Harry Crews Quotes

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.

That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.

If you love something/Set it free/If it loves you/It will come back to you/ If it doesn't--hunt it down and kill it.

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.

survival is triumph enough.

Doubt makes a man decent.

There ought to be a law against the sun rising and setting for you in somebody else.

Men to whom God is dead worship one another.

The writers job is to get naked, To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury!

So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

Alcohol whipped me. Alcohol and I had many, many marvelous times together. We laughed, we talked, we danced at the party together; then one day I woke up and the band had gone home and I was lying in the broken glass with a shirt full of puke and I said, 'Hey, man, the ball game's up'.

Writers spend all their time preoccupied with just the things that their fellow men and women spend their time trying to avoid thinking about. ... It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause—to look at them and make something of them.

everybody he knew was going quietly mad from being tied on a leash that was too short.

I first became fascinated with the Sears catalogue because all the people in its pages were perfect. Nearly everybody I knew had something missing, a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with blindness from a glancing fence staple. And if they didn't have something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire, or knives, or fishhooks. But the people in the catalogue had no such hurts. They were not only whole, had all their arms and legs and eyes on their unscarred bodies, but they were also beautiful.

It was not any one thing that scared him. It was everything. It was his life. His life terrified him. He didn't see how he was going to get through the rest of it.

Survival is truimph enough.

I've never enjoyed myself. I'm incapable of enjoying myself. There's just some people who don't enjoy themselves very much.

As novelist Harry Crews once wrote, I’m the kind of person who—if he can’t have too much of something—doesn’t want any of it. In

He had one of those good country voices: part drunk, part hound dog, part angel.

I am not perfect." It came out in a rush of breath. "See I thought I was. Thank God I ain't. See a perfect thing ain't got a chance. The world kills it, everything perfect. (Listen to him!) Now see a thing that ain't perfect, it grows like a weed. Yeah, like a weed! A thing that ain't perfect gets hand clapping, smiles, takes the wire an easy winner. But the world ain't set up right if you perfect. You lible to run right into a brick wall. Looks like suicide. All the weeds say, looka there, it suicide!

The real artist with no tear in his eye and no sadness in his heart, puts the pages in the fire and does it again!" "All art is a metaphor it's by telling you one thing when your mean something else. The Old Man in the Sea is not about fishing!" "Writing a book is like torture that you don't know, but after it’s done and there it is. It's a joy like unlike anything else, I think it's the closest that a man can come to knowing what is feels like to have a baby.

He knew and accepted for the first time that things would not be different tomorrow. Or ever. Things got different for some people. But for some they did not. There were a lot of things you could do though. One of them was to go nuts trying to pretend things would someday be different.

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High.

If you're a person of feeling, if you feel things keenly and deeply—and I don't think you can be a writer unless you feel things not just for the moment but they live in you—that costs you. I don't think you can be a writer of consequence and merit unless you have grave doubts about yourself, about what you've done and who you are and whom you've hurt. And that costs you. And so, it all costs you. What is left is what all of us are going to get, a chance to know what it's like to die.

You get a tattoo like this and a ’do like this, and wear a shirt where the tattoo shows, and you walk into a room of people and feel the animosity, the disapproval, the how-dare-you. You can feel it coming off them like heat off a stove. And the thing I want to ask them is, how have I deserved this, what have I done that so offends you? I have not asked you to cut your hair this way. I have not asked you what you thought of it, or to approve it. So why do you feel this way towards me? If you can’t get past my 'too—my tattoo—and my 'do—the way I got my hair cut—it’s only because you have decided there are certain things that can be done with hair and certain things that cannot be done with hair. And certain of them are right and proper and decent, and the rest indicate a warped, degenerate nature; therefore I am warped and degenerate. 'Cause I got my hair cut a different way, man? You gonna really live your life like that? What’s wrong with you?

He had been hurt doing everything he had ever done. He expected it, even wanted it. Nothing centered a man like pain. Nothing drove the irrelevant bullshit our of your mind like the taste of your own blood. Duffy always wanted to tell people who were worried about the future of their children, or about God and the order of the universe, to go out and break a rib or two. A few broken ribs threw all thoughts of children, God and the order of the universe right out the window. Nobody with broken ribs ever had free-floating anxiety, or so Duffy was convinced. It was cheaper that a psychiatrist and never so humiliating.

It is 12:23 in the morning, and people are coming to be here, coming to help. They saw what happened, and they can’t stay in their houses. Not just Harry and Craig’s friends. But their friends’ parents, too. Jim from the tech crew has sped over with more lights from his basement. There have to be at least a dozen people. Then more than a dozen. Smita’s mom is here. Two more police officers. And a man Harry’s never seen before walks up and goes straight to Mr. Bellamy, saying, “I’m staying right here with you.” They wear matching rings.

White people were dangerous and snakes were dangerous and now the two were working together, each doing what the other told it to. She was sure she had seen a snake in a weeded ditch with the head of a white man. Right after she came out of the house on the way to Big Joe's, which she had immediately forgotten, she saw it, long and black and diamond-patterned in the ditch with a white man's head. It had blue eyes. The bluest eyes any white man ever had. She was sure she had seen it. She thought she had seen it. Maybe it was only a dream or a memory of another time. Whatever it was, she still saw it every time she closed her eyes, coiled there on the back of her eyelids, blue-eyed and dangerous.

Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all-the good and the bad-carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.

Find a cunt that fits you and you’ll never be the same”, he would say. “Never find any peace. See, it won’t matter if she dishonors you. It won’t matter if she lies to you, hurts you, spits in your face, fucks other men. All you’ll want to know is: are you coming back to me? Are you going to let me have that fantastic cunt one more time? One more time with that cunt that fits you is all you’ll care about. Ruin your family, ruin yourself, nothing will matter.

Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision

A B-17 could get its crew back on one engine. Even with half its tail torn off or with a huge, gaping hole in the wings, fuselage, or nose, a good pilot could get his Fort and his crew back to the base.

Todo hombre es inventor del mundo y justifica todo lo que hay en él mediante el milagro de sí mismo, de la misma forma que todo hombre está convencido de que su nombre aparece el primero en la lista para entrar en el cielo... Todo católico sabe que podría haber sido Papa si se hubieran dado las circunstancias, y todo criminal, hasta el más insignificante, cree en su fuero interno que en realidad es Pretty Boy Floyd o John Dillinger. Todo hombre sabe que su don lo liberará si es lo suficientemente afortunado.

We came on the wind of the carnival. Eight and a half long years ago, on a wind that seemed to promise so much; a mad wind, full of confetti and scented with smoke and pancakes cooked by the side of the road. The pancake stall is still there, and the crowds that line the side of the street, and the flower-decked cart with its motley crew of fairies, wolves and witches. I bought a galette from that very stall. I bought one now, to remember. Still as good, just the right side of burnt, and the flavors- butter and salt and rye- help reawaken the memory.

I love so many books and authors that it's hard to name just a few, but I'm always particularly excited when new books by Alice Hoffman, John Crowley, Joanne Harris, Elizabeth Knox, and Patricia McKillip come out. (And, of course, books by Ellen [Kushner], and Holly [Black], and the rest of the Bordertown crew!) I'm impatiently looking forward to Susanna Clarke's next book too. Aside from writing and reading, my favorite things to do are paint, walk in the countryside with my dog, and listen to music -- especially when it's live and it's played by friends. Fortunately there's a lot of live music where I live.

James Agee. He was born a prince of the language, and so he remains. And Capote. I don't care what kind of stupid ass remarks he makes, he can write; he really can. When he's on he's really on. Updike would be twice the writer he is if he weren't such a hot dog. God knows, he's a word man. Eudora Welty, great writer. Erskine Caldwell, by the way is a helluva lot better than he's ever been given credit for. But if you ask me, "Who's your favorite writer?" there's no answer to that. That's like saying, "What do you like best for breakfast?" Some mornings you want a beer; some mornings you want strawberries; some mornings you want, God help us, Frostie Crispie Flakes with a lot of sugar, and some mornings you want your old lady.

Joe Lon and Willard slipped out of their shirts. Willard flipped over and walked around in the dirt on his hands. Joe Lon took the bottle of whiskey out of his back pocket, set it carefully on the step of the Winnebago, checking out Susan Gender's red pants again as he did. Then he went into a steady handstand and did six dips, his nose just short of the dirt each time he went down. They both came off their hands and looked at Duffy. "I'm impressed," said Duffy, shortly. "What the hell are you, gymnasts?" "Drunks," said Joe Lon picking up the bottle.

During World War II, there had been a project to sabotage the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Years earlier, Leo Szilard, the first person to realize the possibility of a fission chain reaction, had convinced Fermi not to publish the discovery that purified graphite was a cheap and effective neutron moderator. Fermi had wanted to publish, for the sake of the great international project of science, which was above nationalism. But Szilard had persuaded Rabi, and Fermi had abided by the majority vote of their tiny three-person conspiracy. And so, years later, the only neutron moderator the Nazis had known about was deuterium. The only deuterium source under Nazi control had been a captured facility in occupied Norway, which had been knocked out by bombs and sabotage, causing a total of twenty-four civilian deaths. The Nazis had tried to ship the deuterium already refined to Germany, aboard a civilian Norwegian ferry, the SS Hydro. Knut Haukelid and his assistants had been discovered by the night watchman of the civilian ferry while they were sneaking on board to sabotage it. Haukelid had told the watchman that they were escaping the Gestapo, and the watchman had let them go. Haukelid had considered warning the night watchman, but that would have endangered the mission, so Haukelid had only shaken his hand. And the civilian ship had sunk in the deepest part of the lake, with eight dead Germans, seven dead crew, and three dead civilian bystanders. Some of the Norwegian rescuers of the ship had thought the German soldiers present should be left to drown, but this view had not prevailed, and the German survivors had been rescued. And that had been the end of the Nazi nuclear weapons program. Which was to say that Knut Haukelid had killed innocent people. One of whom, the night watchman of the ship, had been a good person. Someone who'd gone out of his way to help Haukelid, at risk to himself; from the kindness of his heart, for the highest moral reasons; and been sent to drown in turn. Afterward, in the cold light of history, it had looked like the Nazis had never been close to getting nuclear weapons after all. And Harry had never read anything suggesting that Haukelid had acted wrongly.

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High." " He said in an interview on video this... ""She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring--to strike--when the band behind her fired up the school song: "Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High." " The writers job is to get naked! To hide nothing. To look away from nothing. To look at it. To not blink. To be not embarrassed or shamed of it. Strip it down and lets get down to where the blood is, the bone is. Instead of hiding it with clothes and all kinds of other stuff, luxury! On-Writing

He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure. Rage would not cure it. Indulgence made it worse, flamed it, made it grow like cancer. And it had ruined his life. Not now, not in this moment. Long before. The world had seemed a good and liveable place. Brutal, yes. but there was a certain joy in that. The brutality on the football fields, in the tonks, was celebration. Men were maimed without malice, sometimes--often even--in friendship. Lonely, yes. Running was lonely. Sweat was lonely. The pain of preparation was lonely. There's no way to share a pulled hamstring with somebody else. There's no way to farm out part of a twisted knee. But who in god's name ever assumed otherwise? Once you know that it was all bearable

Since I was about ten years younger than this crew of alcoholics, I just listened and filled their cups with cheap wine. After they’d had enough, I’d tell them of my escapades in Riverbank and in Panama where I’d worked with the Southern Baptist Convention and Jesus Christ to save the black souls of niggers, spics and Indians. I used to keep my eye on Harris when I told my stories. He had this nasty habit of pulling out a little notebook in the middle of a conversation and jotting down, as he said, “story ideas.” Later on, after I’d transferred to S.F. State and taken his writing course, he asked me if I wanted to read his first draft of Wake Up, Stupid! I kept it for a week and returned it to him at the next short story seminar. I only read the first paragraph. After that, I was no longer afraid of the intellectuals. I knew I could tell a better story.

As expected, Nevada’s summer heat was oppressive; temperatures under the desert sun bubbled around the 130-degree mark, which made it even harder for Monroe and almost everyone except [Clark] Gable to put in a full day’s work. Though he had a chauffeured limousine at his disposal, he drove himself back and forth to work in his silver Mercedes-Benz SC. He always arrived punctually at eight-forty-five A.M., bringing along gallon Thermoses of booze-spiked lemonade and iced tea to fortify himself. For the better part of the morning, he would sit around studying that day’s script pages or gabbing with the crew while waiting for the other principals to arrive. Though the delays were driving him mad, he tried not to show it. But one day while his writer-friend John Lee Mahin was visiting from Los Angeles, Gable told him, “It’s not professional, John, it’s stealing. It’s stealing the bank’s money and United Artists’ money. I don’t see how they’re going to get a picture out of this, but I’m stuck with it now, and I’m trying to do the best I can. It’s been hard on me.

the bad professors pit themselves against the class, but “the good professors get half of the class debating with the other half.” Similarly, “Harry would get half of the crew competing with the other half—setting records for hard work, for dedication, and the like. He did not get us debating with him.

During the early days of Franco's tenure with Harry Alan Towers (1967-1969) there was an occasion, oft remarked upon, when one film (The Girl From Rio) finished shooting a week early, and rather than send the crew home Towers and Franco hastily wrote a new script over the weekend (99 Women), and began shooting it on the Monday. In this case the arrangement was made with the full cooperation of the producer. But did the experience suggest to Franco a possible way of working in the future? After all, 99 Women, conceived in a rush and made without deliberation, went on to become one of Franco's biggest grossing films of all time, spending weeks in the upper reaches of the Variety chart.

He was six feet two inches tall, two hundred and ten pounds of finely trained muscle, with blond shining hair falling down his neck, and standing there in the kitchen between those plaster walls and that skinny wife and those ruined children, it was like his body had somehow managed to suck all that had ever been handsome or strong or alive right out of his wife and out of the children and out of the house itself. The little boy smiled his bad teeth at his daddy, and Muscle only shook his head and then went down the hallway on his machine-smooth stride.

I went out the side door, and Sam fell into step behind me as we walked out beyond the mule barn where four mules stood in the lot and on past the cotton house and then down the dim road past a little leaning shack where our tenant farmers lived, a black family in which there was a boy just a year older than I was. His name was Willalee Bookatee. I went on past their house because I knew they would be in the field, too, so there was no use to stop

An oak stump might cost a man a week of his life.

All I do know is that if I ever hear a man make fun of a woman for loving Harry Styles or anything, for that matter…I am going to out them for the fangirls they are. My life is being ruined because this judge is the equivalent of a Swiftie. The Raiders are basically his Taylor, and I’m paying the price for Crew’s betrayal.” “Yeah, that judge is a real antihero…” Mills throws out, making my sister smile before she answers in the exact way I knew one of them would the moment I made a fucking Taylor Swift comparison.

If you’re a person of feeling, if you feel things keenly and deeply—and I don’t think you can be a writer unless you feel things not just for the moment but they live in you—that costs you. I don’t think you can be a writer of consequence and merit unless you have grave doubts about yourself, about what you’ve done and who you are and whom you’ve hurt. And that costs you. And so, it all costs you. What is left is what all of us are going to get, a chance to know what it’s like to die. — Harry Crews, Getting Naked with Harry Crews: Interviews (University Press of Florida, 1999)

the biography of a childhood which necessarily is the biography of a place, a way of life gone forever out of the world.

No one can save a drowning man who does not himself want to be saved, but those of us safely ashore can be lighthouses

The Cadillac was vast, domed, vaulted and trussed, specially built by Detroit to the Gospel Singer's own specifications, but costing as much as Detroit cared to make it cost, expense being no consideration with the Gospel Singer because he consistently made more money during any given year than he was able to spend. The interior was deep savage red: the seats and headliner formed in heavy leather; the floor padded in spongy carpet. A pale mauve light-indirect, as though emanating from the passengers themselves-lit up the Gospel Singer in the back seat where he lolled, long-jointed and beautiful under his incredible head of yellow girl's hair, and lit up Didymus-manager, chauffeur and confessor to the Gospel Singer-where he sat, narrow-faced and nicotine-stained, rigid in his dark blue businessman's suit. He turned to look over his shoulder at the Gospel Singer, his mouth like the blade of a hatchet. He wore a clerical collar.

All Sam Peckinpah ever did in his movies was show that getting hit on the chin doesn't sound like [makes a small popping noise]. When one grown man hits another grown man in the face, it splatters like an overripe tomato. And it's not fun getting killed. It's bloody and gory and altogether unpleasant. That's all Sam Peckinpah ever did.

Would I be right in thinking you’ve been attacked by a Zeppelin crewed by German airmen?” The entire group looked astonished. “How did you know?” said the mayor. “We’ve been on their tail for a while.” Khuwelsa put her hand over her face to hide her smile at Harry’s exaggerated account of the situation. The mayor looked at Harry, then Khuwelsa, then the Pegasus. “You’re chasing them?

One can only guess what talented people like the crew of Challenger might have done had they returned to earth alive. Yet, even their loss has inspired thousands of others to carry on for them in meaningful ways we will never fully know. They have not been lost to the world. They made it a better place.

As CSU continued to bag and photograph, as the LIRR and Transit detectives and his own crew began to work the waiting room, wandering among the semiconscious potential wits like a squadron of visiting nurses, Billy noticed that one of the commuters sleeping there had what appeared to be blood on his Rangers jersey.

LUCY and Desi. Lucy and Ricky. As far as the public knew, the private life of the Arnazes closely resembled that of the Ricardos on the TV screen; a camera crew just dropped by once a week to film a half hour of slapstick and tender kisses.

The absence of a plan is also some plan.

Yes,” he said simply. “It has been so since vampires came to America. Of course, over the years the system’s changed with the population. There were far fewer vampires in America for the first two hundred years, because the trip over was so perilous. It was hard to work out the length of the voyage with the available blood supply.” Which would have been the crew, of course. “And the Louisiana Purchase made a great difference.” Well, of course it would. I stifled another bout of giggles. “And the kingdoms are divided into . . . ?” “Areas. Used to be called fiefdoms, until we decided that was too behind the times. A sheriff controls each area.

After a long pause, Appius Livius nodded at the boy. “Alexei, remember your company manners,” Appius Livius said softly. Alexei bobbed his head. Having been given permission, the tsarevitch of Russia went outside with the road-crew worker to stow a table in the back of a pickup.

Less than forty-eight hours earlier, the crew members of these ships had learned of the atomic bomb for the first time, the secret behind the mission for which they had been training for months.

Crewmen aboard the Enola Gay gave their first interviews. “The crew said, ‘My God,’ and couldn’t believe what had happened,” said weaponeer William Parsons. “A mountain of smoke was going up in a mushroom with the stem coming down. At the top was white smoke but up to 1,000 feet from the ground there was swirling, boiling dust.” General Carl Spaatz, one of the army air forces’ top officials, called the atomic bomb “the most revolutionary development in the history of the world.

think that’s a difficult question to answer. On the day before the play opened, I wrote a tweet which said “I’d love people to see it, it’s better seen than read—plays are like sheet music, meant to be sung & we’ve a cast & crew of pure Beyoncé.” So maybe that’s the answer: that they imagine the Beyoncés of the acting world—emotional and empathetic titans—killing

When I think back over those days and my thoughts roam to English girls and women I feel a deep sense of gratitude. They served, in their way. They served, as American women and girls did, in the ways that would make feminists proud. They ferried our planes across the Atlantic. They talked us in through the overcast. If you want to know how gratitude can feel, think of being in a B-17, or any aircraft, with two engines out, with a hole in your starboard wing and two of your crew dying of shell fire. Then think of being lost. You are in white, fleecy clouds, and you can hardly see the tips of your wings. Then think of a woman’s voice, coming in to your headset: “It’s all right, Yah-ink, I’ll get you in.” Then her British voice from Flying Control nestles you down, “Eye-zy, mite, you’re just starboard of the glide path. Heading two-fy-uv-nigh-yun.

I had already learned—without knowing I’d learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power. And it was only by right ways of doing things—ritual ways—that kept any of us safe. Making stories about them was not so that we could understand them but so that we could live with them.

On this mission, one crew, piloted by Glenn Dye, flew their twenty-fifth. They were done. They could go home. They were the only original crew of the 100th’s original thirty-five who finished a tour. One out of thirty-five made it through a tour. And even on Dye’s crew, one gunner was killed. None of the original crew all made it. That did not encourage us much.

Crowe had first encountered Harry Winford Morrison in 1909, on the muddy bank of a canal outside Boise, where they were foremen of separate crews lining the ditch with concrete.

She was a great-hipped, heavy-legged woman with breasts that haunt the dreams of hungry men. She was repulsed by Michelangelo’s Creation on the ceiling of the bathroom. “The body is the work of the Devil,” she said. But Fat Man’s father only laughed at her and lay superimposing her head onto the shoulders of Adam, pretending that naked Adam was his wife. And he had sired his son with his wife fully clothed and shoed in a dark room in the middle of the night with her jaws clenched and her teeth grinding and her Bible clutched to her bosom with both hands.

We all of us are made out of dirt. God took him up some dirt and put it in his hands and rolled it around and then he spit in the dirt and rolled it some more and out of that dirt and God spit, he made you and me, all of us.

A beating will loosen a child’s hide and let him grow.

Everything is stories, and stories is everything

DAWN TREADER SOUP When Caspian, King of Narnia, in the company of Reepicheep the mouse knight, Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace, decides to go in search of the lost Lords of Narnia, he sets sail on a ship called the Dawn Treader. The crew experiences many adventures at sea and on land, and have to live off the food on board and what they can find around them. This soup was a particular favorite of Eustace…. At least, until he turned into a dragon! This recipe can easily be made on board a ship, using produce from the sea and supplies from the hold. INGREDIENTS • serves 4 1 lb 2 oz clams 2 3/4 oz smoked bacon 1 shallot 1 1/2 oz butter 3 sprigs thyme 1 bay leaf 1 T flour 2 cooked potatoes, chopped into chunks 1 3/4 oz crème fraîche or sour cream Salt and pepper PREPARATION TIME • 15 mins COOKING TIME • 25 mins Collect the clams on the island of Felimath, rinse them carefully, and place in a cauldron with about 4 oz of water. Boil them for 2 minutes, until the clams open, and discard any that remain closed. Drain the clams, saving the juices, and remove them from their shells. Strain and reserve the juices through a piece of cheesecloth. Chop the bacon and let it brown for a few minutes in a nonstick frying pan. Drain off the excess fat and set the bacon aside on paper towels. Peel the shallot, sauté it for 5 minutes in the butter without browning, then add the bacon, thyme, and bay leaf before the ship reaches the Dark Island. Sprinkle with the flour and let the shallot and bacon cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly. Slowly add the clam juice, stirring at the same time to prevent lumps forming, then add the potato chunks and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove bay leaf and purée with a blender until the soup is quite smooth. Add the clams and the crème fraîche or sour cream, reheat for 2 minutes, season with salt and pepper, and serve. Note: Reepicheep likes to add a handful of samphire to nibble with this soup.

I am The Black Book. Between my top and my bottom, my right and my left, I hold what I have seen, what I have done, and what I have thought. I am everything I have hated: labor without harvest; death without honor; life without land or law. I am a black woman holding a white child in her arms singing to her own baby lying unattended in the grass. I am all the ways I have failed: I am the black slave owner, the buyer of Golden Peacock Bleach Crème and Dr. Palmer’s Skin Whitener, the self- hating player of the dozens; I am my own nigger joke. I am all the ways I survived: I am tun-mush, hoecake cooked on a hoe; I am Fourteen black jockeys winning the Kentucky Derby. I am the creator of hundreds of patented inventions; I am Lafitte the pirate and Marie Laveau. I am Bessie Smith winning a roller-skating contest; I am quilts and ironwork, fine carpentry and lace. I am the wars I fought, the gold I mined, The horses I broke, the trails I blazed. I am all the things I have seen: The New York Caucasian newspaper, the scarred back of Gordon the slave, the Draft Riots, darky tunes, and mer- chants distorting my face to sell thread, soap, shoe polish coconut. And I am all the things I have ever loved: scuppernong wine, cool baptisms in silent water, dream books and number playing. I am the sound of my own voice singing “Sangaree.” I am ring-shouts, and blues, ragtime and gospels. I am mojo, voodoo, and gold earrings. I am not complete here; there is much more, but there is no more time and no more space . . . and I have journeys to take, ships to name, and crews.

I’d love people to see it, it’s better seen than read—plays are like sheet music, meant to be sung & we’ve a cast & crew of pure Beyoncé.

I’ve often said that when he made humans, the all-knowing god must have been admitting a mistake with his first crew of companions and servants, so he dumbed down your design a bit. Thus, you having such difficulty pronouncing what I consider a perfectly commonplace name. Still, it comes in handy, as it keeps me from getting summoned by every Anton, Aleister, and Harry who bumbles his way to the chapter on summoning in whatever book on the dark arts is in his possession.

Udhayanidhi Stalin, Nayantara, Chaya Singh, Santhanam latest Tamil movie Idhu Kathirvelan Kadhal - Movie Review, Movie Rating, Movie News, Cast and Crew Details and much more @ iluvcinema.in Movie Name : Idhu Kathirvelan Kadhal Director : S.R.Prabhakaran Producer : Udhayanidhi Stalin Music Director : Harris Jayaraj Cast & Crew : Udhayanidhi Stalin, Nayantara, Chaya Singh, Santhanam