Jailbird Quotes

You can't just eat good food. You've got to talk about it too. And you've got to talk about it to somebody who understands that kind of food.

I still believe that peace and plenty and happiness can be worked out some way. I am a fool.

Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me.

We're a disaster, a certifiable catastrophe, and there's nothing beautiful about the way we're going. She's trying to be unbreakable but I'm unshakeable. She's going crazy, and I'm already goddamn insane. I clipped my jailbird's wings so she couldn't fly away from me, and then I wonder why the fuck I can't make her soar.

You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed — so you were a good man just the same.

It's all right,' she said. 'You couldn't help it that you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed- so you were a good man just the same.

What is flirtatiousness but an argument that life must go on and on and on?

I’ve only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.

She read my books the way a young cannibal might eat the hearts of brave old enemies. Their magic would become hers.

We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.

Life goes on- and a fool and his self respect are soon parted...

History repeated itself. The 'don't do the things I did' mantra was tiresome pish. The best way to make sure your children don't grow up as cunts is not to be one yourself - or not to let them SEE you being one. This is easier as a sober artist in Santa Barbara than as an alcoholic jailbird in Leith.

He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. “How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?” he said. She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth—not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His bathrobe fell slightly open as his left hand sank from her chin to neck, collarbone, base of throat, his fingertips just inside the edge of her thin polka-dot shirt and trembling over the warm skin there.

She believed, and was entitled to believe, I must say, that all human beings were evil by nature, whether tormentors or victims, or idle standers-by. They could only create meaningless tragedies, she said, since they weren't nearly intelligent enough to accomplish all the good they were meant to do.

I have graded my separate works from A to D. The grades I hand out to myself do not place me in literary history. I am comparing myself with myself. Thus can I give myself an A-plus for Cat’s Cradle, while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare. The report card is chronological, so you can plot my rise and fall on graph paper, if you like: Player Piano B The Sirens of Titan A Mother Night A Cat’s Cradle A-plus God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater A Slaughterhouse-Five A-plus Welcome to the Monkey House B-minus Happy Birthday, Wanda June D Breakfast of Champions C Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons C Slapstick D Jailbird A Palm Sunday C

The economy is a thoughtless weather system- and nothing more. Some joke on the people, to give them such a thing

I was making my mind as blank as possible, you see, since the past was so embarrassing and the future so terrifying.

It is a hard daydream to let go of—that one has friends.

...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.

... a gaggle of old ladies is glued to the window at the end of the hall like children or jailbirds. They're spidery and frail, their hair as fine as mist. Most of them are a good decade younger than me, and this astounds me. Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.---- There are five of them now, white headed old things huddled together and pointing crooked fingers at the glass.

Let wheel to flow on your body Tonight I’ll be little more rowdy. Below to lower lips, Feel ache in hips. Tonight you will be my jailbird, So don’t behave like nerd. Tonight I’ll make you my follower By moving this wheel all over.

He gave me the key, which I later discovered would open practically every door in the hotel. I thanked him, and I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done. I told him I had been in the Arapahoe before—in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was not interested.

That was what made them so hilarious and unafraid. That was the strength of the Nazis. [...] They understood God better than anyone. They knew how to make Him stay away.

Body sizes can be remarkable for their variations from accepted norms, but still explain almost nothing about the lives led inside those bodies.

There was the odd suburban thunderbolt, but they were mostly those people who'd found each other; they were golden and bright-lit and funny. Often they seemed in cahoots somehow, like jailbirds who wouldn't leave; they loved us, they liked us, and that was a pretty good trick.

We are all here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years.

Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He

There was more. There was always more.

People won’t see you as just another woman any more, but as a white woman who hangs with brownies, and you’ll lose a bit of your privilege, you should still check it, though, have you heard the expression, check your privilege, babe? Courtney replied that seeing as Yazz is the daughter of a professor and a very well-known theatre director, she’s hardly underprivileged herself, whereas she, Courtney, comes from a really poor community where it’s normal to be working in a factory at sixteen and have your first child as a single mother at seventeen, and that her father’s farm is effectively owned by the bank Yes but I’m black, Courts, which makes me more oppressed than anyone who isn’t, except Waris who is the most oppressed of all of them (although don’t tell her that) In five categories, black, Muslim, female, poor, hijab bed She’s the only one Yazz can’t tell to check her privilege Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? Is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? Is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality Yazz doesn’t know what to say, when did Court read Roxane Gay - who’s amaaaazing? Was this a student outwitting the master moment? #whitegirltrumpsblackgirl

My nose, thank god, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn't so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom.

And contrast Mary Kathleen, if you will, with my wife Ruth, the Ophelia of the death camps, who believed that even the most intelligent human beings were so stupid that they could only make things worse by speaking their minds. It was thinkers, after all, who had set up the death camps. Setting up a death camp, with its railroad sidings and its around-the-clock crematoria, was not something a moron could do. Neither could a moron explain why a death camp was ultimately humane.

To give an extra dimension to the scolding she gave me: The word “twerp” was freshly coined in those days, and had a specific definition—it was a person, if I may be forgiven, who bit the bubbles of his own farts in a bathtub.

This piece of groping wisdom impresses me still. A sensible prayer people could offer up from time to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: “Dear Lord—never put me in the charge of a frightened human being.” Kenneth

Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize—the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.

As for the pursuit of happiness on this planet: I was as happy as any human being in history. “Thank God,” I thought, “that cigarette was only a dream.

And I am now compelled to wonder if wisdom has ever existed or can ever exist. Might wisdom be as impossible in this particular universe as a perpetual-motion machine?

It is a common experience among jailbirds to wake up and wonder why they are in jail

What kind of bird don’t fly? Jailbird! Jailbird!

We citizens of Luna are jailbirds and descendants of jailbirds. But Luna herself is a stern schoolmistress; those who have lived through her harsh lessons have no cause to feel ashamed.

I performed what was perhaps the most obscenely intimate physical act of my life. I gave birth to a broken, querulous little old man by doing this: by putting on my civilian clothes. There

I was speechless. Never had I dreamed that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America and the enchanting technology of a motion-picture camera would be combined to form such an atrocity.

A slick of vagabonds, petty thieves and their bosses, discharged foreign soldiers, discharged jailbirds, dissolute rich and tinkers, beggars, pimps and their charges, chancers, knife-grinders, poets and police agents.

Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Then I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets - without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes.

By the time I reached the coffee-shop door, however, my self-confidence had collapsed. Panic had taken its place. I believed that I was the ugliest, dirtiest little old bum in Manhattan. If I went into the coffee shop everybody would be nauseated. They would throw me out and tell me to go to the Bowery, where I belonged. But I somehow found the courage to go in anyway - and imagine my surprise! It was a though I had died and gone to heaven! A waitress said to me, "Honeybunch, you sit right own, and I'll bring you your coffee right away." I hadn't said anything to her. So I did sit down, and everywhere I looked I saw customers of every description being received with love. To the waitress everybody was "honeybunch" and "darling" and "dear". It was like an emergency ward after a great catastrophe. It did not matter what race or class the victims belonged to. They were all given the same miracle drug, which was coffee. The catastrophe in this case, of course, was that the sun had come up again. I had the feeling that if Frankenstein's monster crashed into the coffee shop through a brick wall, all anybody would say to him was, "You sit down here, Lambchop, and I'll bring your coffee right away.

THE SAME THING happened if GRIOT was told that the jailbird was Hispanic. It was somewhat more optimistic about Whites, if they could read and write, and had never been in a mental hospital or been given a Dishonorable Discharge from the Armed Forces. Otherwise, they might as well be Black or Hispanic.

The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me. People

You can now sell your considerable skills, Mr. Starbuck, for their true value in the open marketplace of the Free Enterprise System. Happy hunting! Good luck!

You are yet another nincompoop, who, by being at the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said, “was able to set humanitarianism back a full century! Begone!” Strong stuff.

Thus do I capitalize years as though they were proper names.

World War One were simply additional places of hideously dangerous work, where a few men could supervise the wasting of millions of lives in the hopes of making money. It

He sat in his shirt on the edge of the bed and stared into vacancy, desolate. The cigarette ash fell unnoticed on his spotless floor, patterned with the stars, and sun, and moon.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system and nothing more.

Hello and good-bye." What else is there to say? Our language is much larger than it needs to be.

What is the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?" she might ask me. "I don't know," I would say. "You can't hear an enzyme," she would say[...]

Now I, too, I thought, had served my country in uniform, had at every moment for two years done precisely what my country had asked me to do. It had asked me to suffer. It had not asked me to die. There

Courtney replied that Roxane Gay warned against the idea of playing ‘privilege Olympics’ and wrote in Bad Feminist that privilege is relative and contextual, and I agree, Yazz, I mean, where does it all end? is Obama less privileged than a white hillbilly growing up in a trailer park with a junkie single mother and a jailbird father? is a severely disabled person more privileged than a Syrian asylum-seeker who’s been tortured? Roxane argues that we have to find a new discourse for discussing inequality

Well,” said Ruth, when the sounds of the bells had died away, “when you eight-year-olds kill Evil here in Nuremberg, be sure to bury it at a crossroads and drive a stake through its heart—or you just might see it again at the next full moooooooooooooooooon.

We had had many joggers in prison. I found them smug. About the young man and his radio. I decided that he had bought the thing as a prosthetic devices, as an artificial enthusiasm for the planet. He paid as little attention to it as I paid to my false front tooth. I have since seen several young men like that in groups - with their radios tuned to different stations, with the radios engaged in a spirited conversation. The young men themselves, perhaps having been told nothing but "shut up" all their lives, had nothing to say.

And even now, at the rueful age of sixty-six, I find my knees still turn to water when I encounter anyone who still considers it a possibility that there will one day be one big happy peaceful family on Earth--the Family of Man. If I were this very day to meet myself as I was in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-three, I would swoon with pity and respectfulness.

Anarchists are persons who believe with all their hearts that governments are enemies of their own people. I find myself thinking even now that the story of Sacco and Vanzetti may yet enter the bones of future generations. Perhaps it needs to be told only a few more times. If so, then the flight into Mexico will be seen by one and all as yet another expression of a very holy sort of common sense.

Most of those businesses, rigged only to make profits, were as indifferent to the needs of the people as, say, thunderstorms[. . . .] The businesses of RAMJAC, by their very nature, were as unaffected by the joys and tragedies of human beings as the rain that fell on the night that Madeiros and Sacco and Vanzetti died in an electric chair. It would have rained anyway. The economy is a thoughtless weather system—and nothing more.

In Mrs. Dimble’s hands the task of airing the little house and making the bed for Ivy Maggs and her jailbird husband became something between a game and a ritual. It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamiums: age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth. It was an atmosphere extraordinarily alien to that in which she had grown up. A few weeks ago she would have disliked it. Was there not something absurd about that stiff, twinkling archaic world—the mixture of prudery and sensuality, the stylised ardours of the groom and the conventional bashfulness of the bride, the religious sanction, the permitted salacities of Fescennine song, and the suggestion that everyone except the principals might be expected to be rather tipsy? How had the human race ever come to imprison in such a ceremony the most unceremonious thing in the world? But she was no longer sure of her reaction.

Мы существуем без всякой цели в жизни, если ее себе не выдумаем.

Hoc мой, слава Богу, ничего уже не чувствовал. Носы – они снисходительны, спасибо им. Докладывают тебе: скверно пахнет. Но если ты как-то терпишь, нос делает для себя вывод: значит, не так уж непереносим этот запах. И больше не протестует, подчинившись более высокой мудрости. Вот потому-то можно есть лимбургский сыр или прижимать к сердцу старую любовницу, встретившись с ней на углу Сорок второй и Пятой авеню.

A sensible prayer people could offer up from time to time, it seems to me, might go something like this: “Dear Lord—never put me in the charge of a frightened human being.

Labor history was pornography of a sort in those days, and even more so in these days. In public schools and in the homes of nice people it was and remains pretty much taboo to tell tales of labor’s sufferings and derring-do.

Prisons by Stewart Stafford There are prisons of bars and jailers, There are dungeons of the mind, And of family blackmailers. Some sit manacled in a marriage cell, Thunderous isolation next door, All aflame in loveless hell. Misery, with no parole in poverty's trap, While in privileged ivory towers nearby, Elite confinement in luxury's lap. Inmates break free to a new golden age, Other jailbirds await merciful luck, Destined never to escape the cage. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

How could anyone treat me as a person with a diseased mind if I thought that war need never come again—if only common people everywhere would take control of the planet’s wealth, disband their national armies, and forget their national boundaries; if only they would think of themselves ever after as brothers and sisters, yes, and as mothers and fathers, too, and children of all other common people—everywhere. The only person who would be excluded from such friendly and merciful society would be one who took more wealth than he or she needed at any time.

The economy is a thoughtless weather system—and nothing more.

Oh, my God, Walter! We’re both over sixty years old! How is that possible?

He had so opened himself to the consolations of religion that he had become an imbecile.

And in the toe of one of her capacious basketball shoes, among other things, were hypocritical love letters from me. Small world!

Are you going deaf, Walter?” she said. “I hear you all right, now,” I said. “On top of everything else,” she said, “am I going to have to yell my last words?

I made a small mistake we irony collectors often make: I tried to share an irony with a stranger. It can’t be done.

There had always been senseless questions to answer, empty promises to make, meaningless documents to sign.

Hello and good-bye.” What else is there to say? Our language is much larger than it needs to be.

Two top drawers in the dresser easily accepted all I owned, but I looked into all the other drawers anyway. Thus I discovered that the bottom drawer contained seven incomplete clarinets—without cases, mouthpieces, or bells. Life is like that sometimes.

I loved Kia, but our time was always short with one another because of the different lifestyles that we had. She was a mother, who was committed to her jailbird ass man. I was more of a free spirit, one who didn’t conform to the social standards that were expected, and I had very few limits to what I would do, say or try.

A pretty young Negro girl like you may not feel too comfortable with the Aryan Brotherhood jailbirds we have cooped up here.’ Erhert paused and stared at her as if wanting the word ‘Negro’ to sink in and annoy her. Then he slowly licked his lips, like he was getting turned on by the thought. ‘Would kill you soon as look at you. And we have Hispanic gangs. Real mean.

I tried to write a story about a reunion between my father and myself in heaven one time. An early draft of this book in fact began that way. I hoped in the story to become a really good friend of his. But the story turned out perversely, as stories about real people we have known often do. It seemed that in heaven people could be any age they liked, just so long as they had experienced that age on Earth. Thus, John D. Rockefeller, for example, the founder of Standard Oil, could be any age up to ninety-eight. King Tut could be any age up to nineteen, and so on. As author of the story, I was dismayed that my father in heaven chose to be only nine years old. I myself had chosen to be forty-four—respectable, but still quite sexy, too. My dismay with Father turned to embarrassment and anger. He was lemur-like as a nine-year-old, all eyes and hands. He had an endless supply of pencils and pads, and was forever tagging after me, drawing pictures of simply everything and insisting that I admire them when they were done. New acquaintances would sometimes ask me who that strange little boy was, and I would have to reply truthfully, since it was impossible to lie in heaven, “It’s my father.” Bullies liked to torment him, since he was not like other children. He did not enjoy children’s talk and children’s games. Bullies would chase him and catch him and take off his pants and underpants and throw them down the mouth of hell. The mouth of hell looked like a sort of wishing well, but without a bucket and windlass. You could lean over its rim and hear ever so faintly the screams of Hitler and Nero and Salome and Judas and people like that far, far below. I could imagine Hitler, already experiencing maximum agony, periodically finding his head draped with my father’s underpants. Whenever Father had his pants stolen, he would come running to me, purple with rage. As like as not, I had just made some new friends and was impressing them with my urbanity—and there my father would be, bawling bloody murder and with his little pecker waving in the breeze. I complained to my mother about him, but she said she knew nothing about him, or about me, either, since she was only sixteen. So I was stuck with him, and all I could do was yell at him from time to time, “For the love of God, Father, won’t you please grow up!” And so on. It insisted on being a very unfriendly story, so I quit writing it.

Dear Lord—never put me in the charge of a frightened human being.” Kenneth

It is nine o'clock, and London has breakfasted. Some unconsidered tens of thousands have, it is true, already enjoyed with what appetite they might their pre-prandial meal; the upper fifty thousand, again, have not yet left their luxurious couches, and will not breakfast till ten, eleven o'clock, noon; nay, there shall be sundry listless, languid members of fast military clubs, dwellers among the tents of Jermyn Street, and the high-priced second floors of Little Ryder Street, St. James's, upon whom one, two, and three o'clock in the afternoon shall be but as dawn, and whose broiled bones and devilled kidneys shall scarcely be laid on the damask breakfast-cloth before Sol is red in the western horizon. I wish that, in this age so enamoured of statistical information, when we must needs know how many loads of manure go to every acre of turnip-field, and how many jail-birds are thrust into the black hole per mensem for fracturing their pannikins, or tearing their convict jackets, that some M'Culloch or Caird would tabulate for me the amount of provisions, solid and liquid, consumed at the breakfasts of London every morning. I want to know how many thousand eggs are daily chipped, how many of those embryo chickens are poached, and how many fried; how many tons of quartern loaves are cut up to make bread-and-butter, thick and thin; how many porkers have been sacrificed to provide the bacon rashers, fat and streaky ; what rivers have been drained, what fuel consumed, what mounds of salt employed, what volumes of smoke emitted, to catch and cure the finny haddocks and the Yarmouth bloaters, that grace our morning repast. Say, too, Crosse and Blackwell, what multitudinous demands are matutinally made on thee for pots of anchovy paste and preserved tongue, covered with that circular layer - abominable disc! - of oleaginous nastiness, apparently composed of rancid pomatum, but technically known as clarified butter, and yet not so nasty as that adipose horror that surrounds the truffle bedecked pate  de  foie gras. Say, Elizabeth Lazenby, how many hundred bottles of thy sauce (none of which are genuine unless signed by thee) are in request to give a relish to cold meat, game, and fish. Mysteries upon mysteries are there connected with nine o'clock breakfasts.

I then believed that a rich man should have some understanding of the place from which his riches came. That was very juvenile of me. Great wealth should be accepted unquestioningly, or not at all.

The meeting with Hapgood came about because I had told Uncle Alex that I might try to get a job with a labor union after the Army let me go. Unions were admirable instruments for extorting something like economic justice from employers then. Uncle Alex must have thought something like this: “God help us. Against stupidity even the gods contend in vain. Well—at least there is a Harvard man with whom he can discuss this ridiculous dream.” (It was Schiller who first said that about stupidity and the gods. This was Nietzsche’s reply: “Against boredom even the gods contend in vain.”)

was in fact, openly and proudly, a card-carrying communist until Hitler and Stalin signed a nonaggression pact in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-nine. Hell and heaven, as I saw it, were making common cause against weakly defended peoples everywhere. After that I became a cautious believer in capitalistic democracy again. It

There had been no black people on the household staff of the McCone mansion in Cleveland, no black people in my schools. Not even when I was a communist had I had a black person for a friend.

Jesus may have said that,” I told Larkin, “but it is so unlike most of what else He said that I have to conclude that He was slightly crazy that day.” Larkin

There was nothing quite like sworn testimony to make life look trivial and mean ever after. Also:

It went bust,” said Uncle Alex, with a certain grim, Darwinian satisfaction. My

I would give it to you, but a nigga don’t do jailbirds. My daddy a preacher and my mama would beat my ass for bringing an ex-con to the house,” this nigga told her, and I couldn’t do shit but turn and walk the fuck away.

But one day, when we’re telling our grandkids how we met, we’re really going to have to come up with a better story. I don’t want them calling me Grandpa Jailbird.

This story is as common as dirt. Thousands of Native Americans in California, Arizona, and New Mexico could tell it. Anyone with a grandpa who was haunted by Indian boarding school, who stung his family like a dust devil when he drank. Anyone with a grandma who washed laundry until her fingernails cracked and bled, who went without eating when there weren’t enough groceries because she wanted her ten kids to have a few extra bites. Anyone with a mother who kept secrets so her kids wouldn’t find out about their father’s jailbird past. Anyone with a father who chose the violence of industrial labor over the violence of reservation life because he wanted his kids to get through private school and make better lives for themselves. So many people could tell this story, it is shocking how rarely it has been told. Too many mothers have watched their kids thrown into cop cars without protest. Too many aunties have put ice on black eyes without saying a word. Too many grandmothers have watched their grandchildren, their hope for the future, head out to a party and never come home. Too many girls have pretended nothing happened after experiencing sexual harassment, only to redirect the hate toward the innocent face staring back at them in the mirror.

imagined that I was a socialist. I believed that socialism would be good for the common man. As a private first class in the infantry, I was surely a common man.

Here's to God Almighty, the laziest man in town." Strong stuff.

It may be that Ruth protected herself from dread of the gathering storm, or, more accurately, from dread of the gathering silence, by reverting during the daytime, when I was at work, to the Ophelia-like elation she had felt after her liberation-when she had thought of herself as a bird all alone with God.

Dear shithead," it said, "why don't you crawl back under a damp rock somewhere?" The picture was of the Mona Lisa, with that strange smile of hers.

I spoke to the lilies of the valley. "Good morning," I said.

What tender memories did I have of Sarah? Much talk about human suffering and what could be done about it- and then infantile silliness for relief. We collected jokes for each other, to use when it was time for relief. We became addicted to talking to each other on the telephone for hours. Those talks were the most agreeable narcotic I have ever known. We became disembodied-like free-floating souls on the planet Vicuna.

Sarah Wyatt believed that sex was a sort of pratfall that was easily avoided. To avoid it, she had only to remind a would-be lover of the ridiculousness of what he proposed to do to her.

The policemen who will protect his property rights but not your human rights - those are loaded dice.