“
It was just a kiss – "
"Yeah, and King Kong was just a monkey.
”
”
Linda Howard (After the Night)
“
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.
”
”
Colleen Houck (Tiger's Quest (The Tiger Saga, #2))
“
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
”
”
Victoria Laurie
“
. . . 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.J. Jacobs (The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible)
“
A man who doesn't trust cannot be trusted
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
He’s a drunk. One of those guys who dies at twenty and is buried at eighty.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
God was forever generous with His gifts: hope, love, truth, and the belief in the indestructability of the good in all people.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Muchas veces me moría
pensando que no iba a verte.
Pero moría la muerte
cada vez que te veia.
[...]
King Kong no tuvo suerte.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano
“
You’ve got to be strong to get old.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Rape doesn't disturb the peace, it's already part and parcel of the city.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Il faut être crétin, ou simplement malhonnête, pour trouver une oppression insupportable et juger l'autre pleine de poésie.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (Teoría 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...
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
A man ain’t got to stand in church every Sunday to do God’s work.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Her smile displayed a raw, natural beauty that caught Potts off guard. The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong Theory)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Vincent Scully
“
Son, a blessing favors them that needs it. Don’t matter how it comes. It just matters that it does.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
You ain’t got to worry about your skin.” “I do worries about my skin. It covers my body.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Dans la morale judéo-chrétienne, mieux vaut être prise de force que prise pour une chienne, on nous l'a assez répété.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
So he drinks and grows plants and goes to church,” Potts said. “So far, he sounds Catholic.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Booze, he thought. I chose booze over my Moonflower.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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,
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
...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.
”
”
Amor Towles (Rules of Civility)
“
Just because you toast marshmallows with a kid on a camping trip doesn’t mean he’ll become a Boy Scout.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
It wasn't by accident. I consented to become a weaker person.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
For God’s people—all of ’em
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
¿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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
The woman, he thought, was all good handwriting.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
nothing and then selling it at triple cost to buyers in Wyandanch,
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
the sadness, the suspicion, the weariness, the knowledge that came from living a special misery in a world of misery.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
...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-.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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...
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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,
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Deacon Cuffy Lambkins of Five Ends Baptist Church became a walking dead man on a cloudy September afternoon in 1969.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Instead, she threw her head back and laughed, displaying a mouth full of gums and one sole yellow tooth, which stood out like a clump of butter on a plate.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
felt her heart pirouette toward her feet.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is. Soup
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Born in Hong Kong, raised in London, and educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Kai’s mannerisms were a clear reflection of his upbringing.
”
”
Ana Huang (King of Wrath (Kings of Sin, #1))
“
Friendship was trouble in business.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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…
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Yeah, you can be the greatest
You can be the best
You can be the King Kong banging on your chest
”
”
The Script
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
I read the book on not being explained to. That’s called being an old colored woman, sir.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Is this what love does? It changes you this way? It allows you to see the past this clearly?
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Twas beauty killed the beast,‘ said the Dean, who liked to say things like that.
‘No it wasn‘t,‘ said the Chair. ‘It was it splatting into the ground like that.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures (Discworld, #10; Industrial Revolution, #1))
“
For men, life is cool with us spending our time trying to understand them. Because great despair has a gender, too.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Papi, olvidaste lo que le hiciste a ese demonio Deems? Su banda de lagartos te va a rebanar como un plátano.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
I been around the sun one hundred four whole times and nobody’s explained nothing to me.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
In that moment he realized that all the experience of thirty-two years on 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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
Alan Moore
“
You mean the nice little white man who sings? With the puppets?” “That’s Mister Rogers’s address. One forty-three. You know what one forty-three means?” “No, Soup.” His stoic face folded into a smile. “I would tell you, but I don’t wanna spoil it.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Donald E. Westlake (Drowned Hopes (Dortmunder, #7))
“
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
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
¿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
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
Mallory O'Meara (The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
her smile of understanding and acceptance that said, “All intangibles are forgiven, I accept them and more—your faults, your dips and turns, everything, because our love is a hammer forged at the anvil of God and not even your most foolish, irrational act can break it.” That look.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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?
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Rupert Thomson (The Five Gates of Hell)
“
her heart grew tiny wings again.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Now, many directors could and would say, So what? It’s just a movie. You don’t have to believe in giant monkeys to direct King Kong.
”
”
Quentin Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)
“
This is important to point out in a women's magazine, as advice to the readers: OK, so rape is sad, but please don't wail, ladies. It's not dignified. Well, fuck you.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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!
”
”
Christopher Paul Curtis (The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963)
“
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.
”
”
Erik J. Brown (All That's Left in the World (All That's Left in the World, #1))
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Banning the practice of prostitution within an appropriate legal framework is actively preventing the female class from making a decent living and turning a profit from its very stigmatization.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Porn is somehow supposed to be real--something we never expect of film, by its very nature a technique of illusion. We expect porn to show us exactly what we dread about it: the truth of our desire.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (Teoría King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Cuanto más escasa es la virilidad de un tipo, más atento está a lo que hacen las mujeres. Y al contrario, cuanta más seguridad tiene un hombre mejor soporta la diversidad de actitudes de las mujeres y su masculinidad.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (Teoría King Kong)
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes
“
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.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Being insecure -- now that's femininity. Unassuming. A good listener. Not too intellectually impressive. Just cultured enough to understand what some asshole has to say. Chatting is feminine. Anything that doesn't leave a mark.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
And no resident in their right mind would go over their heads to the mighty Housing Authority honchos in Manhattan, who did not like their afternoon naps disturbed with minor complaints about ants, toilets, murders, child molestation, rape, heatless apartments, and lead paint that shrunk children’s brains to the size of a full-grown pea in one of their Brooklyn locations, unless they wanted a new home sleeping on a bench at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
He saw now she was not just handsome, but rather had a quiet, cumulative beauty. She was a tall woman, middle-aged, whose face was not etched with the stern lines of church folks who’ve seen too much and done little about it other than pray.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
[Women] are not even foreigners but we are constantly subtitled, because we don't know what we have to say. Or at least not as well as the dominant male, who has for centuries been writing books on the question of femininity and its implications.
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”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Men love other men. They are always explaining how much they love women, but we all know they're fibbing. They love each other... They watch each other on the cinema screen, give themselves great roles, think themselves powerful, boast, and can't get enough of being so strong, so brave, and so handsome. They write for each other, congratulate each other, support each other.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
In [porn] films, the actress has male-type sexuality. To put it bluntly, she behaves exactly like a gay man in a back room. She is shown in the film as always wanting sex, with anyone, in every hole. And she comes every time. As a man in a woman's body would.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Rape is a civil war, a political organization through which one gender declares to the other, I have complete power over you, I force you to feel inferior, guilty, and degraded. Rape is the exclusive male domain. Not war, hunting, raw desire, violence, or barbarism, but rape, which women -- until now -- have never taken possession of. The masculine mystique must be created as intrinsically dangerous, criminal, and uncontrollable. As such, it must be rigorously controlled by the law, kept in collective order by group.
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”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
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”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
You still often hear people say, "Prostitutes reduce the number of rapes," as if males couldn't control themselves, as if they had to unload themselves somewhere. They would have us believe this is a natural -- instinctual -- fact and not the created political belief it is.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
What women do with their bodies as long as they're around men with power and money actually seems to me very near to prostitution. I still don't catch the subtle difference between the sort of femininity sold in magazines and that of the whore. And although they might not state their price openly, I'm under the impression of having met a lot of whores since then. Lots of women who aren't interested in sex but know how to draw profit from it. Women who sleep with men who are old, ugly, boring, or depressingly stupid, but socially powerful. Women who marry them and fight to gain as much money as they can when they divorce. Who think it's normal to have their bills paid, to be taken on vacation, to be spoiled. Who even see this as an achievement. I find it sad listening to women talk about love as an implicit financial contract.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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).
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Nothing in the world is normal,” he said. “I can’t understand why you’d even hope for that.” His comment sent the anger hissing out of her like a balloon, and her features softened. She eyed him with curiosity, then wiped the edge of her eye with the back of her hand and shifted her weight.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Is your cheese this good?
This wasn’t plain old housing projects “cheese food”; nor was it some smelly, curdled, reluctant Swiss cheese material snatched from a godforsaken bodega someplace, gathering mold in some dirty display case while mice gnawed at it nightly, to be sold, to some sucker fresh from Santo Domingo. 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 bet the cheese boss, cheese for the big cheese, cheese to end the world ...
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”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
I find it strange that today, when so many people walk around with tiny computers in their pockets -- cameras, phones, personal organizers, iPods--there exists no object at all to slip into your pussy when you go out for a stroll that will rip up the cock of any fucker who sticks it in there. Perhaps it isn't desirable to make female genitalia inaccessible by force. A woman must remain open, and fearful. Otherwise, how would masculinity define itself?
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
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”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
True Films On TrueFilms.com, Kevin has reviewed the best documentaries he’s seen over decades. The counterpart book series, True Films 3.0, contains the 200 documentaries he feels you should see before you die, and it is available as a PDF on kk.org. Three docs we both love are The King of Kong, Man on Wire, and A State of Mind.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
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After several years of genuine, sincere, and rigorous research, I have come to the conclusion that femininity is the same thing as bootlicking. The art of servility. You can call it seduction to make it sound glamorous. But it is very rarely a skilled sport. For the majority of women, it's the simple habit of behaving as an inferior.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
When I was hospitalized at the age of fifteen, the psychiatrist asked me why I had made myself so ugly. I thought he had nerve asking me that, since I thought I looked pretty damn cool with red spiky hair, black lips, white lace tights, and outsize army boots. He insisted, was I afraid of being pretty? He said that I had such lovely eyes.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. ... Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion
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”
Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness)
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Well, I reckon to really understand the world, you got to die at least once.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
There was something about him that glistened, something warm that churned and billowed about, like a smoke cloud filled with sparklers.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
you’re still breathing. Every day is a new world.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Why she got to be bowlegged?” “I do got standards.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
he was fresh off scandal himself, having recently been spotted over at Silky’s Bar on Van Marl Street trying to convert a female subway conductor with boobs the size of Milwaukee.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Kong Haakon hadde latt regentskap være regentskap og slått seg ned på Appleton. Han var tilbake i den bekymringsløse tiden da han titulerte seg Prince of Denmark - King of Nothing.
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Tor Bomann-Larsen (Makten (Haakon & Maud #4))
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Authorities! Permits! Insurance! How I yearn for the days when a man could just bust loose, tear around and get what needs to be done, done.
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Will Murray (King Kong vs. Tarzan (The Wild Adventures of King Kong Book 1))
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He ain’t dead. They say just his ear’s shot off.” “That don’t sound like me. It ain’t smart to shoot a man’s ear off. A man ain’t got but two.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
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You hold the copper coin under your tongue during . . . coitus . . . to keep from getting pregnant. My first wife was from Tennessee.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
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Remember: King Kong died for your sins.
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Greg Hill (Principia Discordia: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse The Younger)
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It's D-day for King Kong Lookalikes
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Bruce Andrews (I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up: (or, Social Romanticism) (New American Poetry))
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The collective body functions in the same way as the individual body: if the system is over-anxious, it spontaneously gives rise to self-destructive patterns.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Whatever arouses us, or fails to, comes from dark, uncontrollable places in ourselves, and rarely fits who we would conscious like to be.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
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[Men] have to be the ones to make the woman come. Female masturbation continues to be contemptible and secondary. The orgasm we are supposed to reach is the one given by the man.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
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Una mujer con estilo de puta le interesa a casi todo el mundo.
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Virginie Despentes (Teoría King Kong)
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Ne pas aimer les femmes, chez un homme, c'est une attitude. Ne pas aimer les hommes, chez une femme, c'est une pathologie.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
C'est le contrôle exercé sur nous qui est violent, cette faculté de décider à notre place ce qui est digne et ce qui ne l'est pas.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
He leaned on the church wall and gave his heart a moment to catch itself.
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Experts say that the movie King Kong (1933) released the pent-up rage of the Great Depression. Well, COVID-19 Halloween displays could do the same for our feelings about the 2020 lockdown.
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Stewart Stafford
“
Seduction is within the reach of most young women, as long as they agree to play the game, because it mostly consists of reassuring men about their virility by playing the femininity game.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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,
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James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
I am not saying that being a woman is in itself a painful constraint. Some women do it very well. It's the obligation which is degrading. Of course the great seductresses are right up there in terms of reputation. Figure skaters are pretty cool, too -- but no one expects us all to be figure skaters. Horsewomen have their own special charm -- but you don't get given a saddle and bridle the moment you want to exist.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
You could call me the King Kong of snack food town. I blamed my inability on Ma. She shouldn’t have spent all those years feeding me. Now I didn’t plan to cook for the rest of my life since I was too lazy, ahem, busy.
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Michelle Gross (One Percent of You)
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La dicotomía madre-puta está dibujada artificialmente sobre el cuerpo de las mujeres, un poco como el mapa de África: sin tener en cuenta las realidades del terreno, sino únicamente los intereses de los colonizadores.
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Virginie Despentes, Teoría King Kong
“
Without children, you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible: It is essential that women feel like failures--that they be made to feel as if they've mad the wrong choice. We are held responsible for failures that are collective and cross-gender. The weapons used against our gender are specific, but the method can be applied to men too. A good consumer is an insecure consumer.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Waking into a room, checking whether there are men in it, wanting to please them. Not talking to loud. Not being forceful. Not sitting with your legs splayed to be more comfortable. Not speaking with authority. Not talking about money. Not wanting a position of authority. Not seeking glory. Not laughing too loud. Not being too funny. Pleasing men is a complex art, which requires that one should eliminate anything remotely concerned with power.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Wanting to be a man? I am better than that. I don't give a damn about penises. Don't give a damn about facial hair and testosterone -- I possess all the courage and aggression I need. Of course I want it all, just like a man; and in a man's world I want to defy the rules. Overtly. Not tangentially or apologetically. I want to obtain more than I was promised to begin with. I don't want to be silenced. I don't want to be told what I may do. I don't want them to cut into my flesh in order to make my tits bigger. I don't want a slip of a girl's figure when I'm nearly forty. I don't want to flee conflict so as not to reveal my strength and thereby risk losing my femininity.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
When the film Baise-Moi was banned from the screen, lots of women (men didn't dare comment on that subject) stood up to publicly declare, "How revolting, we absolutely must not consider that violence is an answer to rape." Why not? You never see news items about girls -- alone or in gangs -- biting off the dicks of men who attack them, or trailing their attackers to kill them or beat them lifeless...but women still feel the need to say that violence is not the answer. And yet, if men were to fear having their dicks slashed to pieces with a carpet knife should they try to force a woman, they would soon become much better at controlling their "masculine" urges and understanding that "no" means "no".
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
FOTHER MUCKERRRR DAMN-A-RAMA KING-KONG SONOFA-BISCUIT-BOOTY LINT-LICKER MUNCHER-MUTHAHHH!!” Jeremy yelled his ridiculous stream of made-up curse words with precise enunciation at the top of his lungs and threw his club across the green.
”
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Julie Cassar (Ruby Blue (Ruby Blue, #1))
“
What women do with their bodies as long as they're around men with power and money actually seems to me very near to prostitution. I still don't catch the subtle difference between the sort of femininity sold in magazines and that of the whore.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
However much one admires the improved views of the Boston waterfront, the lines of the stealth bomber, or the acting skills of Keira Knightley in Pirates of the Caribbean, or indeed of the gorilla in King Kong, this still seems like a very good deal.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
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.
”
”
Salman Rushdie (The Moor's Last Sigh)
“
The dark secret behind human nature used to be the upsurge of the animal––as in King Kong. The threat to man, his availability to dehumanization, lay in his own animality. Now the danger is understood as residing in a man's ability to be turned into a machine.
”
”
Susan Sontag (Against Interpretation and Other Essays)
“
Who is in fact the victim [of porn]? The actresses, who surrender their dignity the moment we see them giving a blow job? Or the male viewers, weak and unable to overcome their wish to watch sex, or to understand that what they are watching is merely a performance?
”
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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, something that said, "Guess what, you so-and-so, I am God's child. And I. Am. Still. Here.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
So, to start with, you might be wondering how this chick with a monkey on her back about the size
of King Kong is running about staking nasties and whatnot. Well, truth be told, I’ve been stretching the
truth like it was a big handful of raspberry-flavored saltwater taffy.
”
”
Kathleen Tierney (Blood Oranges (Siobhan Quinn, #1))
“
I am not sweet I am not lovable I am not a middle-class girl. I get hormonal highs that send me into peaks of aggression. If I didn't come from the world of punk rock, I would be ashamed of what I am. But I do come from the world of punk rock, and I am proud of not fitting in.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Because if the prostitution contract became part of everyday life, the marriage contract would be shown up more clearly for what it is: a market in which for a bargain price the woman agrees to carry out a certain number of chores -- notably sexual -- to ensure a man's comfort.
”
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Gail Pheterson writes in the Prostitution Prism that, "Significantly, those who explicitly provide sex are defined by their activity as 'prostitutes', a stigmatized and/or criminalized status, while those who buy sex are neither defined or branded by engagement in the same activity.
”
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
He came from plebeian roots and had failed to distinguish himself in any way, not in war, not in work, not in art, though in this last domain he believed himself to have great talent. He was said to be indolent. He rose late, worked little, and surrounded himself with the lesser lights of the party with whom he felt most comfortable, an entourage of middlebrow souls that Putzi Hanfstaengl derisively nicknamed the “Chauffeureska,” consisting of bodyguards, adjutants, and a chauffeur. He loved movies—King Kong was a favorite—and he adored the music of Richard Wagner.
”
”
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
“
But drinking: manly. Having buddies: manly. Clowning around: manly. Earning lots of money: manly. Owning a fast car: manly. Slouching around: manly. Sniggering as you smoke joints: manly. Being competitive: manly. Being aggressive: manly. Wanting to fuck loads of partners: manly. Responding with violence to something that threatens you: manly. Not taking time to spruce yourself up in the morning: manly. Wearing clothes because they're practical: manly. Everything that's fun to do is manly, everything concerned with survival is manly, everything that gains ground is manly.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Les femmes autour de moi gagnent effectivement moins d'argent que les hommes, occupent des postes subalternes, trouvent normal d'être sous-considérées quand elles entreprennent quelque chose. Il y a une fierté de domestique à devoir avancer entravées, comme si c'était utile, agréable ou sexy.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
I am convinced that lots of women prefer not to masturbate -- claiming it does nothing for them -- rather than admit to what arouses them. We aren't all alike, but I'm not the only one to have this fantasy. These rape fantasies, these fantasies of being taken by force in more or less violent situations, which have been present throughout my masturbatory life, didn't come to me out of the blue. It's a powerful and precise cultural mechanism that predestines female sexuality to climax from its own powerlessness -- which is to say from the superiority of the other -- and woman to orgasm against their will, rather than as sluts who enjoy sex...there is a female predisposition for masochism, which stems not from our hormones, nor from prehistoric times, but from a specific cultural system, and this predisposition has disturbing implications for the way we exercise our independence.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
Pornography, often denounced as making people uneasy about sex, is in fact a tranquilizer. Which explains why it is attacked with such ferocity. It's crucial that sexuality should frighten people. In pron films you know that characters will "do it," you don't have to worry about the outcome, as you do in real life.
”
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
The worry isn't that the women won't survive; quite the contrary. The worry is that they might come and say that [prostitution] isn't such a dreadful job after all. And not only because all work is degrading, difficult, and demanding, but because plenty of men are never as affectionate as when they are with a whore.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
I’d received countless gifts in my life. A customized Audi for my sixteenth birthday; a limited-edition Vacheron Constantin watch when I was accepted into Oxford; a penthouse atop the Peak in Hong Kong when I graduated from Cambridge with my master’s. None of them touched me as much as a flimsy paperback of velociraptor erotica.
”
”
Ana Huang (King of Pride (Kings of Sin, #2))
“
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.
”
”
Elizabeth Little (Dear Daughter)
“
Denise, the Nazi soldiers in those trucks do not suspect they're about to be outfoxed by two girls." In the stillness before we spring back itno action, Denise looks to me, grinning like mad. She quotes a line from King Kong, one of my favorite movies I watched with Tom.
"'Oh no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.
”
”
Amy McAuley (Violins of Autumn)
“
The important thing is to put across the idea that no woman may profit from her sexual services outside marriage. In no case is she adult enough to make a business out of her charms. She necessarily prefers an honest profession. Which is judged honest by the moral authorities. And not degrading. Because for women, sex without love is always degrading.
”
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Doing what we should never be done: asking for money for what must remain free. The decision does not belong to each adult woman, but is imposed by collective laws. Prostitutes are the only workers whose alienation moves the upper class -- to the extent that women who have never lacked for anything are absolutely, smugly convinced that prostitution should not be legalized.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
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.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
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
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
In my case, prostitution was a crucial step in rebuilding myself after the rape. A business of dollar-by-dollar compensation, for what had been taken from me by brute force. I must have kept intact whatever I could sell to each client. If I could sell times in a row then it wasn't something that could be destroyed by use. My sex belonged to me only, it didn't lose value through being used, and it could profitable. I was once again in an ultra-feminine position, but this time I was bringing in a profit.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada
”
”
Louise Erdrich (The Sentence: A Novel)
“
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!
”
”
Diana Sorescu (Diana cu Vanilie)
“
Mind you, I'm not saying a word against old Kipper. The salt of the earth. But nobody could have called him a knock-out in the way of looks. Having gone in a lot for boxing from his earliest years, he had the cauliflower ear of which I had spoken to Aunt Dahlia and in addition to this a nose which some hidden hand had knocked slightly out of the straight. He would, in short, have been an unsafe entrant to have backed in a beauty contest, even if the only other competitors had been Boris Karloff, King Kong and Oofy Prosser of the Drones.
”
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P.G. Wodehouse (How Right You Are, Jeeves (Jeeves, #12))
“
I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess. Clad only in garter belt and one dress shield, I held off the entire elite of the Trobriand Islanders, a race who possess no words for "why" or "because." Wielding a stone axe, I broke the arms, the limbs, the balls of their finest warriors, my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot.
”
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Gore Vidal (Myra Breckinridge)
“
[Prostitution laws] are a way of reminding men that their sexuality is necessarily monstrous, that it creates victims and destroys lives. Because masculine sexuality must remain criminalized, dangerous, antisocial, and threatening. This is not an inherent truth, it's a cultural construction. When whores are prevents from working in decent conditions, women are not the only ones being targeted, men's sexuality is also being controlled. Having a relaxed heterosexual fuck when they feel like it mustn't be too easy or pleasant. Their sexuality must remain a problem.
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Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)
“
Every artist who moves us, from a movie maker to Beethoven or Shakespeare, is a bit of a
hypnotist. In this sense that seemingly stupid and mechanical contraption we call "society" must rank as the greatest artist on the planet. For instance, when I was seven or eight, and feeling superior to the kids who closed their eyes "during the scary parts," I was entering a deep hypnosis created by another Virtual Reality called language. This hypnosis was a worse nightmare than the Wicked Witch of the West or King Kong or the Wolf-Man or any of their kith and kin, but it made me a "member of society".
”
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Hyatt S. Christopher (To Lie Is Human: Not Getting Caught Is Divine)
“
Along with Batman v. Superman and Godzilla vs. Kong, I suppose we’ll get Frankenstein vs. Dracula, and perhaps Transformers vs. G.I. Joe in the HasbroVerse, and Warcraft vs. Angry Birds in the GameVerse — not to be confused with the BoardgameVerse of Battleship vs. Risk and Chutes and Ladders vs. Candy Land.
And eventually all of these shared universes will collide with all of the others, including Alien vs. Predator and Freddy vs. Jason, in a Brobdingnagian rumble pitting Jedi against Pirates of the Caribbean, Terminators against Borg, and Muppets against Smurfs, world without end. Even if for some inexplicable reason that doesn’t happen, the LegoVerse will make it happen
”
”
Steven D. Greydanus
“
And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fiddle-faddle and not faddle- fiddle? Why is it ping-pong and pitter-patter rather than pong-ping and patter-pitter? Why dribs and drabs, rather than vice versa? Why can't a kitchen be span and spic? Whence riff-raff, mish-mash, flim-flam, chit-chat, tit for tat, knick-knack, zig-zag, sing-song, ding-dong, King Kong, criss-cross, shilly-shally, see-saw, hee-haw, flip-flop, hippity-hop, tick-tock, tic-tac-toe, eeny-meeny-miney-moe, bric-a-brac, clickety-clack, hickory-dickory-dock, kit and kaboodle, and bibbity-bobbity-boo? The answer is that the vowels for which the tongue is high and in the front always come before the vowels for which the tongue is low and in the back.
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Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language)
“
He came from plebeian roots and had failed to distinguish himself in any way, not in war, not in work, not in art, though in this last domain he believed himself to have great talent. He was said to be indolent. He rose late, worked little, and surrounded himself with the lesser lights of the party with whom he felt most comfortable, an entourage of middlebrow souls that Putzi Hanfstaengl derisively nicknamed the “Chauffeureska,” consisting of bodyguards, adjutants, and a chauffeur. He loved movies—King Kong was a favorite—and he adored the music of Richard Wagner. He dressed badly. Apart from his mustache and his eyes, the features of his face were indistinct and unimpressive, as if begun in clay but never fired. Recalling his first impression of Hitler, Hanfstaengl wrote, “Hitler looked like a suburban hairdresser on his day off.
”
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Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
“
Do you know, all this time you preached at me? You told me that even Grendel's mother was actuated by maternal love.
You told me ghouls were male.
Rodan is male—and asinine.
King Kong is male.
I could have been a witch, but the Devil is male. Faust is male.
The man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was male.
I was never on the moon.
Then there are the birds, with (as Shaw so nobly puts it) the touching poetry of their loves and
nestings in which the males sing so well and beautifully and the females sit on the nest, and the baboons who get torn in half (female) by the others (male), and the chimpanzees with their hierarchy (male) written about by professors (male) with their hierarchy, who accept (male) the (male) view of (female) (male). You can see what's happening. At heart I must be gentle, for I never even thought of the praying mantis or the female wasp; but I guess I am just loyal to my own phylum. One might as well dream of being an oak tree. Chestnut tree, great-rooted hermaphrodite.
”
”
Joanna Russ (The Female Man)
“
Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason
”
”
Louise Erdrich (The Sentence: A Novel)
“
The cake did look fantastic, though. There were photos. Shane cut into the thing, groaned at the sight of the chocolate cake beneath the vanilla frosting, but he took a piece – the King Kong piece – and ate it anyway. Michael gave him a present of a set of silver-coated throwing stars, which Shane greatly admired until Eve sharply reminded him they were not for home use, except in emergencies; Eve’s present was a t-shirt with an insulting graphic on it, of course. Claire saved her present for last.
He unwrapped it and raised his eyebrows. “A book,” he said.
“It’s a how-to book,” she said, “on how to kill zombies. But there’s a chapter at the end on vampires, too. Oh, and mummies, but we don’t see a whole lot of those around here.”
“Useful,” he said, and started to put it aside. Then he frowned and flipped through it.
There was a marker in the middle, and he pulled it out – a man’s silver bracelet. In the middle were engraved his initials. He turned it in the light, admiring it, then put it on and reached out for her hand to pull her closer. She got a kiss, a long, sweet one, and he brushed her hair back as he whispered, “I love you.”
“Happy birthday,” she said. “And next time? Eat the stupid cupcake.
”
”
Rachel Caine (Let Them Eat Cake)
“
Slothrop is just settling down next to a girl in a prewar Worth frock and with a face like Tenniel’s Alice, same forehead, nose, hair, when from outside comes this most godawful clanking, snarling, crunching of wood, girls come running terrified out of the eucalyptus trees and into the house and right behind them what comes crashing now into the pallid lights of the garden but—why the Sherman Tank itself! headlights burning like the eyes of King Kong, treads spewing grass and pieces of flagstone as it manoeuvres around and comes to a halt. Its 75 mm cannon swivels until it’s pointing through the French windows right down into the room. “Antoine!” a young lady focusing in on the gigantic muzzle, “for heaven’s sake, not now. . . .” A hatch flies open and Tamara—Slothrop guesses: wasn’t Italo supposed to have the tank?—uh—emerges shrieking to denounce Raoul, Waxwing, Italo, Theophile, and the middleman on the opium deal. “But now,” she screams, “I have you all! One coup de foudre!” The hatch drops—oh, Jesus—there’s the sound of a 3-inch shell being loaded into its breech. Girls start to scream and make for the exits. Dopers are looking around, blinking, smiling, saying yes in a number of ways. Raoul tries to mount his horse and make his escape, but misses the saddle and slides all the way over, falling into a tub of black-market Jell-o, raspberry flavor, with whipped cream on top. “Aw, no . . .” Slothrop having about decided to make a flanking run for the tank when YYYBLAAANNNGGG! the cannon lets loose an enormous roar, flame shooting three feet into the room, shock wave driving eardrums in to middle of brain, blowing everybody against the far walls. A drape has caught fire. Slothrop, tripping over partygoers, can’t hear anything, knows his head hurts, keeps running through the smoke at the tank—leaps on, goes to undog the hatch and is nearly knocked off by Tamara popping up to holler at everybody again. After a struggle which shouldn’t be without its erotic moments, for Tamara is a swell enough looking twist with some fine moves, Slothrop manages to get her in a come-along and drag her down off of the tank. But loud noise and all, look—he doesn’t seem to have an erection. Hmm. This is a datum London never got, because nobody was looking. Turns out the projectile, a dud, has only torn holes in several walls, and demolished a large allegorical painting of Virtue and Vice in an unnatural act. Virtue had one of those dim faraway smiles. Vice was scratching his shaggy head, a little bewildered. The burning drape’s been put out with champagne. Raoul is in tears, thankful for his life, wringing Slothrop’s hands and kissing his cheeks, leaving trails of Jell-o wherever he touches. Tamara is escorted away by Raoul’s bodyguards. Slothrop has just disengaged himself and is wiping the Jell-o off of his suit when there is a heavy touch on his shoulder. “You were right. You are the man.” “That’s nothing.” Errol Flynn frisks his mustache. “I saved a dame from an octopus not so long ago, how about that?” “With one difference,” sez Blodgett Waxwing. “This really happened tonight. But that octopus didn’t.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)
“
Alors le mot est évité. À cause de tout ce qu'il recouvre. Dans le camp des agressées, comme chez les agresseurs, on tourne autour du terme. C'est un silence croisé.
”
”
Virginie Despentes (King Kong théorie)