ice cream.” “Matthias,” Nina said, “I’m not sure we can continue to spend time together.

We're the survivors. Not everyone is. But we are.

Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.

I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ... "You grew up, Alex.

Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scotty's vision. He says he likes them--actually, what he says is: "I consider them a visual enhancement." We think they remind him of his mom.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.

Thousands of solar panels lift and tilt at the same time, in the same way. I clutch at Dad's arm: "Why are they doing that?" "They're collecting moonlight," Dad says, and I remember: it's weaker, but we use it.

I could be goon squad material," Fitzgerald argues. Typical rookie: of course he wants to be good at everything from the get-go. What Fitzgerald's got is the kind of potential you don't see in the guys mired on the fourth line, the kind of potential Mike's never had in his life.

We adored it, and discussed it, and swapped jokes from it, and it made us feel more alive. In some way, it was cathartic: it exhilarated us by lifting us up above our everyday frustrations and boredoms. It gave us a liberating perspective on this odd event unfolding around us, called 'our life.' And when, years later, I became bewildered by the reception of Monty Python by some of our looniest fans, I suddenly realised they were experiencing exactly the combination of emotions that had rendered me such a devotee of the Goons, and so I was able to forgive them.

I will never betray my Goon Dock friends, We will stick together until the whole world ends, Through heaven and hell and nuclear war, Good pals like us will stick like tar, In the city, or the country, or the forest, or the boonies I am proudly declared a fellow Goony. —The Goony Oath

My image of “a Communist” was not a Soviet bureaucrat but my friend Leon’s father, a cabdriver who came home from work bruised and bloody one day, beaten up by his employer’s goons (yes, that word was soon part of my vocabulary) for trying to organize his fellow cabdrivers into a union.

What I'm Afraid Of: [...] That I'm a grown-up woman coming back to this place after many years. That my parents are gone, and our house isn't ours anymore. It's a broken-down ruin with no one in it. Living here all together was so sweet. Even when we fought. It felt like it would never end. I'll always miss it.

The lesson is this: When the road gets dark and all hope seems lost, there's nothing to do but keep going. We, like Bilbo, must keep up our "hobbitry in heart." Even more important, as people of faith, we recognize that we are not alone. Whatever happens from this point on, we put our trust in God. And we go on.

Oh we'll know each other for forever' Bix said. 'The days of losing touch are almost gone.' 'What does that mean? ' Drew asks. 'We're going to meet again in a different place,' Bix said. 'Everyone we've lost, we'll find. Or they'll find us.

She takes hold of his hands. As they move together, Rolph feels his self-consciousness miraculously fade, as if he is growing up right there on the dance floor, becoming a boy who dances with girls like his sister. Charlie feels it, too. In fact, this particular memory is one she'll return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Rolph has shot himself in the head in their father's house at twenty eight: her brother as a boy, hair slicked flat, eyes sparking, shyly learning to dance.

Watching someone you love… die? There are no words for how broken that makes a person. It’s like waking up from a bad dream only to find out that it’s you reality, it’s like watching sunlight fade from the sky, like watching death suck the one you love dry, and being powerless to stop it. You may as well try to stop the waves from rolling in, or the sun from rising.In the end, the waves will roll, the sun will set, and death will come. The only thing you have a choice in? How you deal with it…when it does.

Somewhere in the lane after that they came level with a small door next to a fried chicken shop. There was a small red-lit sign over this door.

The thing is, if you're an ugly goon when you're 15, you're an ugly goon for the rest of your life — until the day you die. You're always a goon, even if lots of years go by, even if you get married and have a kid, even if you're more successful than you ever thought you'd be in your wildest dreams. You're still that same goon who everybody laughed at. It never changes.

The second key maneuver, which flowed naturally from the first, was to redefine racism itself. Confronted with civil rights headlines depicting unflattering portrayals of KKK rallies and jackbooted sheriffs, white authority transformed those damning images of white supremacy into the sole definition of racism. This simple but wickedly brilliant conceptual and linguistic shift served multiple purposes. First and foremost, it was conscience soothing. The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although 'resentful of black progress' and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the 'kind of upstanding white citizen(s)' who were 'positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan". The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional and pervasive.

And, see, those metaphors – 'up front' and 'out in the open' – are part of a system we call atavistic purism. AP implies the existence of an ethically perfect state, which not only doesn't exist and never existed, but it's usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoever's making the judgments.

Where do you think the term ‘count’ came from, anyway?” “Earth, I thought. A pre-atomic—late Roman, actually—term for a nobleman who ran a county. Or maybe the district was named after the rank.” “On Barrayar, it is in fact a contraction of the term ‘accountant.’ The first ’counts were Varadar Tau’s—an amazing bandit, you should read up on him sometime—Varadar Tau’s tax collectors.” “All this time I thought it was a military rank! Aping medieval history.” “Oh, the military part came immediately thereafter, the first time the old goons tried to shake down somebody who didn’t want to contribute. The rank acquired more glamour later.

And as for me, though that I konne but lyte, On bokes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that ther is game noon That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But yt be seldom on the holyday, Save, certeynly, whan that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules synge, And that the floures gynnen for to sprynge, Farewel my bok and my devocioun!

Riesel had been crusading against the criminal element in labor unions. The night of the radio broadcast, Riesel stepped out of the famous Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway near Times Square and was approached on the sidewalk by a goon who threw a cup of acid in his face. Riesel was blinded by the acid’s effect on his eyes. It soon became obvious that the attack had been ordered by Hoffa ally and labor racketeer John Dioguardi, aka Johnny Dio.

It doesn’t really look like a bear,” Max said one night. “Why should it?” Ephraim said, sounding angry. “That’s humans trying to, like, organize the stars to our liking. You think the Big Guy, the Grand Creator, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever said: Oh, guess I’d better make these flaming balls of gas look exactly like a bear or a fucking spoon so those stupid goons on rock 5,079 don’t get confused?” He lip-farted. “Ohyeahriiiight,

But I had to keep my hands under the desk—my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law—they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood! I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver “ranting lectures” to them about the United States; some

My strength was returning as we went on. It occurred to me then that it was in times of struggle that I found the best parts of myself-courage, loyalty, an unexpected peace- and I always discovered what I needed to break through and go on.

Under the New Deal, governmental goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress’s war-making powers at several turns. When warned by Frances Perkins in 1932 that many provisions of the New Deal were unconstitutional, he in effect shrugged and said that they’d deal with that later (his intended solution: pack the Supreme Court with cronies). In 1942 he flatly told Congress that if it didn’t do what he wanted, he’d do it anyway.

If we human beings are information processing machines, reading X's & O's and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call "experience", & if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain, then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?

Das mine!' protested Ava, Bennie's daughter, affirming Alex's recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, 'Mine pot! Mine pot!

Though he could not remember how he had been injured or how long he had been unconcious, his first thought was to call the office and find someone to cover his shifts. He had a busy week of beating people to a bloody pulp, and his victims weren't going to punch themselves in the face. He couldn't leave his bosses in the lurch. He was evil, but he was professional. Perhaps it was his dedication to his work that had built him such an impressive resume: fifteen broken jaws, fifty-seven legs, a hundred arms, and more noses than he could count. He had knocked out thousands of teeth, pushed a few people off bridges, and once buried a guy in concrete up to his neck. He had been nominated for the Goon of the Year nine times by OUCH (Organization of United Criminals and Henchman), and had won its highest honor, the Brass Knuckle, seven times. At the office, he showed up early and left late. He ate his lunch on the job, frequently beating people as he ate his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches. You didn't get on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list by taking a sick day!

People say that America has no religion, but it's the opposite: America has every religion, all the old ones, and produces more new ones than anywhere else on earth. America;'s religious life is like the photo mosaic in which a thousand little images add up to one big picture, except there's no big picture, just a blob of unrelated and unrelatable images, texts, and poses, the freedom to take what you want from a religion and reject hte rest and be lonely, standing outsdie the warm shelters of temples with your own goon god that no one else can understand.

Ted had the uneasy sense that the child was spinning them out as a way of filling the time, distracting them both from whatever was going on inside the house. And this made her seem much older than she really was, a tiny little woman, knowing, world-weary, too accepting of life's burdens even to mention them.

Yale tried to say some­thing, but didn’t know how to be­gin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lin­coln Park la­goon, the two of them shar­ing Richard’s Le­ica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of in­ter­act­ing with the world that was si­mul­ta­ne­ously self­ish and gen­er­ous—grab­bing at beauty and re­flect­ing beauty back. The benches and fire hy­drants and man­hole cov­ers Nico and Richard stopped to pho­to­graph were made more beau­ti­ful by their notic­ing. They were left more beau­ti­ful, once they walked away. By the end of the day, Yale found him­self see­ing things in frames, saw the way the light hit fence posts, wanted to lap up the rip­ples of sun on a record store win­dow. He said, “I get it, I do.

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands he'd grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays the quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tape - everything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course) - above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors he'd sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

কতবার যে আমি তোমোকে স্পর্শ করতে গিয়ে গুটিয়ে নিয়েছি হাত-সে কথা ঈশ্বর জানেন। তোমাকে ভালোবাসার কথা বলতে গিয়েও কতবার যে আমি সে কথা বলিনি সে কথা আমার ঈশ্বর জানেন। তোমার হাতের মৃদু কড়ানাড়ার শব্দ শুনে জেগে উঠবার জন্য দরোজার সঙ্গে চুম্বকের মতো আমি গেঁথে রেখেছিলাম আমার কর্ণযুগল; তুমি এসে আমাকে ডেকে বলবেঃ 'এই ওঠো, আমি, আ…মি…।' আর অমি এ-কী শুনলাম এমত উল্লাসে নিজেকে নিক্ষেপ করবো তোমার উদ্দেশ্যে কতবার যে এরকম একটি দৃশ্যের কথা আমি মনে মনে কল্পনা করেছি, সে-কথা আমার ঈশ্বর জানেন। আমার চুল পেকেছে তোমার জন্য, আমার গায়ে জ্বর এসেছে তোমার জন্য, আমার ঈশ্বর জানেন- আমার মৃত্যু হবে তোমার জন্য। তারপর অনেকদিন পর একদিন তুমিও জানবে, আমি জন্মেছিলাম তোমার জন্য। শুধু তোমার জন্য।

At the end, in Harry’s handiwork, there’s nothing sentimental about love, no sunlit clouds and glory notes—it’s a substantial, earthbound connection, grounded in effort, kindness, and decency. Learning to love, Harry liked to say, is really about learning to live. Perhaps everyday affection seems a small facet of love. Perhaps, though, it is the modest, steady responses that see us through day after day, that stretch into a life of close and loving relationships.

As you flail, knowing you’re not supposed to panic – panicking will drain your strength – your mind pulls away as it does so easily, so often, without your even noticing sometimes, leaving Robert Freeman Jr. to manage the current alone while you withdraw to the broader landscape, the water and buildings and streets, the avenues like endless hallways, your dorm full of sleeping students, the air thick with their communal breath. You slip through Sasha’s open window, floating over the sill lined with artifacts from her travels: a white seashell, a small gold pagoda, a pair of red dice. Her harp in one corner with its small wood stool. She’s asleep in her narrow bed, her burned red hair dark against the sheets. You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sasha’s sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of I’m sorry and I believe in you and I’ll always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, I’ll be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!

...Many years ago he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he'd folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it the edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both.

Most people remember COINTELPRO from the days of the Black Panthers, Yippies, and other revolutionary groups who threatened our government during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. Sensing that these groups might incite American citizens into radical action, the FBI sent in agents to agitate members of these various groups, often pitting them against each other through various forms of subterfuge, such as blackmail. It appears that the CIA, FBI, and NSA are now sending their goons into the metaphysical marketplace, making sure that people who think they are aspiring to higher and positively transformative things are, in reality, only becoming more self-indulgent, disconnected, and confused. The biggest influx of these agents occurred during the blossoming of the "human potential" movement in the early '70s, through such institutions as Esalen. Legions of people threw away their protest banners and followed their bliss during a time when directly addressing the socio-political problems of the day was imperative. Since then, the emphasis on personal development - and more recently, the You Create Your Own Reality movement - a significant segment of the population has been brainwashed into disdaining all socio-political issues. For what better way to disempower people than to have them focus on their personal evolution at the expense of their families, communities, and the countries they live in?

I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.