La Weather Quotes

She felt so human that he could barely carry on a conversation.

Estelle used to call these the restless days, when the warmer-blooded gods began to stir, and the cold ones began to settle. When dreamers were most prone to bad ideas, and wanderers were likely to get lost.

This is the ultimate bad-boy date, isn't it? Breaking into a different country." "Hey, it makes a change from hot-wiring cars together." "Been there, done that....Alex seriously, are you sure no one's going to shoot us?

Willow, you know that you said you couldn't tell how I felt at the rest stop?" I nodded, and he took my hand, laying it flat on his chest with his own resting over it. "Can you tell now?" he asked. His heart beat firmly under my hand; my own pulse was pounding so hard that I could barely think straight. Closing my eyes, I took a deep, steadying breath, and then another as I tried to clear my mind, to feel what he was feeling. For a moment there was just the softness of our breathing--then all at once it washed over me in a great wave. He was in love with me, too. I opened my eyes. Alex was still holding my hand to his chest, watching me, his expression more serious than I'd ever seen it. Unable to speak, I slowly dropped my hand and wrapped my arms around him. His own arms came around me as he rested his head on my hair. "I really do, you know," he said, his voice rough. "I know," I whispered back. "I do, too.

Hey, you've got the girl, I've got the picture. That's fair, right?

You know that half the girls in school would have been after you." He gave a soft laugh. "If they were into someone who was flunking out...I don't think I'd do too well with having to go to class when a bell rings or caring about homework..." "A bad boy--even better. You'd have done well in Spanish class." "If I ever went to it." We lay in silence for a awhile; Alex's arms felt so warm and safe that I was starting to get sleepy. "Say something in Spanish," I mumbled. He kissed my hair. "Te amo, Willow," he said quietly. I came awake, smiling into the darkness. "What does that mean?" I whispered. I could almost hear his own smile. "What do you think it means?" I hugged him, kissing his collarbone and wondering if it was possible to actually die of happiness. "Te amo, Alex.

I couldn't meet his gaze. I stared at the table just behind him--the mess of cards on it, the lantern giving off its quiet glow. "When you gave me your shirt to wear that night, I could feel you. I could feel your essence." The world went still. We were standing only inches from each other, not touching. Outside, I could hear the faint murmur of the wind blowing through the trees. "What did it feel like?" he asked in a low voice. "Like...coming home," I admitted.

A good angel is only a dead angel.

Willow, things feel more uncertain than ever now," He said finally. "But I love you. For as long as I live - if that's fifty years from now, or just next week - I'll love you.

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?

After a long time, I cleared my throat. “So anyway, when we get to Nevada...I think we should rethink your dad’s rule.” Alex glanced down at me and smiled – the first real smile I’d seen on his face in a long time. “You know what? It’s already been rethought and completely ditched,” he said. And he wrapped his arms around me and we stood looking up at the mountains, with the rising rays of the sun lighting them from the east.

Alex propped himself against the metal railing where Willow had just stood. "Okay, let's get something straight," he said in Spanish."If you think I don't know you're after my girfriend, you're crazy. And if you try to put any sleazy moves on her while you're here, you're going to regret it." Seb's knapsack was at his feet. He took out a pack of cigarettes; tapped out the last one and lit it.Settling back against the door jamb, he gave Alex a considering, faintly humorous look. "Sleazy moves?" he repeated. "Don't worry, I don't do sleazy moves." "Let me rephrase," said Alex coldly "Any moves, just keep your hands off her.

There was no way that I wanted him to stop touching me, even for a few hours. My pulse thudded as I glanced across at the camp bed. I cleared my throat. "Wel...is there a reason we can't both take the bed? The sleeping bags zip together, don't they?" Alex stared at me without moving. "Would that be OK?" I asked, feeling nervous suddenly. The lantern light made his eyes look darker, his hair almost black. He started to smile, a grin spreading across his face. "Yes, that would be extremely OK.

He reached across and fingered the pendant; I felt it move against my skin. "Willow, look," He said. "We haven't talked much about what might happen, but...you know that I always want to be with you, right? I mean--no matter what." And I had known it; I felt it every time he held me--but even so, actually hearing the words made my heart catch. "I want that, too," I said. "Always, Alex.

The girl I’ve been looking for my entire life. Alex resisted the urge to throw Seb off the balcony and see if he could fly.

Willow's eyes flew to his, startled. They stared at each other. Her foot felt small under his hand; he rubbed it lightly with his thumb, feeling the silky heat of her skin, his pulse hammering through his veins. He felt like he was falling. All he could see was her. She looked closed to tears. "Alex--" Leaning across the corner of the table, he cradled her face in his hands and kissed her. Her lips were soft and warm. With a sob, Willow returned the kiss, throwing her arms around his neck. He opened his mouth, tasting her; felt her hair tumble down around his hands. Happiness burst through him, exploding through his chest. Willow. Oh, God. Willow.

He kissed me, so gently at first that I melted. I pressed close against him as the kiss deepened, curling my arms around his neck and tumbling into pure sensation. The softness of his hair as I ran my fingers through it; his arms hands on my skin, caressing me. It felt so, so good. I'd been afraid that I'd never have this again--this sense of being so achingly alive that every nerve ending was on fire.

I had my arms around his waist, smiling as I looked up at him. Being with Alex made me so completely happy, in an easy, uncomplicated way that I hadn't felt since I was a small child. "I love you," I said. In the five days we'd been there, it was the first time I'd said the words to him in English; they just slipped out. Alex's expression went very still as he looked down at me, his dark hair stirred by the slight breeze. I picked up a sudden wave of his emotions, and they almost brought tears to my eyes. Gently, he took my face in his hands and kissed me. "I love you, too," he said against my lips.

We're so often told that art can't really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.

Alex grabbed our things from the bike and bought them inside; then he fastened the tent closed, securing us in. "Come here, babe, I'll keep you warm.

Willow nestled against him. He smoothed her long hair down the back of her T-shirt, feeling its softness. In a few moments she fell asleep again, her breathing warm and regular against his chest. Alex kissed her head, his arms tightening around her. As he drifted back to sleep himself, he saw a brief flash of the thousands of angels streaming in, but right then it seemed distant, almost unimportant. The only thing that mattered was that he was lying in a bed holding Willow, their bare legs entwined. It was all he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

How about that one? Is that a constellation?" I asked, pointing upward. We were down in the small valley where the truck was parked. Alex sat leaning against a rock; I was between his legs with my back against his chest, his arms around me as we stared up at the stars. "Yeah, that's the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades." He bent his head, and I caught my breath as his warm mouth nuzzled at my neck. I hadn't gotten even remotely used yet to how good it felt to be kissed by Alex. "It's so sexy how you know all of this," I said when I could speak again. "Yeah?" I heard the grin in his voice. "I know the summer constellations, too. Will that get me bonus kisses?" "I think it might, actually.

Touching his hair, she leaned hesitantly forward, and he folded his arms around her, sinking into sensation again as they kissed--the slight weight of her on his lap, the smell of her. He glided his hands up the warm dip of her spine, felt her shiver and press closer. He could never get enough of this. Never.

Querida, it's alright," he said. "No one has hurt me in years." "Hey, you're supposed to be my brother," I said, trying to joke. "Brother's don't hold their sisters' hands or call them querida." Seb smiled, his hazel eyes starting to dance. "Yes, they do," he said. "This happens all the time." "Well I guess things are different in Mexico then," I said. "Because in America, no way. And I'm an American." "But you're in Mexico now," he pointed out. "Right. And you're saying here, boys holds hands with their sisters and call them sweetheart." "Oh yes. We're very friendly, we Mexicans.

Gently, I ran my hand across his chest, exploring it. My breath felt tight in my throat. He was so beautiful. His muscles were toned, defined, his skin warm and smooth. Stroking my palm up over the line of his collarbone, I felt the firmness of his shoulder, the strength of his bicep. I traced my fingers over the black AK, following the lines of the letters. Alex hardly moved as I touched him, his eyes never leaving me. Finally I sighed and dropped my hand. I tried to smile. "I've sort of been wanting to do that ever since that first night in the motel room," I admitted.

Alex resisted the urge to throw Seb off the balcony and see if he could fly.

For a long time we just held each other, our hearts beating hard. My eyes were closed, my face pressed against the warm dip between his shoulder and neck. Alex. I felt a happiness so great that it was like a deep stillness within me, as if something I'd been looking for my entire life had just slotted into place, making me whole. Finally Alex drew back. Stroking my hair from my face, he kissed me slowly, and I wanted to melt. "I can't believe that I can just do that whenver I want to now," he whispered. "You may not be getting much done for the next few weeks. Or months, or years." Years. My heart skipped, hoping that was true. "I think I can live with that," I said. Hardly able to believe that I could touch him whenever I wanted to, either, I slid my hand down his arm, feeling the different textures of him: hard muscle, smooth skin. "Do you want to go to bed?" I asked softly. Then, for the second time that night, I felt my face flame at the question. Alex smiled and touched my cheek. "You still mean sleep, right?" "Still sleep." My skin was on fire. "Just making sure. Yeah, sleep sounds good. I'm sure I'll manage to drop off. Eventually." His smile turned teasing. "Do I have to put my shirt on?" I couldn't help smiling, too, though embarrassment was still singeing through me. "No, I'd rather you didn't," I admitted.

Empathy is not something that happens to us when we read Dickens. It’s work. What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

We kissed again. It grew deeper; Alex wrapped his arms around me, drawing me close against him. His back was smooth and warm. I ran my hands over it as we kissed, loving the feel of his skin, and almost went faint as his lips moved briefly to my neck and then found my mouth again. In my entire life, nothing had ever felt as good as Alex kissing me like that. When we finally pulled apart, both our hearts were pounding. I cleared my throat, skimming my fingers along his forearm. "Alex, you, um...you know that I've never--" "I know," he broke in softly. He reached for my hand, linking his fingers through mine. "Willow, it's OK. We'll do whatever you want. I just want to be with you; I don't care.

Holding my pendant, I lay on my side without moving, noiseless tears streaming down my face until the pillow grew damp beneath my cheek. I didn't want to die. I wanted to live, to be with Alex, to experience so much more than I had so far. But just then, it was Alex I was crying for. All that he'd gone through, all those deaths of people he loved--and now he was having to experience it again, with me. Thinking of what he was going through was like being beaten up inside; it was even worse than imagining whatever might happen the next day. Part of me hoped that he really did hate me now--maybe it would help; maybe it would make it not hurt so much. And more than that, I guess I was crying for both of us...that it hadn't turned out to be always, after all.

I almost jumped when the door opened. Alex came back inside, wearing black sweatpants; I swallowed as I saw his chest bare. "Forgot my T-shirt," he said sheepishly. His bag was on the floor near the bed, and I watched the lantern light play on his skin as he crossed to it. Squatting by the bag, he pulled out a T-shirt; I sat frozen, taking in the movement of his back and shoulders. I stood up, my heart hammering. "Wait. Can I just...?" I trailed off as he turned to look at me. "What?" he said, rising to his feet. An embarrassed laugh escaped me. I shook my head. "Just--before you put that on, can I...?" In slow motion, I went over to him. I reached out toward his chest and then stopped, my fingers hesitating an inch from his skin. "Is--this all right?" Alex stood very still, a soft smile on his face. "Anything you want is all right.

You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.

Wow," she said weakly. "That's even more amazing than I thought it would be." Alex's arms were still looped around her waist; it took a serious effort not to draw her back to him and start kissing her again. He managed to control himself and grinned. "You mean with me or just in general?" "In general," she said. "But I have a feeling it's especially amazing with you." She leaned back in his arms, studying him. Shaking her head with a slight smile, she reached out and stroked the line of his cheekbone. "Do you even realize how gorgeous you are?" What he realized was that he was happier than he'd ever been. He gazed at Willow, drinking in her face, feeling amazed that this was happening--that she was here with him and that she actually felt the same way. "Come here," he said softly. And pulling her toward him, he simply held her, cradling her against his chest.

The stopped time of a painting, say, or the drawn-out minutes and compressed years of a novel, in which it is possible to see patterns and consequences that are otherwise invisible.

The look in his eyes melted me.

Was he really willing to throw away what we had this easily? How could two people who loved each other so much be communicating so badly? When one of them was psychic, even?

A useful analogy for what she calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison.

What drives all these essays is a long-standing interest in how a person can be free, and especially in how to find a freedom that is shareable, and not dependent upon the oppression or exclusion of other people.

A paranoid reader is concerned with gathering information, tracing links and making the hidden visible. They anticipate and are perennially defended against disaster, catastrophe, disappointment. They are always on the lookout for danger, about which they can never, ever know enough.

A useful analogy for what [Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick] calls 'reparative reading' is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn't mean being naïve or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments.

I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder, and I’m amazed that we’re not running amok in the streets and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.

How can the weather have a state of mind?” said Papadimitriou. The gyptian said, “You think the weather is only out there? It’s in here too,” and tapped his head. “So do you mean that the weather’s state of mind is just our state of mind?” “Nothing is just anything,” the gyptian replied, and would say no more.

Never stop growing in life. The world's tallest redwood trees were once little nuts, that kept on growing, regardless of weather, trials and tribulations.

People here aren't mean; they're not unsociable - it just hurts to get close to someone and then lose them

I never allow myself to be influenced in the smallest degree either by atmospheric disturbances or by the arbitrary divisions of what is known as Time.

But people sitting at a table don’t make a family. Monologues don’t make a conversation.

I’ve always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,’ she said, ‘and I’ve never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.

What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it's up to you.

You can't always be a hero," he whispered. "Sometimes just surviving is the best that you can do.

In LA, celebrity news was city news. I could turn on the morning news and get weather (almost comic in its lack of variation), traffic (ditto), and celebrity gossip, delivered with the seriousness of a stock-market update.

In terms of her painting, never mind the innovations she brought to bear on her private life, she forged a passage to a world of openness and freedom, as frightening as it was exhilarating. 'I've always been absolutely terrified every single moment of my life,' she said, 'and I've never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do,

The first of these houses appeared to be occupied. The next two were vacant. Dingy curtains, soot-grey against their snowy window-sills, hung over the next. A litter of paper and refuse-abandoned by the last long gust of wind that must have come whistling round the nearer angle of the house - lay under the broken flight of steps up to a mid-Victorian porch. The small snow clinging to the bricks and to the worn and weathered cement of the wall only added to its gaunt lifelessness. ("Bad Company

Des trombes marines se dressaient là accumulées et en apparence immobiles comme les piliers noirs d'un temple. Elles supportaient, renflées à leurs extrémités, la voûte sombre et basse de la tempête, mais, au travers des déchirures de la voûte, des pans de lumière tombaient, et la pleine lune rayonnait, entre les piliers, sur les dalles froides de la mer.

Secrets have a tendency to come out eventually, in unexpected and nasty ways.

The world's biggest tree, the redwood tree was once a little nut that just kept growing regardless of weather.

I buried my face against his neck, breathing him in - the smell of machine oil, summertime, a thousand memories

When you are part of the caravan of crazy clouds you start to become a little less domesticated and a little more like wild mountain weather.

What art does is provide material with which to think: new registers, new spaces. After that, friend, it’s up to you.

Never stop growing. The world's tallest redwood trees were all once little nuts, that kept growing regardless of weather, trials or tribulations.

It was as good a dinner as I have ever absorbed, and Thomas like a watered flower. As we sat down he was saying some things about the Government which they wouldn't have cared to hear. With the consomme pate d'Italie he said but what could you expect nowadays? With the paupiettes de sole a la princesse he admitted rather decently that the Government couldn't be held responsible for the rotten weather, anyway. And shortly after the caneton Aylesbury a la broche he was practically giving the lads the benefit of his whole-hearted support.

Why did Earth only get one moon while other planets had so many? And why didn’t our moon have a sexy name, like Elara or Ananke? Just Moon. It was like having a dog and naming him Dog.

Fiction can do that: can make a space for reflecting, for generating novel ways of responding and reacting to lies and guns and walls alike. The mere act of cracking open a book, Smith thinks, is creative in itself, capable of inculcating kindness and agility in the reader. ‘Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s like being given the world, its darks and lights. At which point we can go about the darks and lights with our imagination energised” - Olivia Laing, Funny Weather

OK,” he said. “‘It’s a hundred and six miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.’” I felt my mouth quirk at the Blues Brothers quote. And I thought — even if he’s never going to feel the same way that I do, it doesn’t matter. I still want to be with him. I never wanted to be without him. “Hit it,” I said.

la virtud del tiempo es que permite que las plantas, incluso aquellas a las que más alérgico eras, crezcan. Si se vuelven hermosas y se abren con bonitos pétalos, ya no las miramos del mismo modo.

Willow was very relaxed company, easy to talk to when either of them felt like talking or just as happy to stay quiet, lost in her own thoughts as they climbed. Glancing at her profile as they sat on a boulder looking out at the view, it suddenly struck Alex that he’d never felt so comfortable with anyone in his life. It felt as if he’d known Willow always. No. It felt like she was a part of him.

He cries himself to sleep at night on his huge pilluh." "That thing’s like Spootnik. It's got its own weather system." "It's like an orange on a toothpick." I think he heard me talking about him to the nurses and formulated a plan to get back at me. I firmly believe at night in the nursery he and all the other newborns struck up a conversation and decided it was time for a revolution. Viva la newborns!

For generations people have called natural disasters “acts of God.” This has been a misnomer. Eons ago, God the Father conceded control of Earth’s weather to Satan himself, the prince and power of the air. God allowed destruction and death by natural phenomena, yes, because of the fall of man. And no doubt God at times intervened against such actions by the evil one because of the fervent prayers of his people.

Before embarking on a voyage, first speak with the ancient sailors, listen to and understand the winds, then patiently make a boat and sail. Yet, even then, be open to other dreams, changes, circumstances. Throughout our lives, we limit ourselves to fixed goals, only to get on the local ferry and just travel the distance between two known points. Yet, we create an illusion of freedom and choice, accompanied by a sense of independence. Thus, we carefully study weather reports, ride on the port side on odd numbered days, starboard on holidays, have tea at fixed times, never speak with those who wear glasses, always smile at those who wear green and of course allow ourselves just the slight possibility of a dream about jumping ship and going off to our island one day. C'est la vie? Our predictably totalitarian lives are an insult to the human spirit.

[...] il te faut seulement comprendre que te retrouver à la case départ n'est pas une régression. Te retrouver quelque part, c'est une déjà une bonne chose en soi - cela veut dire que tu as conscience de ce que tu fais.

The sun rises with a surprising intensity, a sign that June Gloom has cleared the runway and July is on approach. We are both tired, and it would've been to return to our bed after our morning walk, read from a book maybe, drift lazily in and out of sleep. But the sun beckons with a blazingly confrontational message: There is darkness, but there is also light. To stay in bed would be to embrace the darkness, the seizures, the octopus. To go outside is to embrace the light.

angels are beautiful,” I said finally. “And they’re still deadly.” “You’re really not getting this,” said Alex. He touched my face. “Yes, all angels are beautiful, but that’s just how they look. Your angel is you; she’s a part of you. And that means she’s  . . .  everything I love.

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— Lean on a garden urn— Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair— Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise— Fling them to the ground and turn With a fugitive resentment in your eyes: But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair. So I would have had him leave, So I would have had her stand and grieve, So he would have left As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, As the mind deserts the body it has used. I should find Some way incomparably light and deft, Some way we both should understand, Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand. She turned away, but with the autumn weather Compelled my imagination many days, Many days and many hours: Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers. And I wonder how they should have been together! I should have lost a gesture and a pose. Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

But I saw your aura looking healthy again, then looking sick after a hunt. And you keep getting migraines. You should take better care of yourself,” he added mildly. “Look for ways to not be so tense – long walks, meditation, these things would help.” Alex suddenly felt like Seb was his therapist; he had to resist the urge to shake him.

The Argonauts is about these small, miraculous domestic dramas, and the acts of readjustment and care that they require, but it is also a reconsideration of what the institutions established around sexuality and reproduction mean if you come at them slant, if you disrupt them by the very fact of your being. Evictions and exclusions keep occurring.

After you’ve distinguished between the things that are up to you and the things that aren’t (ta eph’hemin, ta ouk eph’hemin), and the break comes down to something you don’t control… you’ve got only one option: acceptance. The shot didn’t go in. The stock went to zero. The weather disrupted the shipment. Say it with me: C’est la vie. It’s all fine.

We're so often told that art can't really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living. Don't you want it, to be impregnate with all that light? And what will happen if you are?

La seule dichotomie qui compte est celle qui sépare ceux qui agissent de ceux qui ne font rien. [...] Nous exagérons dramatiquement le rôle de ceux qui refusent les conclusions de la science parce que cela permet à ceux qui les acceptent de se sentir en paix avec eux-mêmes, sans pour autant nous mettre au défi d'agir en utilisant le savoir que nous avons intégré.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]

Dooming, floodish weather is everywhere, and I bet ‘la Seine monte!’ Tons of love, Bing. ________ ‘La Seine monte!’ was no joke but a dangerous reality when, with the spring and autumn floods, we rose almost to the level of the Boulevard. When we reached the tops of the trees, warning signals went out, and it soon became difficult not to become entangled in their branches.

Every night perhaps, we accept the risk of experiencing, while we sleep, sufferings that we consider to be null and void because they will be endured only in the course of a sleep that we believe is without consciousness. In fact, on the evenings when I returned home late from La Raspelière, I was very sleepy. But as soon as the cold weather arrived, I was unable to get to sleep right away, because the fire was so bright it was as if a lamp had been lit.

The night was blustery and raw, with a chill wet wind blowing down the avenues, and when Rose and I met Françoise and her son and a friend at La Lorraine, a glittering brassiere not far from L'Étoile, rain was descending from the heavens in torrents. Someone in the group, sensing my state of mind, apologized for the evil night, but I recall thinking that even if this were one of those warmly scented and passionate evenings for which Paris is celebrated I would respond like the zombie I had become. The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.

Like Lord Nugent, George Papadimitriou had experienced the sense of strangeness and unreality that the flood produced. The gyptian owner of the boat he was traveling on told him that in gyptian lore, extreme weather had its own states of mind, just as calm weather did. “How can the weather have a state of mind?” said Papadimitriou. The gyptian said, “You think the weather is only out there? It’s in here too,” and tapped his head. “So do you mean that the weather’s state of mind is just our state of mind?” “Nothing is just anything,” the gyptian replied, and would say no more.

Another gust whips through, and Addie folds herself against it, eyes blurring. She shuffles sideways, onto a narrow street, just to escape the violent wind, and the sudden quiet, the breezeless peace, of the alley is like down, soft and warm. Her knees fold. She slumps into a corner against a set of steps, and watches her fingers turn blue, thinks she can see frost spreading over her skin, and marvels quietly, sleepily, at her own transformation. Her breath fogs the air in front of her, each exhale briefly blotting out the world beyond until the gray city fades to white, to white, to white. Strange, how it seems to linger now, a little more with every breath, as if she's fogging up a pane of glass. She wonders how many breaths until the world is hidden. Erased, like her. Perhaps it is her vision blurring. She does not care. She is tired. She is so tired. Addie cannot stay awake, and why should she try? Sleep is such a mercy. Perhaps she will wake again in the spring, like the princess in one of her father's stories, and find herself lying in the grassy bank along the Sarthe, Estele nudging her with a worn shoe and teasing her for dreaming again.

My work is part detective, part cultural anthropologist. I am a spy, a researcher, a negotiator, a trendsetter, a socialite, and a dealmaker. This is the reason I own this one-man niche. I supply the world with the most brilliant stories in adrenaline-packed adventures concocted by writers, stalkers, hackers, and odd characters, and then produced and marketed by heads of studios and publishers who come to me with preemptive offers. I have the power to turn someone’s obscure dream into one hundred TV episodes, then syndication. I can find a screenplay written in film school and turn it into a blockbuster.

And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

These narratives are interesting in and of themselves, but Nelson isn’t just airing her feelings out. She’s bent on using these experiences as ways of prying the culture open, of investigating what it is that’s being so avidly defended and policed. Binaries, mostly: the overwhelming need, to which the left is no more immune than the right, for categories to remain pure and unpolluted. Gay people marrying or becoming pregnant, individuals migrating from one gender to another, let alone refusing to commit to either, occasions immense turbulence in thought systems that depend upon orderly separation and partition, which is part of the reason that the trans-rights movement has proved so depressingly threatening to certain quarters of feminist thought.

And as Adeline watches, she realizes she cannot stay. Or rather, she could—could find a way to skip from house to house, like stones skating across the river—but she will not. Because when she thinks of it, she feels neither like the river nor the stone, but like a hand, as it tires of throwing. There is Estele, closing her door. There is Isabelle, one moment kind, and the next filled with horror. Later, much later, Addie will make a game of these cycles, will see how long she can step from perch to perch before she falls. But right now, the pain is too fresh, too sharp, and she cannot fathom going through those motions, cannot weather the weary look on her father’s face, the rebuke in Estele’s eyes. Adeline LaRue cannot be a stranger here, to these people she has always known. It hurts too much, watching them forget her.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth,

The consequences enveloped the entire globe. During 1890 a strong La Niña ocean temperature anomaly developed, followed by two El Niño years, which warmed Pacific waters and upended normal weather patterns—causing floods in some places, drought in others. In India, monsoons failed, leading to widespread cattle deaths, locust plagues, and grain riots.172 In Russia, peasants had been pressured to clear huge areas for wheat, with the grain exported as a cash crop; overseers had walked away rich. But by 1891 and 1892, the land was exhausted. Drought, bad harvests, and bitter winters led vast numbers of peasants to burn the thatched roofs of their homes for fuel and eat “famine bread” made out of weeds. Typhus swept in to finish off the emaciated. Worldwide, millions died. It was, as one scholar put it, a “fin de siècle apocalypse.”173 Weather patterns in the

But my grandmother, in all weathers, even when the rain was coming down in torrents and Françoise had rushed the precious wicker armchairs indoors so that they should not have soaked, was to be seen pacing the desert rain-lashed garden, pushing back her disordered grey locks so that her forehead might be freer to absorb the health-giving draughts of wind and rain. She would say, "At last one can breathe!" and would trot up and down the sodden paths—too straight and symmetrical for her liking, owing to the want of any feeling for nature in the new gardener, whom my father had been asking all morning if the weather were going to improve—her keen, jerky little step regulated by the various effects wrought upon her soul by the intoxication of the storm, the power of hygiene, the stupidity of my upbringing and the symmetry of gardens, rather than by any anxiety (for that was quite unknown to her) to save her plum-coloured skirt from the mudstains which it would gradually disappear to a height that was the constant bane and despair of her maid.

Spring came down hard that year. And I do mean hard, like the fist of some drunken pike poker with too much fury and not enough ale, whose wife just left him for some wandering minstrel and whose commanding officer absconded with his pay.

So we got the Word of God telling us that prayer––not light, love and good thoughts––changed the weather. Last time I checked, that kind of thing was called supernatural. So why is it that when the Bible promises us that insistent prayer, prayed by a man just like us, provided a miracle from God, we choose to settle for good thoughts?

they have about forty Dassault Rafale E’s, the top-of-the-line export variant of the standard French tactical fighter. This is a very bad-ass aircraft indeed, boys and girls. Good range, good sensors, good ECM, day and night, all-weather capable, and it can deliver large amounts of all kinds of very nasty ordnance with unnerving accuracy.” “Vive la France,” somebody down the table muttered.

In her perennial search for the best foods regardless of cuisine, exploring the vast cornucopia at her disposal, she'd realized that the little mom-and-pop restaurants in the mini-malls were where she found the mother lode of deliciousness. Why? Because immigrants operated them. They had brought their homeland's flavors in their suitcases and were adding them to the never-ending gastronomic experiment that took place every day in Los Angeles. She loved to observe, but more important, to participate in the frequent overlap between different cuisines, resulting in an endless continuum of delight and surprise. Multiply that by more than one hundred and fifty countries and you had yourself Angeleno cuisine.

You could have picked Yom Kippur to come clean, but any day is a good day to repent.

He tried to sleep but was kept awake through the night by a profound sadness. He knew there wasn’t much he could do for all the Mexicans who would suffer the wrath and bigotry of the newly elected president of the United States. So he wept. Wednesday, November 9th “Should we move to Mexico City?

And then there’s the other thing I’m realizing: my work is useless as a megaphone. How many people can be exposed to the message in an art gallery? It’s such an elitist medium. I like to work with clay, and I will continue to do so, but I also need to join the cause and fight.

Just think about this next time you put an almond in your mouth: a bee had to pollinate its blossom for you to eat it. That’s how miraculous it is.

Such a farmer he’d turned out to be. A fraud. A failure. A flake. A featherweight. A flop. A fucking fool. He tried to find another fitting word starting with the letter “f” but couldn’t come up with one.

a fluid, hybrid faith that ultimately boiled down to the celebration of all holidays indiscriminately, without giving their religion any further theological examination. Hanukkah was the time to light up the menorah, Christmas was when the tree was decorated and gifts were given and received, and that was that. On