Maggot Quotes

Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.

Maggots squirming in your eyeholes...and your other orifices, might be carrying things a bit too far." "This is why I keep you around, Rixon. Always seeing things from the bright side.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

And do you think that unto such as you A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew God gave a secret, and denied it me? Well, well—what matters it? Believe that, too!

Leaking sacks of mutated maggots?" He raises his perfectly arched eyebrow as though I'd just failed my verbal insult exam.

You gave me a dead frog for my birthday! To remind you we all die and end up rotting underground eaten by maggots so we should enjoy our birthdays while we have them. I found it thoughtful.

Faerie might be beautiful, but its beauty is like a golden stag’s carcass, crawling with maggots beneath his hide, ready to burst.

I guess we'd better move the trash. We can start with the Dumpster." He pointed at it, looking distinctly unenthusiastic. "You'd rather face a ravening horde of demons, wouldn't you?" Clary said. "At least they wouldn't be crawling with maggots. Well," he added thoughtfully, "not most of them, anyway. There was this one demon, once, that I tracked down to the sewers under Grand Central—" "Don't." Clary raised a warning hand. "I'm not really in the mood right now." "That's got to be the first time a girl's ever said that to me," Jace mused. "Stick with me and it won't be the last." The corner of Jace's mouth twitched. "This is hardly the time for idle banter. We have garbage to haul.

We'll be chopped up before you can say 'King Maggot'.

You see, the what ifs are as boundless as the stars.

She's all over us like maggots on garbage, just because I interfered with one pickpocket yesterday.

How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly?

Sometimes, one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lusts.

They're not ‘fellas.’  They’re not anywhere near human. They’re nothing but leaking sacks of mutated maggots, just like you.” Lookswise, he and the other angels I’d seen were closer to living Adonises, complete with god-like faces and presence. But inside, they were maggots for sure.

TO what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Maggots are freaky hideous,’ I say, getting up. I try to salvage some dignity, but I can’t help but shiver and shake my hands in the air. It’s an instinctive impulse, one I’m not up for resisting right now. ‘You’ve fought off a gang of men twice your size, killed an angel warrior, stood up to an archangel, and wielded an angel sword.’ Raffe cocks his head. ‘But you scream like a little girl when you see a maggot?’ ‘It’s not just a maggot,’ I say. ‘A hand burst out of the ground and grabbed my ankle. And maggots crawled out of it and tried to burrow into me. You would scream like a little girl too if that happened to you.’ ‘They didn’t try to burrow into you. They were just crawling. It’s what maggots do. They crawl.’ ‘You don’t know anything.

What if suffering doesn’t end with death? How can we know? What if it doesn’t get better? What if death isn’t an escape? What if the maggots continue to feed and feed and feed and continue to be felt? This possibility scares me.

Not only are mortals rotten, the very atmosphere in which we live is materially and physically rotten, swarming with maggots, with obscene appearances, poisonous minds, and foul organisms.

Jace: "I guess we better move the trash. We can start with the Dumpster," looking unenthusiastic. Clary: "You'd rather face a ravening horde of demons, wouldn't you?" Jace: "At least they wouldn't be crawling with maggots. Well, not most of them, anyway. There was this one demon, once, that I tracked down to the sewers under Grand Central--" Clary: "Don't. I'm not really in the mood right now." Jace: "That's got to be the first time a girl's ever said that to me." Clary: "Stick with me and it won't be the last.

New York! The white prisons, the sidewalks swarming with maggots, the breadlines, the opium joints that are built like palaces, the kikes that are there, the lepers, the thugs, and above all, the ennui, the monotony of faces, streets, legs, houses, skyscrapers, meals, posters, jobs, crimes, loves... A whole city erected over a hollow pit of nothingness. Meaningless. Absolute meaningless.

The other side of the "sacred" is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.

I shut my eyes and try not to squeal. ‘Get the maggots off me!’ Raffe brushes them off, but it feels like they’re still crawling on my skin. ‘So you do scream like a little girl,’ says Raffe with some satisfaction in his voice. I open my eyes a second too soon, because I catch him tossing the severed hand into the sand

At sunset, on the river ban, Krishna Loved her for the last time and left. . . That night in her husband's arms, Radha felt So dead that he asked, What is wrong, Do you mind my kisses, love? And she said, Not not at all, but thought, What is It to the corpse if the maggots nip?

Listen, ah don't wanna speak ill of the dead but have ah told you that mah mother was a great whopping whale of a cunt? Well she was precisely that - a great whopping whale of a hog's cunt with a dirty maggot for a brain.

Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery?

Why let them order you about? Why let them tell you to hurry and scurry like ants or maggots? Take your time! Saunter a while! Enjoy the sunshine, enjoy the breeze, let life carry you at your own pace! Don't be slaves of time, it's a helluva way to die, slowly, by degrees...down with the Ticktockman!

It’s better that you leave her alone,” she said. “There isn’t just water under your bridge, there’s maggots and shit and dead bodies. Now, get the fuck out of my house before I call the police.

I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound.

Sunlight is bad,' he wheezes. 'It's the exact same stuff as breeds maggots in wounded soldiers' legs. And when there's no war on, it fades wallpaper.

There are train-track thinkers, then there's you, Standish, a breeze in the park of imagination.

I now wondered if the lullaby of death was not a lovely song, but the droning of flies. If flies and maggots were all Death's handmaidens.

when I was four years old they tried to test my I.Q. they showed me a picture of 3 oranges and a pear they said, which one is different? it does not belong they taught me different is wrong but when I was 13 years old I woke up one morning thighs covered in blood like a war like a warning that I live in a breakable takeable body an ever-increasingly valuable body that a woman had come in the night to replace me deface me see, my body is borrowed yeah, I got it on loan for the time in between my mom and some maggots I don't need anyone to hold me I can hold my own I got highways for stretchmarks see where I've grown I sing sometimes like my life is at stake 'cause you're only as loud as the noises you make I'm learning to laugh as hard as I can listen 'cause silence is violence in women and poor people if more people were screaming then I could relax but a good brain ain't diddley if you don't have the facts we live in a breakable takeable world an ever available possible world and we can make music like we can make do genius is in a back beat backseat to nothing if you're dancing especially something stupid like I.Q. for every lie I unlearn I learn something new I sing sometimes for the war that I fight 'cause every tool is a weapon - if you hold it right.

we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end. CLAUDIUS Alas, alas. HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

I mean, I may not hold the record in cleaning house either, but if I've got old milk cartons that smell like maggots I bundle them up and put them out." "I'm on a disability pension'" he said. "I'm socially incompetent.

It had struck me that the world was full of holes, holes which you could fall into, never to be seen again. I couldn't understand the difference between disappearance and death. Both seemed the same to me, both left holes. Holes in your heart holes in your life.

Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.

Mom has a massive sunflower for a soul so big there's hardly any room in her for organs. Jude and me have one soul between us that we have to share: a tree with its leaves on fire. And Dad has a plate of maggots for his.

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life... But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong—for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives. We throw ourselves onto the grenade to save our buddies in the foxhole. We rise out of the trenches and charge the entrenched enemy and die like maggots under a blowtorch. We strap bombs on our bodies and blow ourselves up in the midst of our enemies. We are, when the cause is sufficient, insane.

After the trial, I watched as another female pathologist collected maggots from a spinal column found in the desert. There was a decomposed head, too, and before leaving work she planned to simmer it and study the exposed cranium for contusions. I was asked to pass this information along to the chief medical examiner, and, looking back, I perhaps should have chosen my words more carefully. 'Fire up the kettle,' I told him. 'Ol'-fashioned skull boil at five p.m.

Doubt is a great worm in a crispy, red apple.

Woman, man, mole, maggot – they’re all the same, when all’s said and done, except for slight variations in cognitive ability.

On your feet, maggot!

I wiped off my fingers, but it wasn't the mold or maggots making my stomach revolt... No, it was the knowledge that all around me sat empty people in rotting clothes, nibbling on flyblown trifles while they spoke of nothing of consequence with fixed smiles on their false faces.

On the outside, I’m the perfect kid–like a statue of perfect marble, serene and unreal. Inside, it’s all snakes and maggots and broken glass.

Maggot calmed me down by explaining Bible stories were a category of superhero comic. Not to be confused with real life.

Speaking of dust, ‘out of which we came and to which we shall return,’ do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds of worms according as we are fat or thin? In fat corpses one species of maggot is found, the rhizophagus, while thin corpses are patronized only by the phora. The latter is evidently the aristocrat, the fastidious gourmet which turns up its nose at a heavy meal of copious breasts and juicy at bellies. Just think, there is no perfect equality, even in the manner in which we feed the worms.

Things I will never like: 1. Drying off with a cold, damp towel. 2. The feeling of seaweed wrapping around my legs. 3. Anything that was popular in the 70's. 4. Licorice, yam, or raisins. 5. That high-pitched screech that babies make. 6. Writhing maggots.

Hate?” Thorkel said, raising an eyebrow, onions stuck in his beard. “Hate does no one any good,” he shrugged. “Sometimes killing has to be done, but do not do it with hate in your heart. It will eat at you, like maggots laid beneath the skin.

His [Lord Peter's] long, amiable face looked as if it had generated spontaneously from his top hat, as white maggots breed from Gorgonzola.

Thanks, Jeb," Kyle said. "Shut the hell up, Kyle. Just keep you fat mouth shut. I'm dead serious about shooting you, you worthless maggot.

Zombies smell worse than anything you can imagine if you haven’t been hunting things on the dark side of the world. It’s a ripe, gassy odour, like rotting eggs and meat gone bad, crawling blind with maggots. It’s road kill and decayed food and body odour all rolled into one package and tied up with puke.

Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

How could you do that to me?" I repeat. I don´t have to itemize. He knows what I speak of. Eventually N produces three answers, in this order: 1. "Because I am a complete rotter." I silently agree, but it´s a cop-out: I have maggots, therefore I am dead. 2. "I was stressed at work and unhappy and we were always fighting...and you know I was just crazy..." I cut him off, saying, "You don´t get to be crazy. You did exactly what you chose to do." Which is true, he did. It is what he has always done. He therefore seems slightly puzzled at the need for further diagnosis, which may explain his third response: 3. "I don´t know." This, I feel instinctively, is the correct answer. How can I stay angry with him for being what he is? I was, after all, his wife, and I chose him. No coincidences, that´s what Freud said. None. Ever. I wipe my eyes on my sleeve and walk toward the truck, saying to his general direction, "Fine. At least now I know: You don´t know." I stop and turn around and fire one more question: a bullet demanding attention in the moment it enters the skin and spreads outward, an important bullet that must be acknowledged. "What did you feel?" After a lengthy pause, he answers. "I felt nothing." And that, I realize too late, was not the whole truth, but was a valid part of the truth. Oh, and welcome to the Serengeti. That too.

Entomologists have a name for young flies, but it is an ugly name, an insult. Let's not use the word "maggot." Let's use a pretty word. Let's use "hacienda.

A child doesn’t understand a hammer until he’s mashed his finger at a nail. Get up and stop whining, maggot! You have forgotten the face of your father!

And do you think that unto such as you, A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew, God gave the Secret, and denied it me? - Well, well, what matters it! believe that too.

Harvey, Harvey, Harvey, I always wanted to be a hero in my life but i knew people won't let me to be a hero they only let you to be a villain, you know a villain, with a knife because these cheap maggots always want you to hurt them, hurt them badly." the joker said angrily.

You’ve fought off a gang of men twice your size, killed an angel warrior, stood up to an archangel, and wielded an angel sword.” Raffe cocks his head. “But you scream like a little girl when you see a maggot?

Creo que lo mejor que tenemos en la vida es la imaginación y tú de eso tienes a montones.

Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen. Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will none the less get something that looks remarkably like it. Set yourself a “stint,” [London wrote 1,000 words nearly every day of his adult life] and see that you do that “stint” each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year. Study the tricks of the writers who have arrived. They have mastered the tools with which you are cutting your fingers. They are doing things, and their work bears the internal evidence of how it is done. Don’t wait for some good Samaritan to tell you, but dig it out for yourself. See that your pores are open and your digestion is good. That is, I am confident, the most important rule of all. Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain. Cheap paper is less perishable than gray matter, and lead pencil markings endure longer than memory. And work. Spell it in capital letters. WORK. WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well. The three great things are: GOOD HEALTH; WORK; and a PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—SINCERITY. Without this, the other three are without avail; with it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants." [Getting Into Print (The Editor magazine, March 1903)]

Foolishness, sir. How can old wounds heal while maggots linger so richly? Or a peace hold for ever built on slaughter and a magician’s trickery? I see how devoutly you wish it, for your old horrors to crumble as dust. Yet they await in the soil as white bones for men to uncover.

Live or die, but don't poison everything... Well, death's been here for a long time -- it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye and the religious objects and how I mourned them when they were made obscene by my dwarf-heart's doodle. The chief ingredient is mutilation. And mud, day after day, mud like a ritual, and the baby on the platter, cooked but still human, cooked also with little maggots, sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother, the damn bitch! Even so, I kept right on going on, a sort of human statement, lugging myself as if I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk. This became perjury of the soul. It became an outright lie and even though I dressed the body it was still naked, still killed. It was caught in the first place at birth, like a fish. But I play it, dressed it up, dressed it up like somebody's doll. Is life something you play? And all the time wanting to get rid of it? And further, everyone yelling at you to shut up. And no wonder! People don't like to be told that you're sick and then be forced to watch you come down with the hammer. Today life opened inside me like an egg and there inside after considerable digging I found the answer. What a bargain! There was the sun, her yolk moving feverishly, tumbling her prize -- and you realize she does this daily! I'd known she was a purifier but I hadn't thought she was solid, hadn't known she was an answer. God! It's a dream, lovers sprouting in the yard like celery stalks and better, a husband straight as a redwood, two daughters, two sea urchings, picking roses off my hackles. If I'm on fire they dance around it and cook marshmallows. And if I'm ice they simply skate on me in little ballet costumes. Here, all along, thinking I was a killer, anointing myself daily with my little poisons. But no. I'm an empress. I wear an apron. My typewriter writes. It didn't break the way it warned. Even crazy, I'm as nice as a chocolate bar. Even with the witches' gymnastics they trust my incalculable city, my corruptible bed. O dearest three, I make a soft reply. The witch comes on and you paint her pink. I come with kisses in my hood and the sun, the smart one, rolling in my arms. So I say Live and turn my shadow three times round to feed our puppies as they come, the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown, despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy! Despite the pails of water that waited, to drown them, to pull them down like stones, they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue and fumbling for the tiny tits. Just last week, eight Dalmatians, 3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood each like a birch tree. I promise to love more if they come, because in spite of cruelty and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens, I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann. The poison just didn't take. So I won't hang around in my hospital shift, repeating The Black Mass and all of it. I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

These questions are punctuated by other questions, as diverse as "Will I ever do time?" and "Did this girl have a trusting heart?" The smell of meat and blood clouds up the condo until I don't notice it anymore. And later my macabre joy sours and I'm weeping for myself, unable to find solace in any of this, crying out, sobbing "I just want to be loved," cursing the earth and everything I have been taught: principles, distinctions, choices, morals, compromises, knowledge, unity, prayer - all of it was wrong, without any final purpose. All it came down to was: die or adapt. I imagine my own vacant face, the disembodied voice coming from its mouth: These are terrible times. Maggots already writhe across the human sausage, the drool pouring from my lips dribbles over them, and still I can't tell if I'm cooking any of this correctly, because I'm crying too hard and I have never really cooked anything before.

And… that’s the last we have in our actual records. […] There’s been more in the last week, I take it?” “More assault and battery,” I said, feeling a touch weary. “Whatever charges come up with the thing at the school. I sort of arranged to have a psychopath kill herself. Um. However you’d charge putting maggots in someone’s eyeballs. In self-defense.

I'm find," her voice squeaked out. Remembering the maggots-and not one hundred percent sure the ghost had taken them with her-Kylie leapt up, yanked the covers off the bed, and tossed them on the floor, she backed away from the pile of bedding. "Yeah. You look just fine," Della said sarcastically. Kylie jumped from foot to foot and brushed off imaginary maggots that she felt crawling on her skin. Della stood there in Mickey Mouse pajamas, staring at her as if she didn't' know whether to laugh or run. Kylie stopped dancing and tried to breathe normally. "If I die, promise me I'll be cremated." Della frowned. "Die?" "Not that I'm planning to die anytime soon." She gave her arm one more swipe. "But still." Della shook her head. "I don't know why you pretend you're okay.

Por un lado están los que piensan linealmente, y por otro lado estás tú, que eres como un golpe de brisa en el parque de la imaginación

I thought you loved all this excitement,' Nyx said. 'I love orange-flavored popsicles. Fried maggots on toast. Sunset in Ashura. This? This, I merely tolerate.

I have maggots in my scrotum.

Through and through the inspired leaves, Ye maggots, make your windings; But, oh! respect his lordship’s taste, And spare his golden bindings.

He coughs. Not a good sound. Too deep, too full of coffins. Why is mankind so fucking cruel? Why?

Colecciono palabras: son golosinas en la boca del sonido.

Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius? HAMLET At supper. KING CLAUDIUS At supper! where? HAMLET Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.

You deserve to die," I whisper, suddenly realizing Iv'e said the words aloud. "Excuse me?" "Nothing." "Not nothing. You just told me that I deserve to be maggot feed." "Not maggot feed, just-" "Dead!" "Forget it" "I don't know why I said that. Just daydreaming, I guess." "Daydreaming about my death?" "Forget it", I repeat. "Are you sure you aren't still mad that I wouldn't let you borrow my vintage fishnet leggings?" "More like I didn't want to borrow them,

Thus is worked out, from maggots up to man, the universal law of the violent destruction of living beings. The whole earth, continually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world,the extinction of evil,the death of death.

Rape wounds deeply, splits open your core with shrapnel. The stench of the injury attracts maggots which hatch into clouds of doubt and self-loathing the dirt you feel inside you nourishes anxiety, depression, and shame poisoning your blood, festering in your brain until you will do anything to stop feeling the darkness rising within anything to stop feeling– untreated pain is a cancer of the soul that can kill you

Free your mind....and your ass will follow.

Let me tell you about gods," said Wiggin. "No matter how smart or strong you are, there's always somebody smarter or stronger, and when you run into somebody who's stronger and smarter than anybody, you think, This is a god. This is perfection. But I can promise you that there's somebody else somewhere else who'll make your god look like a maggot by comparison. And somebody smarter or stronger or better in some way. So let me tell you what I think about gods. I think a real god is not going to be so scared or angry that he tries to keep other people down. For Congress to genetically alter people to make them smarter and more creative, that could have been a godlike, generous gift. But they were scared, so they hobbled the people of Path. They wanted to stay in control. A real god doesn't care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.

I saw a lot of men die there. Most men. Do you know what killed them?”…”Despair,” said Finney. “They believed themselves to be prisoners. I lived with those men, ate the same maggot-infested food, slept in the same beds, did the same back-breaking work. But they died and I lived. Do you know why?” “You were free.” “I was free. Milton was right…the mind is its own place. I was never a prisoner. Not then, not now.

Suck it up! A foolish grumble of advice. Why would I want to suck it up? Why draw it in to let it fester and rot internally until it cankers my insides? I dare offer wiser words―spit it out! Weep, wail, and raise your voice to the heavens as fresh wounds bleed dry! And then cast it all to the wasteland of dead concerns to be consumed by vultures and maggots.

Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity, - the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heavens artillery, - but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggots life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear od death, of God, of the universe, comes over him, - the hope of the Resurrection and the life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God. - The White Silence

She hissed, right there behind my ear, and I had the horrible idea she was spitting maggots into my hair. Why maggots were a problem when I was about to be dead, I didn’t know, but the idea completely grossed me out. “In the womb I heard you die, for no one lives when a banshee cries.” I wasn’t just going to die. I was going to be rhymed to death. That simply wasn’t fair.

He says nothing but I know he is listening. Words are the only medicine I have. ‘You make sense of a world that is senseless. You gave me space boots so that I could walk on other planets. Without you, I’m lost. There’s no left, no right. No tomorrow, only miles of yesterdays. It doesn’t matter what happens now because I’ve found you. That’s why I’m here. Because of you. You who I love. My best friend. My brother.

Listen to me, maggots. Listen for your lives, for that's what it could mean some day. You never see all that you see. One of the things they send you to me for is to show you what you don't see in what you see--what you don't see when you're scared, or fighting or running or fucking. No man sees al that he sees, but before you're gunslinger--those of you who don't go west, that is,--you'll see more in one single glance than some men see in a lifetime. And some of what you don't see in that glance you'll see afterwards, in the eye of your memory--if you live long enough to remember, that is. Because the difference between seeing and not seeing can be the difference between the living and dying.

A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing

Hey,” I said before he could say anything else that would make the mood even weirder or break it entirely. “You wanna grab some coffee or something someday? I mean, some time when I’m not crawling with maggots,” I added with a laugh that sounded nervous to my own ears and probably sounded desperate and pathetic to his. I totally braced myself for him to hem and haw and say that he couldn’t or had a girlfriend or something. I was shocked instead when he gave me a nod. “That sounds nice. And I’m cool with the no maggots thing too.

Tú me diste botas espaciales para que pudiera caminar por otros planetas. Sin ti me siento perdido. No sé si tirar a la derecha o la izquierda. No veo el mañana, sólo kilómetros y kilómetros de ayeres. Ahora que te he encontrado, ya no me importa lo que ocurra. Por eso he venido hasta aquí. Por ti. Porque te quiero.

While he was cautiously preambling, I tried to form a picture of all he did each day to earn his calories, all his grimaces and promises, pretty much like my own . . . And then to amuse myself, I imagined him all naked at his altar . . . It's a good habit to get into: when somebody comes to see you, quick reduce him to nakedness, and you'll see through him in a flash, regardless of who it is, you will instantly discern the underlying reality, namely an enormous, hungry maggot. It's good sleight-of-the-imagination. His lousy prestige vanishes, evaporates. Once you've got him naked you'll be dealing with nothing more than a bragging pretentious beggar, talking drivel of one kind or another. It's a test that nothing can withstand. In a moment you'll know where you are at. There wont be anything left but ideas, and there's nothing frightening about ideas. With ideas nothing is lost, everything can be straightened out. Whereas it's sometimes hard to stand up to the prestige of a man with his clothes on. Nasty smells and mysteries cling to his clothes.

i believe in living. i believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people. i believe in sunshine. In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs; And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts. And sprouts grow into trees. i believe in the magic of the hands. And in the wisdom of the eyes. i believe in rain and tears. And in the blood of infinity. i believe in life. And i have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path i have seen the destruction of the daylight and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted i have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson. i have walked on cut grass. i have eaten crow and blunder bread and breathed the stench of indifference i have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if i know anything at all, it's that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down. i believe in living i believe in birth. i believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port.

They are THE OPPORTUNISTS, those souls who in life were neither for good nor evil but only for themselves. Mixed with them are those outcasts who took no sides in the Rebellion of the Angels. They are neither in Hell nor out of it. Eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air; and as they run they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets, who sting them and produce a constant flow of blood and putrid matter which trickles down the bodies of the sinners and is feasted upon by loathsome worms and maggots who coat the ground.

I waved away a fly that buzzed in my ear, my hand caked with blood both my own and foreign. I’d always thought death would be some sort of peaceful homecoming—a sweet, sad lullaby to usher me into whatever waited afterward. I crunched down with an armored boot on the flagpole of a Loyalist standard-bearer, smearing red mud across the tusked boar embroidered on its emerald flag. I now wondered if the lullaby of death was not a lovely song, but the droning of flies. If flies and maggots were all Death’s handmaidens.

I wanted to feel like I could open my mouth and fill it with Pepper's flesh, close my teeth on her skin and tear it away, making blood pump like a fountain over everything - rug, clothes, hair, face - both Violet and I stopped in midair. Pepper's eyes had flooded with tears. It was too easy, she was enjoying this. Her body softened like a sponge waiting to soak up my punches. Her lips smiled the same way Valerie's did. It was as if I had discovered maggots in her flesh. I recoiled from her where she lay on the bed like a piece of rotting meat.

Maggots in corpses. He'd seen. Whitely churning, in the mouths of dead soldiers, where their noses had been, their ears and blasted-away jaws. Most of the soldiers had been men as young as he himself had been. Italians fallen after the Austrian offensive of 1918. You do not forget such sights. You do not un-see such sights. He himself had been wounded, but he had not died. The distinction was profound. Between what lived and what died the distinction was profound. Yet it remained mysterious, elusive. You did not wish to speak of it. Especially you did not wish to pray about it, to beg God to spare you. For it disgusted him to think of God. It disgusted him to think of prayers to such a god. Fumbling his big, bare toe against the trigger of the shotgun he was damned if he would think, in his last quivering moment of his life, of God.

Between the sleeping and the waking, it is there. Between the rising and the resting, it is there. It is always there. It gnaws on my heart. It chews on my soul. I turn aside and see it. I stop my ears and hear it. I cover myself and feel it. There are no human words for what I mean. It is the language of the bare bough and the cold stone, pronounced in the fell wind's sullen whisper and the metronomic drip-drip of the rain. It is the song the falling snow sings and the discordant clamour of sunlight ripped apart by the canopy and miserly filtered down. It is what the unseeing eye sees. It is what the deaf ear heres. It is the romantic ballad of death's embrace; the solemn hymn of offal dripping from bloody teeth; the lamentation of the bloated corpse rotting in the sun; the graceful ballet of maggots twisting in the ruins of God's temple. Here in this gray land, we have no name. We are the carcasses reflected in the yellow eye. Our bones are bleached within our skin; our empty sockets regard the crow. Here in this shadow country, our tiny voices scratch like a fly's wing against unmoving air. Ours is the language of imbeciles, the gibberish of idiots. The root and the vine have more to say than us.

The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn’t last from one sticky shovelful to the next. Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed up my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into. ‘You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.’ In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket in the mud—and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shoved skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels. I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, ‘I can’t dig in here! There’s a dead Nip here!’ The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, ‘You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.

Her father would return from China. He’d come back with all his soldiers. He’d pick her up in his strong arms and say that he’d never meant to leave, that he hadn’t meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who’d ever trafficked with the peacekeepers. A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better.

What had spoken to her in that scoured-out cavity of the granite? What dwelt in the first of the caves? Something very old and very small. Before time, it was before space also. Something snub-nosed, incapable of generosity -- the undying worm itself. Since hearing its voice, she had not entertained one large thought, she was actually envious of Adela. All this fuss over a frightened girl! Nothing had happened, 'and if it had,' she found herself thinking with the cynicism of a withered priestess, 'if it had there are worse evils than love.' The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church -- Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but -- Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots; her constant thought was: 'Less attention should be paid to my future daughter-in-law and more to me, there is no sorrow like my sorrow,' although when the attention was paid she rejected it irritably.

What does Africa — what does the West stand for? Is not our own interior white on the chart? black though it may prove, like the coast, when discovered. Is it the source of the Nile, or the Niger, or the Mississippi, or a Northwest Passage around this continent, that we would find? Are these the problems which most concern mankind? Is Franklin the only man who is lost, that his wife should be so earnest to find him? Does Mr. Grinnell know where he himself is? Be rather the Mungo Park,the Lewis and Clark and Frobisher,of your own streams and oceans; explore your own higher latitudes — with shiploads of preserved meats to support you, if they be necessary; and pile the empty cans sky-high for a sign. Were preserved meats invented to preserve meat merely? Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state, a hummock left by the ice. Yet some can be patriotic who have no self-respect, and sacrifice the greater to the less. They love the soil which makes their graves, but have no sympathy with the spirit which may still animate their clay. Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.What was the meaning of that South-Sea Exploring Expedition,with all its parade and expense, but an indirect recognition of the fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which every man is an isthmus or an inlet, yet unexplored by him, but that it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone.

The Place Faidherbe had the characteristic atmosphere, the overdone décor, the floral and verbal excess, of a subprefecture in southern France gone mad. The ten cars left the Place Faidherbe only to come back five minutes later, having once more completed the same circuit with their cargo of anemic Europeans, dressed in unbleached linen, fragile creatures as wobbly as melting sherbet. For weeks and years these colonials passed the same forms and faces until they were so sick of hating them that they didn’t even look at one another. The officers now and then would take their families out for a walk, paying close attention to military salutes and civilian greetings, the wives swaddled in their special sanitary napkins, the children, unbearably plump European maggots, wilted by the heat and constant diarrhea. To command, you need more than a kepi; you also need troops. In the climate of Fort-Gono the European cadres melted faster than butter. A battalion was like a lump of sugar in your coffee; the longer you looked the less you saw. Most of the white conscripts were permanently in the hospital, sleeping off their malaria, riddled with parasites made to order fo every nook and cranny of the body, whole squads stretched out flat between cigarettes and flies, masturbating under moldy sheets, spinning endless yarns between fits of painstakingly provoked and coddled fever.

Patriotism,” said Lymond, “like honesty is a luxury with a very high face value which is quickly pricing itself out of the spiritual market altogether. [...] It is an emotion as well, and of course the emotion comes first. A child’s home and the ways of its life are sacrosanct, perfect, inviolate to the child. Add age; add security; add experience. In time we all admit our relatives and our neighbours, our fellow townsmen and even, perhaps, at last our fellow nationals to the threshold of tolerance. But the man living one inch beyond the boundary is an inveterate foe. [...] Patriotism is a fine hothouse for maggots. It breeds intolerance; it forces a spindle-legged, spurious riot of colour.… A man of only moderate powers enjoys the special sanction of purpose, the sense of ceremony; the echo of mysterious, lost and royal things; a trace of the broad, plain childish virtues of myth and legend and ballad. He wants advancement—what simpler way is there? He’s tired of the little seasons and looks for movement and change and an edge of peril and excitement; he enjoys the flowering of small talents lost in the dry courses of daily life. For all these reasons, men at least once in their lives move the finger which will take them to battle for their country.… “Patriotism,” said Lymond again. “It’s an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Patriotism; loyalty; a true conviction that of all the troubled and striving world, the soil of one’s fathers is noblest and best. A celestial competition for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature and bigoted intolerance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power— [...] These are not patriots but martyrs, dying in cheerful self-interest as the Christians died in the pleasant conviction of grace, leaving their example by chance to brood beneath the water and rise, miraculously, to refresh the centuries. The cry is raised: Our land is glorious under the sun. I have a need to believe it, they say. It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave. [...] “And who shall say they are wrong?” said Lymond. “There are those who will always cleave to the living country, and who with their uprooted imaginations might well make of it an instrument for good. Is it quite beyond us in this land? Is there no one will take up this priceless thing and say, Here is a nation, with such a soul; with such talents; with these failings and this native worth? In what fashion can this one people be brought to live in full vigour and serenity, and who, in their compassion and wisdom, will take it and lead it into the path?

But you know, the longer you listen to this abortion debate, the more you hear this phrase “sanctity of life”. You’ve heard that. Sanctity of life. You believe in it? Personally, I think it’s a bunch of shit. Well, I mean, life is sacred? Who said so? God? Hey, if you read history, you realize that God is one of the leading causes of death. Has been for thousands of years. Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Christians all taking turns killing each other ‘cause God told them it was a good idea. The sword of God, the blood of the land, vengeance is mine. Millions of dead motherfuckers. Millions of dead motherfuckers all because they gave the wrong answer to the God question. “You believe in God?” “No.” Boom. Dead. “You believe in God?” “Yes.” “You believe in my God? “No.” Boom. Dead. “My God has a bigger dick than your God!” Thousands of years. Thousands of years, and all the best wars, too. The bloodiest, most brutal wars fought, all based on religious hatred. Which is fine with me. Hey, any time a bunch of holy people want to kill each other I’m a happy guy. But don’t be giving me all this shit about the sanctity of life. I mean, even if there were such a thing, I don’t think it’s something you can blame on God. No, you know where the sanctity of life came from? We made it up. You know why? ‘Cause we’re alive. Self-interest. Living people have a strong interest in promoting the idea that somehow life is sacred. You don’t see Abbott and Costello running around, talking about this shit, do you? We’re not hearing a whole lot from Mussolini on the subject. What’s the latest from JFK? Not a goddamn thing. ‘Cause JFK, Mussolini and Abbott and Costello are fucking dead. They’re fucking dead. And dead people give less than a shit about the sanctity of life. Only living people care about it so the whole thing grows out of a completely biased point of view. It’s a self serving, man-made bullshit story. It’s one of these things we tell ourselves so we’ll feel noble. Life is sacred. Makes you feel noble. Well let me ask you this: if everything that ever lived is dead, and everything alive is gonna die, where does the sacred part come in? I’m having trouble with that. ‘Cuz, I mean, even with all this stuff we preach about the sanctity of life, we don’t practice it. We don’t practice it. Look at what we’d kill: Mosquitoes and flies. ‘Cause they’re pests. Lions and tigers. ‘Cause it’s fun! Chickens and pigs. ‘Cause we’re hungry. Pheasants and quails. ‘Cause it’s fun. And we’re hungry. And people. We kill people… ‘Cause they’re pests. And it’s fun! And you might have noticed something else. The sanctity of life doesn’t seem to apply to cancer cells, does it? You rarely see a bumper sticker that says “Save the tumors.”. Or “I brake for advanced melanoma.”. No, viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, E. Coli bacteria, the crabs. Nothing sacred about those things. So at best the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up! Made it up!