King Kong Quotes

It was just a kiss – " "Yeah, and King Kong was just a monkey.

All things considered, I'd rather have monkeys," Kishan shouted. I shivered. "Tell you what. We'll rent King Kong and The Birds. Then you can decide." He yelled as he ran from a swooping bird, "Are you asking me on a date? Because if you are, it will definitely give me more incentive to come out of this alive." "Whatever works" "You're on.

Muchas veces me moría pensando que no iba a verte. Pero moría la muerte cada vez que te veia. [...] King Kong no tuvo suerte.

And I was fairly certain that my strong-enough-for-King-Kong-but-made-for-a-woman deodorant had utterly failed. --Doom with a View

. . . my obsession with gratefulness. I can't stop. Just now, I press the elevator button and am thankful that it arrives quickly. I get onto the elevator and am thankful that the elevator cable didn't snap and plummet me to the basement. I go to the fifth floor and am thankful that I didn't have to stop on the second or third or fourth floor. I get out and am thankful that Julie left the door unlocked so I don't have to rummage for my King Kong key ring. I walk in, and am thankful that Jasper is home and healthy and stuffing his face with pineapple wedges. And on and on. I'm actually muttering to myself, 'Thank you. . .thank you. . . thank you.' It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.

A man who doesn't trust cannot be trusted

Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. The lies they tell each other sound better to them than the truth does when it comes out of our mouths.

God was forever generous with His gifts: hope, love, truth, and the belief in the indestructability of the good in all people.

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible.

The Empire State, a lonely dinosaur, rose sadly at midtown, highest tower, tallest mountain, longest road, King Kong's eyrie, meant to moor airships, alas.

He’s a drunk. One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty.

...you could just tell that if Rosie couldn't romance her way to the top of the Empire State Building, she was prepared to climb it like King Kong.

C'est quand même épatant, et pour le moins moderne, un dominant qui vient chialer que le dominé n'y met pas assez du sien...

Il faut être crétin, ou simplement malhonnête, pour trouver une oppression insupportable et juger l'autre pleine de poésie.

I’ve always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters’ irritation was perfectly reasonable. Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion, so it was no wonder to me Godzilla was crabby; as for King Kong, few men would blame him for his attraction to pretty Fay Wray. (Though her screaming would have eventually put off anyone less patient than a gorilla.) If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.

Después de unos años de buena, leal y sincera investigación he acabado llegando a esta conclusión: la feminidad es una puta hipocresía. El arte de ser servil.

Le féminisme est une aventure collective, pour les femmes, pour les hommes, et pour les autres. Un révolution, bien en marche. Une vision du monde, un choix. Il ne s'agit pas d'opposer les petits avantages des femmes aux petits acquis des hommes mais bien de tout foutre en l'air.

A man ain’t got to stand in church every Sunday to do God’s work.

Rape doesn't disturb the peace, it's already part and parcel of the city.

Because this ideal of the attractive but not whorish white woman, in a good marriage but not self-effacing, with a nice job but not so successful she outshines her man, slim but not neurotic over food, forever young without being disfigured by the surgeon’s knife, a radiant mother not overwhelmed by nappies and homework, who manages her home beautifully without becoming a slave to housework, who knows a thing or two but less than a man, this happy white woman who is constantly shoved under our noses, this woman we are all supposed to work hard to resemble – never mind that she seems to be running herself ragged for not much reward – I for one have never met her, not anywhere. My hunch is that she doesn’t exist.

You’ve got to be strong to get old.

a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an

You ain’t got to worry about your skin.” “I do worries about my skin. It covers my body.

Son, a blessing favors them that needs it. Don’t matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.

Dans la morale judéo-chrétienne, mieux vaut être prise de force que prise pour une chienne, on nous l'a assez répété.

So he drinks and grows plants and goes to church,” Potts said. “So far, he sounds Catholic.

¿Por qué nadie ha inventado el equivalente a Ikea para cuidar a los niños, el equivalente de Macintosh para hacer las tareas domésticas? La organización de la colectividad sigue siendo una prerrogativa masculina.

This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to beat the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world,

They turned and found themselves facing a bullet head on an ICBM body lumpily stuffed into a black shirt and a brown suit. It was as though King Kong were making a break for it, hoping to smuggle himself back to his island disguised as a human being.

...el día que los hombres tengan miedo de que les laceren la polla a golpe de cúter cuando acosen a una chica, seguro que de repente sabrán controlar mejor sus pasiones –masculinas- y comprender lo que quiere decir –no-.

Me hace gracia, desde entonces, escuchar como los hombres disertan sobre la estupidez de las mujeres que adoran el poder, el dinero o la fama, como si adorar un liguero fuera menos estúpido...

Why we got to have the police around every time we has a simple party? Ya'll don't watch out for us. Y'all watch over us. I don't see y'all out there standing over the white folks in Park Slope when they has their block parties

He felt like a radio tuning in to a new channel, one that was beginning to fuzz into range, slowly coming in clear, proper, the way his Hettie had always wanted him to be. The new feeling humbled him.

The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose and he didn't even know. The guy had about one brain cell and he was doing time in it.

Mais, à ce moment précis, je me suis sentie femme, salement femme, comme je ne l'avais jamais senti, comme je ne l'ai plus jamais senti. Défendre ma propre peau ne me permettait pas de blesser un homme.

There seems to be an audience that demands everything be explained to them that everything be easy. And I don t think that s doing us any good as a culture. The ease with which we can accomplish or conjure any possible imaginable scenario through CGI is almost directly proportionate to how uninterested we re becoming in all of this. I can remember Ray Harryhausen s animated skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. I can remember Willis O Brien s King Kong. I can remember being awed at the artistry that had made those things possible. Yes I knew how it was done. But it looked so wonderful. These days I can see half a million Orcs coming over a hill and I am bored. I am not impressed at all. Because frankly I could have gotten someone a passerby on the street who could have gotten the same effect if you d given them half a million dollars to do it. It removes artistry and imagination and places money in the driver s seat and I think it s a pretty straight equation—that there is an inverse relationship between money and imagination.

Just because you toast marshmallows with a kid on a camping trip doesn’t mean he’ll become a Boy Scout.

The Star-Spangled Banner,’” she scoffed. “I never did like that old lying, lollygagging, hypocritical, warring-ass drinking song. With the bombs bursting in air and so forth.

Most times I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.

Monster stories are powerful. They explore prejudice, rejection, anger and every imaginable negative aspect of living in society. However, only half of society is reflected in the ranks of the people who create these monsters. Almost every single iconic monster in film is male and was designed by a man: the Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong. The emotions and problems that all of them represent are also experienced by women, but women are more likely to see themselves as merely the victims of these monsters. Women rarely get to explore on-screen what it's like to be a giant pissed-off creature. Those emotions are written off. If a woman is angry or upset, she'll be considered hysterical and too emotional. One of the hardest things about misogyny in the film industry isn't facing it directly, it's having to tamp down your anger about it so that when you speak about the problem, you'll be taken seriously. Women don't get to stomp around like Godzilla. Someone will just ask if you're on your period.

Je suis plutôt King Kong que Kate Moss, comme fille. Je suis ce genre de femme qu’on n’épouse pas, avec qui on ne fait pas d’enfant, je parle de ma place de femme toujours trop tout ce qu’elle est, trop agressive, trop bruyante, trop grosse, trop brutale, trop hirsute, toujours trop virile, me dit-on.

In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years in the NYPD and all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it.

while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Porque el ideal de la mujer blanca, seductora pero no puta, bien casada pero no a la sombra, que trabaja pero sin demasiado éxito para no aplastar a su hombre, delgada pero no obsesionada con la alimentación, que parece indefinidamente joven pero sin dejarse desfigurar por la cirugía estética, madre realizada pero no desbordada por los pañales y por las tareas del colegio, buen ama de casa pero no sirvienta, cultivada pero menos que un hombre, esta mujer blanca, feliz que nos ponen delante de los ojos, esa a la que deberíamos hacer el esfuerzo de parecernos (...) nunca me la he encontrado en ninguna parte. Es posible incluso que no exista.

When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup

because in her heart it was proof that God was forever generous with His gifts: hope, love, truth, and the belief in the indestructability of the good in all people.

Her smile displayed a raw, natural beauty that caught Potts off guard. The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.

Born in Hong Kong, raised in London, and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Kai’s mannerisms were a clear reflection of his upbringing.

Deacon Cuffy Lambkins of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.

Giving words to ideas was too dangerous in their world. When Poppa did give words to something, though, it was for a reason. It had weight.

The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.

There was going to be a battle something like if Godzilla met King Kong, or if Frankenstein met Dracula, or like when champion wrestler Bobo Brazil meets the Sheik!

I think he was a gangster.” “Why you say that?” Miss Izi asked. “He had a lot of pockmarks on his face.” “That’s nothing,” Miss Izi said. “That could be from learning to use a fork.

Isn’t it something,” Hettie said softly, “what ol’ New York really is? We come here to be free and find life’s worse here than back home. The white folks here just color it different. They don’t mind you sitting next to ’em on the subway, or riding the bus in the front seat, but if you asks for the same pay, or wants to live next door, or get so beat down you don’t wanna stand up and sing about how great America is, they’ll bust down on you so hard pus’ll come out your ears.

Los hombres denuncian con virulencia las injusticias sociales o raciales, pero se muestran indulgentes y comprensivos cuando se trata de la dominación machista (...) piensan que una forma de opresión es insoportable y que la otra está llena de poesía

Sin embargo, como chica por la que los hombres se interesan poco estoy rabiosa, mientras todos me explican que ni siquiera debería estar ahí. Pero siempre hemos existido. Aunque nunca se habla de nosotras en las novelas de hombres, que sólo imaginan mujeres con las que querrían acostarse. Siempre hemos existido, pero nunca hemos hablado. Incluso hoy que las mujeres publican muchas novelas, raramente encontramos personajes femeninos cuyo aspecto físico sea desagradable o mediocre, incapaces de amar a los hombres o de ser amadas. Por el contrario, a las heroínas de la literatura contemporánea les gustan los hombres, los encuentran fácilmente, se acuestan con ellos en dos capítulos, se corren en cuatro líneas y a todas les gusta el sexo. La figura de la pringada de la feminidad me resulta más que simpática: es esencial. Del mismo modo que la figura del perdedor social, económico o político. Prefiero los que no consiguen lo que quieren, por la buena y simple razón de que yo misma tampoco lo logro. Y porque, en general, el humor y la invención están de nuestro lado. Cuando no se tiene lo que hay que tener para chulearse, se es a menudo más creativo. Yo, como chica, soy más bien King Kong que Kate Moss.

Je suis furieuse contre une société qui m'a éduquée sans jamais m'apprendre à blesser un homme s'il m'écarte les cuisses de forces, alors que cette même société m'a inculqué l'idée que c'était un crime dont je ne devais pas me remettre. Et je suis surtout folle de rage qu'en face de trois hommes, une carabine et piégée dans une forêt dont on ne peut s'échapper en courant, je me sente encore aujourd'hui coupable de ne pas avoir eu le courage de nous défendre avec un petit couteau.

¿cuántos artículos en los últimos veinte años se han escrito sobre las mujeres que dan miedo a los hombres, sobre las que se han quedado solas, las que han sido castigadas por su ambición o su singularidad? Como si ser viuda, estar sola o abandonada en tiempos de guerra, o ser maltratadafuera una invención reciente. Siempre hemos tenido que arreglárnoslas sin la ayuda de nadie

Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is,” she said flatly. “Danger here. Danger there. We don’t need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don’t need you to say what the world is to us.

nothing and then selling it at triple cost to buyers in Wyandanch,

Friendship was trouble in business.

all the formal police training in the world was useless when the smile of someone you suddenly care about finds the bow that wraps your heart and undoes it.

What hair she had looked like scrambled eggs in string form, in wild clumps and in single strands, giving her the appearance of a wired, harried, ancient, terrified professor.

felt her heart pirouette toward her feet.

Is this what love does? It changes you this way? It allows you to see the past this clearly?

Resulta asombroso y, como poco, moderno, que sea un dominante el que venga a quejarse de que el dominado no pone bastante de su parte…

When I was six, I cried for almost an hour in the parking lot of the King of Prussia Mall because my mom wouldn’t buy me a Godzilla DVD.” She actually looks up at me. “What?” “To be fair, it was King Kong vs. Godzilla, the old one. I just thought the cover looked cool. It was only five bucks in the bargain bin. But yeah, almost an hour. And she sat there in silence the whole time until I finally started to calm down. Then you know what she did?” Cara shakes her head and reaches out for the water. I try not to look at her as she drinks. “She queues up a song on her phone and hits play. And it’s the Rolling Stones. ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ I cried for another seven minutes while she sang at the top of her lungs.

Porn is also the method men use to imagine what they would do if they were women, how they would apply themselves to satisfy other men, what good sluts they'd be, what prick-devourers.

the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country.

She laughed, and as she did, Potts felt as if he were watching a dark, silent mountain suddenly blink to life, illuminated by a hundred lights from a small, quaint village that had lived on the mountainside for a hundred years, the village appearing out of nowhere, all the lights aglow at once. Every feature of her face glowed. He found himself wanting to tell her every sorrow he ever knew,

Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk, or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn’t matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is.

As Sausage recounted it in the basement that night, it was as if her own future were being revealed, unrolling itself before her like a carpet, one whose design and weave changed as it stretched out ahead.

I never understand it when parents talk about sending their kids to school to “socialize” them. Children aren’t people. They’re barely even animals. They’re just suppurating wounds of emotion inflamed by too much positive reinforcement. You can’t be socialized by the unsocializable. That’s like asking King Kong to teach tap dance.

Afrika'nın haritası nasıl o toprakların gerçekliğini yok sayarak sadece işgalcilerin kendi çıkarları doğrultusunda çizilmişse, anne-orospu ikiliği de kadın bedenine aynı şekilde cetvelle çizilmiş gibidir. "Doğal" bir süreçten değil politik bir iradeden kaynaklanır. Kadınlar, birbirleriyle bağdaşmayan iki seçenek arasında kalmaya mahkum edilmiştir. Erkeklerse başka türde bir ikilikte sıkışmışlardır: Onları azdıran şey bir sorun olarak kalmalıdır.

One has to forget about being sweet, pleasant, and helpful; one has to give oneself permission to publicly dominate the other. One has to manage without the other's approval.

After practice on lazy summer afternoons, he’d gather the kids around and tell stories about baseball players long dead, players from the old Negro leagues with names that sounded like brands of candy: Cool Papa Bell, Golly Honey Gibson, Smooth Rube Foster, Bullet Rogan, guys who knocked the ball five hundred feet high into the hot August air at some ballpark far away down south someplace, the stories soaring high over their heads, over the harbor, over their dirty baseball field, past the rude, red-hot projects where they lived. The Negro leagues, Sport said, were a dream. Why, Negro league players had leg muscles like rocks.

Men are trapped in a different dichotomy, that which gives them a hard-on must remain a problem. Above all, no reconciliation. Because a peculiar thing about men is that they tend to despise that which they desire, as well as despising themselves for the physical manifestation of that desire.

Porque el ideal de la mujer blanca, seductora pero no puta, bien casada pero no a la sombra, que trabaja pero sin demasiado éxito para no aplastar a su hombre, delgada pero no obsesionada con la alimentación, que parece indefinidamente joven pero sin dejarse desfigurar por la cirugía estética, madre realizada pero no desbordada por los pañales y por las tareas del colegio, buen ama de casa pero no sirvienta, cultivada pero menos que un hombre, esta mujer blanca feliz que nos ponen delante de los ojos, esa a la que deberíamos hacer el esfuerzo de parecernos, a parte del hecho de que parece romperse la crisma por poca cosa, nunca me la he encontrado en ninguna parte. Es posible incluso que no exista.

She smiled bitterly, and once again the mask she wore so well, the firm lady of strong, impatient indifference whom he’d met when he first walked into the church a week before, broke apart, revealing the vulnerable, lonely soul underneath. She’s just like me, he thought in wonder. She’s as lost as I am.

El feminismo es una aventura colectiva, para las mujeres pero también para los hombres y para todos los demás. Una revolución que ya ha comenzado. Una visión del mundo, una opción. No se trata de oponer las pequeñas ventajas de las mujeres a los pequeños derechos adquiridos de los hombres, sino de dinamitarlo todo.

powerless suckers who believed in the American dream scrambling to the suburbs because they, the big boys, wanted a bigger percentage. He felt it, or thought he felt it, as they stood by the front door. There was a connection: a man whose father was dead and a woman whose father was about to die, a sense of wanting to belong, standing in the warm vestibule, she in her farm-girl dress, with a job that paid taxes and drew no cops, no Joe Pecks, no complicated phone calls from complicated people trying to pick your pocket with one

The eternal feminine is a massive joke. It seems that male identity depends on keeping up this lie...femme fatale, bunny girl, nurse, Lolita, whore, kindly mother, or ball-breaker. All of it an act. A carefully choreographed and costumed production. And what comfort does it all provide? We don't know exactly what they fear, should these artificial archetypes collapse: whores are just average individuals, mothers are not intrinsically good or brave or loving, and the same goes for fathers. It depends on the person, the situation, the moment.

Je ne ressens pas la moindre honte de ne pas être une super bonne meuf. En revanche, je suis verte de rage qu'en tant qu fille qui intéresse peu les hommes, on cherche sans cesse à me faire savoir que je ne devrais même pas être là. On a toujours existé. Même s'il n'est pas question de nous dans les romans d'hommes, qui n'imaginent que des femmes avec qui ils voudraient coucher. On a toujours existé, on n'a jamais parlé. Même aujourd'hui que les femmes publient beaucoup de romans, on rencontre rarement de personnage féminins aux physiques ingrats ou médiocres, inaptes à aimer les hommes ou à s'en faire aimer. Au contraire les héroines contemporaines aiment les hommes, les rencontrent facilement couchent avec eux en deux chapitres, elles jouissent en quatre lignes et elles aiment toutes le sexe. La figure de la looseuse de la féminité m'est plus que sympathique, elle m'est essentielle.

Prison, illness, abuse, drugs, abandonment, deportation: all traumas have their literature. But this crucial and fundamental trauma -- the very definition of femininity, "the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless" -- was not part of literature. Not a single woman who has been through the process of rape has taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience. No guide, no companionship. Rape wasn't allowed into the symbolic realm.

As he sat before the elderly Irishman in his boxcar, the moment of realization suddenly tumbled into Elefante’s consciousness with startling efficiency, landing on his insides with a heaviness that felt like a blacksmith’s hammer falling on an anvil.

Yes, I know there is a fashion nowadays for these Hitler's-valet type memoirs, and many people are against, they say we should not humanise the inhuman. But the point is they are not inhuman, these Mainduck-style little Hitlers, and it is in their humanity that we must locate our collective guilt, humanity's guilt for human beings' misdeeds; for if they are just monsters - if it is just a question of King Kong and Godzilla wreaking havoc until the aeroplanes bring them down - then the rest of us are excused.

and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Son, you looks like a character witness for a nightmare. You ugly enough to have your face capped.” “We can’t all be pretty,” he grumbled. “Well, you ain’t no gemstone, son. You got a face for swim trunk ads.” “I’m seventy-one, Sister Paul. I’m a spring chicken compared to you. I don’t see no mens doing backflips at the door over you. At least I ain’t got enough wrinkles in my face to hold ten days of rain.

I know that what girls do with their own clitorises in private isn't exactly my business, but this indifference to masturbation does bother me: if they don't touch themselves when they're alone, when do women connect with their own fantasies? How familiar are they with what really turns them on? And if you don't know that about yourself, what exactly do you know? What relationship can you have with yourself if you systematically hand your genitals over to someone else?

J’écris de chez les moches, pour les moches, les vieilles, les camionneuses, les frigides, les mal baisées, les imbaisables, les hystériques, les tarées, toutes les exclues du grand marché à la bonne meuf. Et je commence par là pour que les choses soient claires : je ne m’excuse de rien, je ne viens pas me plaindre. Je n’échangerais ma place contre aucune autre parce qu’être Virginie Despentes me semble être une affaire plus intéressante à mener que n’importe quelle autre affaire. Je trouve ça formidable qu’il y ait aussi des femmes qui aiment séduire, qui sachent séduire, d’autres se faire épouser, des qui sentent le sexe et d’autres le gâteau du goûter des enfants qui sortent de l’école. Formidable qu’il y en ait de très douces, d’autres épanouies dans leur féminité, qu’il y en ait de jeunes, très belles, d’autres coquettes et rayonnantes. Franchement, je suis bien contente pour toutes celles à qui les choses telles qu’elles sont conviennent. C’est dit sans la moindre ironie. Il se trouve simplement que je ne fais pas partie de celles-là. Bien sûr que je n’écrirais pas ce que j’écris si j’étais belle, belle à changer l’attitude de tous les hommes que je croise. C’est en tant que prolotte de la féminité que je parle, que j’ai parlé hier et que je recommence aujourd’hui (p. 9-10).

J’écris donc d’ici, de chez les invendues, les tordues, celles qui ont le crâne rasée, celles qui ne savent pas s’habiller, celles qui ont peur de puer, celles qui ont les chicots pourris, celles qui ne savent pas s’y prendre, celles à qui les hommes ne font pas de cadeau, celles qui baiseraient n’importe qui voulant bien d’elles, les grosses putes, les petites salopes, les femmes à chatte toujours sèche, celles qui ont un gros bides, celles qui voudraient être des hommes, celles qui se prennent pour des hommes, celles qui rêvent de faire hardeuses, celles qui n’en ont rien à foutre des mecs mais que leurs copines intéressent, celles qui ont un gros cul, celles qui ont les poils drus et bien noirs et qui ne vont pas se faire épiler, les femmes brutales, bruyantes, celles qui cassent tout sur leur passage, celles qui n’aiment pas les parfumeries, celles qui se mettent du rouge trop rouge, celles qui sont trop mal foutues pour pouvoir se saper comme des chaudasses mais qui en crèvent d’envie, celles qui veulent porter des fringues d’hommes et la barbe dans la rue, celles qui veulent tout montrer, celles qui sont pudiques par complexe, celles qui ne savent pas dire non, celles qu’on enferme pour les mater, celles qui font peur, celles qui font pitié, celles qui ne font pas envie, celles qui ont la peau flasque, des rides plein la face, celles qui rêvent de se faire lifter, liposucer, péter le nez pour le refaire mais qui n’ont pas l’argent pour le faire, celles qui ne ressemblent à rien, celles qui ne comptent que sur elles-mêmes pour se protéger, celles qui ne savent pas être rassurantes, celles qui s’en foutent de leurs enfants, celles qui aiment boire jusqu’à se vautrer par terre dans les bars, celles qui ne savent pas se tenir.

And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Băi, eu sunt invidioasă pe bărbați. Mi-e ciudă când îi văd că se trezesc dimineața și-n 5 minute sunt gata de plecare pentru că ei nu trebuie să se spoiască cu fond de ten Lumiere Active Rejuvenesse Hybrid SPF 16 Matifiant Hidratant Colorant Exasperant Iritant Deloc-important, să-și facă genele ( apropo, voi ați observat ce gene lungi și întoarse au ăștia??? Mizeriile!!!), să își pudreze nasul, să își pună protej-slip cu aromă de ocean în spume și levănțică proaspăt culeasă din Etiopia și nici să-și repare cearcănele cât găleata cu un șpaclu de concealer. Îi invidiez că umblă cu păr pe piept și pe spinare și lumea zice că-s macho, iar noi dacă uităm să ne epilăm pe mâini strigă toți în cor ”Uite-o pe sor-sa lu' King Kong!”. Mă oftic de numa' când văd ce parcări imposibile fac din 3 mișcări, iar nouă ne tremură gladiolele când dăm cu spatele 5 metri. Mă enervează la culme că ei arată bine într-un tricou lăbărțat și o pereche de jeanși, iar noi trebuie să ne coțopenim pe tocuri cât macaraua, care ne rup de incomode ce sunt!

Now I know why I tried to kill you,” Sportcoat said. “For the life of goodness is not one that your people has chosen for you. I don’t want that you should end up like me, or my Hettie, dead of sorrow in the harbor. I’m in the last Octobers of life, boy. I ain’t got many more Aprils left. It’s a right end for an old drunk like me, and a right end for you too that you die as a good boy, strong and handsome and smart, like I remembers you. Best pitcher in the world. Boy who could pitch his way outta the shithole we all has to live in. Better to remember you that way than as the sewer you has become. That’s a good dream. That’s a dream an old drunk like me deserves at the end of his days. For I done wasted every penny I had in the ways of goodness so long ago, I can’t remember ’em no more.

This was fresh, rich, heavenly, succulent, soft, creamy, kiss-my-ass, cows-gotta-die-for-this, delightfully salty, moo-ass, good old white folks cheese, cheese to die for, cheese to make you happy, cheese to beat the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world, cheese so good it inspired a line every first Saturday of the month: mothers, daughters, fathers, grandparents, disabled in wheelchairs, kids, relatives from out of town, white folks from nearby Brooklyn Heights, and even South American workers from the garbage-processing plant on Concord Avenue, all patiently standing in a line that stretched from the interior of Hot Sausage’s boiler room to Building 17’s outer doorway, up the ramp to the sidewalk, curling around the side of the building and to the plaza near the flagpole.

there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die. The sight of Beanie’s mother howling at her son’s coffin would haunt them all in the next few days. Next week, or next month some time, some other mother would take her place, howling her grief. And another after that. They saw the future, too, she could tell. It would continue forever. It was all so very grim. But then, she thought, every once in a while there’s a glimmer of hope. Just a blip on the horizon, a whack on the nose of the giant that set him back on his heels or to the canvas,

Men love talking about women. At least then they don't have to talk about themselves. How is it that in thirty years no man has produced the slightest innovative work on masculinity? They are so expert, so voluble when it comes to holding forth about women, so why this silence when it comes to themselves? We know that the more they speak, the less they say -- of essentials, of what they really think. Perhaps they want us to talk about them instead? For example, perhaps they want to be told how their gang bangs look from the outside? Well, they look as if men want to see themselves fucking, as i they want to look at each other's dicks, to be together with their hard-ons; as if they want to get fucked themselves. It looks as if what they're scared to admit is what they really want: to fuck each other. Men love other men. They are always explaining how much they love women, but we all know they're fibbing. They love each other women. Many of them start thinking about friends when they're still inside a pussy.

Well, I could let the weeds grow,” she said. “But I’m not a person who knows enough about what should or should not be to leave things as they are when they got no purpose that I can understand. My purpose is to keep this church open long enough to save somebody. That’s all I know. If I was a book-learned person, somebody who could use thirty-four words instead of three words to say what I mean, I might know the full answer to your question. But I’m a simple woman, Officer. These weeds is a blight to this house of worship, so I goes at ’em. The truth is, they do me no harm. They’re unsightly to me but sightly to God. And still I cuts at ’em. I reckon I’m like most folks. Most times I don’t know what I’m doing. Sometimes I feel like I don’t hardly know enough to tie my own shoes.

Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face.

Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder. She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.