“
Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf
At various times, I have asked myself what reasons
moved me to study, while my night came down,
without particular hope of satisfaction,
the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons.
Used up by the years, my memory
loses its grip on words that I have vainly
repeated and repeated. My life in the same way
weaves and unweaves its weary history.
Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul
has some secret, sufficient way of knowing
that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing
circle can take in all, can accomplish all.
Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,
the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges
“
Operating by trial and error mostly, we've evolved a tacitly agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have more fun than Christians. Let's scrape Horace's Dulche et utile off the plate before we even start the banquet. We're writing for fun, not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the jokes are.
All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.)
”
”
David Eddings (The Rivan Codex: Ancient Texts of the Belgariad and the Malloreon)
“
The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one.
”
”
Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There)
“
Alt-right free-speech proponents have made me their cause célèbre. I and my pretty, Anglo-Saxon face have become the perfect victim of the left-wing fascist cancel-culture mob.
”
”
R.F. Kuang (Yellowface)
“
Culturally, though not theologically, I’m a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can’t swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don’t speak very strictly. To those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt feelings and now excuse myself from their business.
“Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed—much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts. I respond with gratitude to anyone who has ever voyaged to the center of that heart, and who has then returned to the world with a report for the rest of us that God is an experience of supreme love. In every religious tradition on earth, there have always been mystical saints and transcendents who report exactly this experience. Unfortunately many of them have ended up arrested and killed. Still, I think very highly of them.
“In the end, what I have come to believe about God is simple. It’s like this—I used to have this really great dog. She came from the pound. She was a mixture of about ten different breeds, but seemed to have inherited the finest features of them all. She was brown. When people asked me, “What kind of dog is that?” I would always give the same answer: “She’s a brown dog.” Similarly, when the question is raised, “What kind of God do you believe in?” my answer is easy: “I believe in a magnificent God
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
What are you doing?” she finally asked.
“Just thinking about my day. What are you doing?”
“Trying to find Jace. Have you seen her?”
“Trying to find her? Why? Is it because she’s Albanian?”
“I’m trying to . . . wait . . . what?”
“You hate her because she’s Albanian?”
“I don’t hate—”
“Is it just Albanians you hate, or is it all East Europeans?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Wow. I had no idea you were like this.”
Another sister-Crow showed up. “Like what?”
“Rachel hates Eastern Europeans.”
“I do not!”
“So you hate all Europeans? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No!”
“My God, Rachel.” The other sister-Crow shook her head, disgust on her face as she walked off. “I’m really disappointed in you.”
“Wait . . .” Rachel glared down at Annalisa. “Jesus Christ.”
“So you hate the Christian God, too?”
“Oh my God! Shut up!”
Rachel stormed off, calling after the sister-Crow who’d been so disgusted with her, and Annalisa opened the closet door. “Anglo guilt . . . it’s so my favorite thing.
”
”
Shelly Laurenston (The Undoing (Call of Crows, #2))
“
Daniel walked as tall and strong as Ian or Mac, even Hart. "They grow up so fast," Angelo said when he reacheed Cam.
Cameron glanced at him, thinking the man joking, but Angelo's dark eyes were serious.
"Chilhood is gone in the wink of an eye, and then they have to be men. You Anglos are strange, sending your sons out into the world as soon as they get tall enough. My family has been together forever."
"I notice you don't live with them, Angelo, so don't become sentimental. Besides my family is together. Just a bit spread out."
"Rich Anglos need too much space."
"That is true, but it keeps us from killing each other.
”
”
Jennifer Ashley (The Many Sins of Lord Cameron (MacKenzies & McBrides, #3))
“
The word worry is derived from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning “to strangle or choke.” The stranglehold of worry keeps a woman from enjoying a life of contentment and peace.
”
”
Linda Dillow (Calm My Anxious Heart: A Woman's Guide to Finding Contentment (TH1NK Reference Collection))
“
An experience opens many windows,” an Anglo-Saxon writer once said.
”
”
Lion Feuchtwanger (The Devil in France: My Encounter with Him in the Summer of 1940)
“
I have had to confront the fact that
much of what I value about being Chicana, about my family, has been
subverted by anglo culture and my own cooperation with it.
”
”
Cherríe L. Moraga
“
So you make a deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.'…
"'No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to CAUSE them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance…. Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with US…. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.'…
"'Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?'
"'Exactly like that. "Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one."'…
"It's a good idea,' I said. 'Especially since we're still here sleeping on God's couch. We're permanent houseguests.'
"'Yep, we are. Better remember how to put everything back how we found it.'
It was a new angle on religion, for me. I felt a little embarrassed for my blunt interrogation. And the more I thought about it, even more embarrassed for my bluntly utilitarian culture. 'The way they tell it to us Anglos, God put the earth here for us to use, westward-ho. Like a special little playground.'
"Loyd said, 'Well, that explains a lot.'…
"'But where do you go when you've pissed in every corner of your playground?'...
"To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams)
“
We don't need to stop at green or natural burial. "Burial" comes from the anglo-saxon word birgan, "to conceal." Not everyone wants to be concealed under the earth. I don't want to be concealed. Ever since my dark night of the soul in the redwood forest, I've believed the animals I've consumed my whole life should someday have their turn with me. The ancient Ethiopians would place their dead in the lake where they fished, so the fish would have the opportunity to receive back the nutrients. The earth is expertly designed to take back what it has created. Bodies left for carrion in enclosed, regulated spaces could be the answer to the environmental problems of burial and cremation. There is no limit to where our engagement with death can take us.
”
”
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory)
“
Anglo-Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as WASP, and American Black is always on the bottom, and what’s in the middle depends on time and place. (Or as that marvelous rhyme goes: if you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back!) Americans assume that everyone will get their tribalism. But it takes a while to figure it all out. So in undergrad, we had a visiting speaker and a classmate whispers to another, “Oh my God, he looks so Jewish,” with a shudder, an actual shudder. Like Jewish was a bad thing. I didn’t get it. As far as I could see, the man was white, not much different from the classmate herself. Jewish to me was something vague, something biblical. But I learned quickly. You see, in America’s ladder of races, Jewish is white but also some rungs below white. A bit confusing, because I knew this straw-haired, freckled girl who said she was Jewish. How can Americans tell who is Jewish? How did the classmate know the guy was Jewish? I read somewhere how American colleges used to ask applicants for their mother’s surnames, to make sure they weren’t Jewish because they wouldn’t admit Jewish people. So maybe that’s how to tell? From people’s names? The longer you are here, the more you start to get it.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
Ian Fleming
The CBC Interview, 1953
He doesn’t use Anglo-Saxon four-letter words, “I don’t like seeing them on the page.”
When asked why his novels are so popular in light of the dirtiness of the trade (of espionage), Fleming said, “The books have pace and plenty of action. And espionage is not regarded by the majority of the public as a dirty trade. They regard it as a rather sort of ah, ah very romantic affair… Spying has always been regarded as (a) very romantic one-man job, so-to-speak. A one man against a whole police force or an army.”
Regarding heroes of his time, Fleming said, “I think that although they may have feet of clay, ah, we probably all have, and all human beings have, there’s no point in dwelling entirely on the feet. There are many other parts of the animal to be examined. And I think people like to read about heroes.”
BBC Interview on Desert Island Discs
Question: Had the character of James Bond been growing in your mind for a long time?
Ian Fleming’s response: “No, I can’t say I had, really. He sort of, ah, developed when I was just on the edge of getting married, after having been a bachelor for so long, and I really wanted to take my mind off the agony. And so I decided to sit down and write a book.”
Question: How much long do you think you can keep Bond going?
Ian Fleming’s response: “Well, I don’t know. It depends on how much I, how much more I can go on following his adventures.”
Question: You don’t feel he’s keeping you from more serious writing?
Ian Fleming’s response: “No. I’m not in the Shakespeare stakes. I’ve got no ambitions.
”
”
Ian Fleming
“
The Anglo-Saxon part of my persona kicked in. “Thank you,” I said, like an automated idiot. “What was so bad about your week?” My sub text was more along the lines of: ‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Let’s go away and celebrate. A few orgies would be good.’ Jack
”
”
Penelope Haines (Death on D'Urville: A Claire Hardcastle Mystery)
“
But then my poor sons would have to be educated alongside Anglo-Indians. They’d have a chee-chee accent like their mother and be called ‘fifteen annas’ behind their backs, even if they were not Anglo-Indians.” There were sixteen annas to a rupee, and to be a Celeste was to be one short.
”
”
Abraham Verghese (The Covenant of Water)
“
I was extremely shy of approaching my hero but he, as I found out, was sorely in need of company. By then almost completely blind, he was claustrated and even a little confused and this may help explain the rather shocking attitude that he took to the blunt trauma that was being inflicted in the streets and squares around him. 'This was my country and it might be yet,' he intoned to me when the topic first came up, as it had to: 'But something came between it and the sun.' This couplet he claimed (I have never been able to locate it) was from Edmund Blunden, whose gnarled hand I had been so excited to shake all those years ago, but it was not the Videla junta that Borges meant by the allusion. It was the pre-existing rule of Juan Perón, which he felt had depraved and corrupted Argentine society. I didn't disagree with this at all—and Perón had victimized Borges's mother and sister as well as having Borges himself fired from his job at the National Library—but it was nonetheless sad to hear the old man saying that he heartily preferred the new uniformed regime, as being one of 'gentlemen' as opposed to 'pimps.' This was a touch like listening to Evelyn Waugh at his most liverish and bufferish. (It was also partly redeemed by a piece of learned philology or etymology concerning the Buenos Aires dockside slang for pimp: canfinflero. 'A canfinfla, you see,' said Borges with perfect composure, 'is a pussy or more exactly a cunt. So a canfinflero is a trafficker in cunt: in Anglo-Saxon we might say a 'cunter."' Had not the very tango itself been evolved in a brothel in 1880? Borges could talk indefinitely about this sort of thing, perhaps in revenge for having had an oversolicitous mother who tyrannized him all his life.)
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
If you like Anglo-Saxon, I belched. If you fancy Latin, I eructed. No matter which, I had known that Wolfe and Inspector Cramer would have to put up with it that evening, because that is always a part of my reaction to sauerkraut. I don’t glory in it or go for a record, but neither do I fight it back. I want to be liked just for myself.
”
”
Rex Stout (Murder by the Book (Nero Wolfe, #19))
“
In the United States and other Anglo-Saxon cultures, people are trained (mostly subconsciously) to communicate as literally and explicitly as possible. Good communication is all about clarity and explicitness, and accountability for accurate transmission of the message is placed firmly on the communicator: “If you don’t understand, it’s my fault.
”
”
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
“
And my good lord, for your honors better satisfaction, that it was not so barbarouslie nor butcherlie don as you thinck it to be, it should seeme your honor hath bene wrongfullie enformed, in sayinge he was cutt in manye peeces, after his deathe—for if he had bene cutt in many peces, he could not a lived till the next morninge, which themselves reported he did—which shewes he was not cutt in verie many peeces!
”
”
George MacDonald Fraser (The Steel Bonnets: The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers)
“
Write what you know," my ass. Now, I'm not suggesting that you write about my ass. But although you do not, in fact, know my ass, I give you permission to write about it. And if you think you need my permission to write about my ass ("What right do I have, as a male, twenty-something, single, childfree, immigrant Indonesian Buddhist, to pretend to understand the ass of an Anglo American middle-aged married female Freethinker?") or about anything, then you lack the courage, curiosity and imagination to write good fiction, so please find something else to do.
”
”
Robyn Parnell
“
Gandhi was one such bad parent who rewarded the ill-behaved and punished the well-behaved. He was harsh on the polemical but non-violent Swami Shraddhananda, and kind to the Swami’s murderer, about whom he stated in public: ‘Abdul Rashid is my brother.’ In settling his succession, he spurned his loyal and obedient friend Sardar Patel, and favoured the conceited and un-Gandhian Anglo-secularist Jawaharlal Nehru. His dealings with Suhrawardy were also read by the Muslim agitators as a sign of deference to Muslim aggression, an encouragement to continue on the chosen path of provocation and violence.
”
”
Koenraad Elst (Why I Killed the Mahatma: Understanding Godse's Defence)
“
I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this state, and I’m gonna make it the basis of politics in this country.” Later, at his inaugural, he proclaimed, “I have stood where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom … Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us … In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!
”
”
Bill O'Reilly (Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot)
“
When I was growing up, we took Texas history twice—if I remember correctly, in the fourth and the seventh grades. I cannot say with certainty that slavery was never mentioned. Of course, I didn’t need school to tell me that Blacks had been enslaved in Texas. I heard references to slavery from my parents and grandparents. A common retort when another kid—often a sibling—insisted you do something for them you didn’t want to do was “Slavery time is over.” And we celebrated Juneteenth, which marked the end of the institution. But if slavery was mentioned in the early days of my education, it didn’t figure prominently enough in our lessons to give us a clear and complete picture of the role the institution played in the state’s early development, its days as a Republic, its entry into the Union, and its role in the Civil War and its aftermath. Instead, as with the claim “The American Civil War was not about slavery. It was about states’ rights,” the move when talking about Texas’s rebellion against Mexico was to take similar refuge in concerns about overreaching federal authorities. Anglo-Texans chafed at the centralizing tendencies of the Mexican government and longed to be free. As one could ask about the states’ rights argument—states’ rights to do what?—I don’t recall my teachers giving a complete explanation for why Anglo-Texans felt so threatened by the Mexican government.
”
”
Annette Gordon-Reed (On Juneteenth)
“
But that's crazy, " George said. "How can I be the Average American Man? I'm only five foot eight and my name is Blaxter spelled with an "l", and I'm of Armenian and Latvian ancestry and I was born in Ship's Bottom, New Jersey. What's that average of, for Chrissakes? They better recheck their results. What they're looking for is some Iowa farmboy with blond hair and a Mercury and 2.4 children."
"That's the old, outdated stereotype," the reporter said. "America today is composed of racial and ethnic minorities whose sheer ubiquity precludes the possibility of choosing an Anglo-Saxon model. The average man of today has to be unique to be average, if you see what I mean."
The Shaggy Average American Man Story
”
”
Robert Sheckley
“
But there were endless rewards. There was a pervasive sense of adventure, that a surprise was just waiting to be discovered in the next encounter or at the end of the next street. There was the food, of course-even the banal cafe seemed to serve something exquisite-and the artistry with which it was all done, right down to the tiny scenarios in bread and chocolate that were unveiled fortnightly in our boulanger's window. I even came to appreciate-in memory, to bask in-the flirtatious comments made by men in the street, bending every rule in my postfeminist, Anglo-American playbook as I did so, seeing it all as just more joyous street theater in a city that was alive with it, especially in warm weather when everyone was out. I knew that I would remember all of it always, that Paris would be there forever in sharply delineated images,a pack of mental cards to be shuffled through, rearranged, anytime I liked.
”
”
Penelope Rowlands
“
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay ?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat - jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:
Bloomin' idol made o' mud
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay...
When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was droppin' slow,
She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing "Kulla-lo-lo!
With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an' the hathis pilin' teak.
Elephints a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence 'ung that 'eavy you was 'arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay...
But that's all shove be'ind me - long ago an' fur away
An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay;
An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
"If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else."
No! you won't 'eed nothin' else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay...
I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted English drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and -
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay...
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
O the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay !
”
”
Rudyard Kipling (Mandalay)
“
The German Volk will believe me when I say that I would have chosen peace over war. Because for me, peace meant a multitude of delightful assignments. What I was able to do for the German Volk in the few years from 1933 to 1939, thanks to Providence and the support of numerous excellent assistants, in terms of culture, education, as well as economic recovery, and, above all, in the social organization of our lives, this can surely one day be compared with what my enemies have done and achieved in the same period.
In the long years of struggle for power, I often regretted that the realization of my plans was spoiled by incidents that were not only relatively unimportant, but also, above all, completely insignificant. I regret this war not only because of the sacrifices that it demands of my German Volk and of other people, but also because of the time it takes away from those who intend to carry out a great social and civilizing work and who want to complete it. After all, what Mr. Roosevelt is capable of achieving, he has proved. What Mr. Churchill has achieved, nobody knows. I can only feel profound regret at what this war will prevent me and the entire National Socialist movement from doing for many years. It is a shame that a person cannot do anything about true bunglers and lazy fellows stealing the valuable time that he wanted to dedicate to cultural, social, and economic projects for his Volk.
The same applies to Fascist Italy. There, too, one man has perpetuated his name for all time through a civilizing and national revolution of worldwide dimensions. In the same way it cannot be compared to the democratic-political bungling of the idlers and dividend profiteers, who, in the Anglo-American countries, for instance, spend the wealth accumulated by their fathers or acquire new wealth through shady deals. It is precisely because this young Europe is involved in the resolution of truly great questions that it will not allow the representatives of a group of powers who tactfully call themselves the “have” states to rob them of everything that makes life worth living, namely, the value of one’s own people, their freedom, and their social and general human existence. Therefore, we understand that Japan, weary of the everlasting blackmail and impudent threats, has chosen to defend itself against the most infamous warmongers of all time. Now a mighty front of nation-states, reaching from the Channel to East Asia, has taken up the struggle against the international Jewish-capitalist and Bolshevik conspiracy.
New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades January 1, 1942
”
”
Adolf Hitler (Collection of Speeches: 1922-1945)
“
Speech to the Reichstag Berlin, December 11
Deputies! Men of the German Reichstag! Ever since the rejection of my last peace proposal in July 1940, we have been aware that this war has to be fought to the bitter end. That the Anglo-American, Jewish-capitalist world formed a front with Bolshevism does not come as a surprise to us National Socialists. At home, we found them in the same union, and we succeeded in our struggle at home by defeating our enemies after a sixteen-year-long struggle for power.
When I decided twenty-three years ago to enter politics in order to reverse the decline of the nation, I was a nameless, unknown soldier. Many of you know how difficult the first years of this struggle were. The way from a small movement of seven men to the taking over of responsible government on January 30, 1933, was so miraculous that Providence itself must have made it possible through its blessings.
Today, I head the strongest army in the world, the mightiest air force, and a proud navy. Behind me, I am conscious of the sworn community of the party, which made me great and which became great through me.
The enemies that I confront have been known to be our enemies for over twenty years. Alas, the road that lies ahead of me cannot be compared to the one lying behind me. The German Volk realizes the decisiveness of the hour for its existence. Under the most difficult circumstances, millions of soldiers are obediently and loyally doing their duty.
The American President and his plutocratic clique have called us a people of have nots. That is right! And these have-nots want to live. In any event, they will not allow the owners to rob them of the little that they have to live on. My party comrades, you know my relentless resolve to conclude a struggle victoriously once it has begun. You know my intention not to shy away from anything in such a fight and to break all the resistance that has to be broken.
In my speech on September 1, 1939, I assured you that, in this struggle, neither the force of arms nor time will defeat Germany. I want to assure my enemies that neither will the force of arms nor time defeat us, but neither inner doubts make us falter in the fulfillment of our duty. When we consider the sacrifices of our soldiers, how they risk their lives, then the sacrifices of the homeland become completely insignificant and unimportant. When we think of the numbers of those who, generations before us, fell for the existence and greatness of the German Volk, then we become all the more aware of the greatness of the duty imposed on us.
Whoever seeks to forsake this duty has no right to expect treatment as a Volksgenosse in our midst.
Therefore, no one can expect to live who thinks that he can depreciate the front’s sacrifices at home. Irrespective of the form of disguise for this attempt to disrupt this German front, to undermine this Volk’s willingness to resist, to weaken the authority of this regime, to sabotage the efforts of the homeland, the offender will fall! There will be only one difference: the soldier honorably makes this sacrifice at the front, while the other, who wishes to depreciate this honorable sacrifice, dies in shame.
Our enemies should not deceive themselves. In the two thousand years of the history known to us, our German Volk has never been more unified and united than it is today. The Lord of the Worlds has done so many great things for us in the last years that we bow in gratitude before Providence, which has permitted us to be members of such a great Volk. We thank Him that, in view of past and future generations of the German Volk, we were also allowed to enter our names honorably in the undying book of German history.
”
”
Adolf Hitler
“
But, my friend, I am not an Anglo-Saxon. Why should I play the hypocrite?
”
”
Agatha Christie (While the Light Lasts (Hercule Poirot, #47))
“
I worked for a solid year, and at the end of it I had a draft of my thesis: “The Family, Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought, 1813–1890.
”
”
Tara Westover (Educated)
“
I don't have a racist bone in my body," Jax muttered. "I'm Hispanic, and I have a Native American, Korean, Anglo-Saxon, and Texan lieutenants," She coughed. "Texan isn't a race." "It should be," Jax returned.
”
”
Rebecca Zanetti (Winter Igniting (Scorpius Syndrome #5))
“
In Living in Spanglish I posit the coming of existence of this forwars-looking race that obliterates all races, stripping away Vasaconelos's petty resentment of Anglo culture and patronizing Euro-centrist, and acknowledge a cultural-economic inevitability that is hemispheric in nature.
Note: Jose Vasaconelos wrote 1925 essay "La Raza cosmica" [The Cosmic Race] asserting, "Por mi raza hablara mi espiritu [The Spirit will speak through my race.
”
”
Ed Morales (Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America)
“
(The Big Horn Association was formed in Cheyenne, and its members believed in Manifest Destiny: “The rich and beautiful valleys of Wyoming are destined for the occupancy and sustenance of the Anglo-Saxon race. The wealth that for untold ages has lain hidden beneath the snow-capped summits of our mountains has been placed there by Providence to reward the brave spirits whose lot it is to compose the advance-guard of civilization. The Indians must stand aside or be overwhelmed by the ever advancing and ever increasing tide of emigration. The destiny of the aborigines is written in characters not to be mistaken. The same inscrutable Arbiter that decreed the downfall of Rome has pronounced the doom of extinction upon the red men of America.”)
”
”
Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West)
“
This spiritualized “matter” evolving toward perfection in infinity has its greatest representation on Earth among “the American or Anglo-Saxon race,” Lyon and Sherman tell us, cheerfully unaware of how terribly, terribly Politically Incorrect that would sound in our own time. But most white Americans thought that way in their time. We can only feel deep gratitude that we have transcended all such ignorance and now have a philosophy proven 100% Politically Correct, and the future will therefore never laugh or sneer at our opinions.
”
”
Robert Anton Wilson (Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death)
“
while the chilliest Anglo-Saxon repression of sex pretends it simply doesn't exist, Latin repression says it's a filthy fact of life, use it for what it's worth . . . shake it in his face, wear it as a decoy.
”
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Aurora Levins Morales (This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color)
“
I wandered over to the adobe birthplace of Ignacio Seguin Zaragoza, whose father was posted at the garrison in the early 1800s. Zaragoza went on to become a national hero in Mexico, leading a reformist revolt against Santa Anna and defeat- ing an invading French force on May 5, 1862, the date celebrated as Cinco de Mayo.
While exploring the birthplace, I met Alberto Perez, a history and so- cial studies teacher in the Dallas area who was visiting with his family. When I confessed my ignorance of Zaragoza, he smiled and said, "You're not alone. A lot of Texans don't know him, either, or even that Mexico had its own fight for independence."
The son of Mexican immigrants, Perez had taught at a predominantly Hispanic school in Dallas named for Zaragoza. Even there, he'd found it hard to bring nuance to students' understanding of Mexico and Texas in the nineteenth century.
"The word 'revolution' slants it from the start," he said. "It makes kids think of the American Revolution and throwing off oppression."
Perez tried to balance this with a broader, Mexican perspective. Anglos had been invited to settle Texas and were granted rights, citizenship, and considerable latitude in their adherence to distant authority. Mexico's aboli- tion of slavery, for instance, had little force on its northeastern frontier, where Southerners needed only to produce a "contract" that technically la- beled their human chattel as indentured servants.
"Then the Anglos basically decided, 'We don't like your rules,"" Perez said. "This is our country now.
”
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Tony Horwitz (Spying on the South: Travels with Frederick Law Olmsted in a Fractured Land)
“
In the United States and other Anglo-Saxon cultures, people are trained (mostly subconsciously) to communicate as literally and explicitly as possible. Good communication is all about clarity and explicitness, and accountability for accurate transmission of the message is placed firmly on the communicator: “If you don’t understand, it’s my fault.” By contrast, in many Asian cultures, including India, China, Japan, and Indonesia, messages are often conveyed implicitly, requiring the listener to read between the lines. Good communication is subtle, layered, and may depend on copious subtext, with responsibility for transmission of the message shared between the one sending the message and the one receiving it. The same applies to many African cultures, including those found in Kenya and Zimbabwe, and to a lesser degree Latin American cultures (such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina) and Latin European cultures (such as Spain, Italy, Portugal) including France.
”
”
Erin Meyer (The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business)
“
There is a marked difference between brilliance and intellectuality.
Some of us use both words interchangeably to describe people who can use big words.
A number of people are grandiloquent but not wise.
A person can be verbose but not esoteric.
Just as literacy does not equate to intelligence.
There are two types of learnt people in the world.
Some persons are scholars and others are alchemist.
Let me further my thesis on intellectuals.
Now you have a scholar and an alchemist.
The scholar passes exams, memorizes words and phrases, the alchemist has the intellectual prowess to start a whole new fundamental truth, discipline and school of thought because they can create concepts from their own minds without no external inputs.
Alchemist pass exams without studying because they just know how things work or they use context clue.
For that reason not every smart person is a genius.
Alchemist use their brains to change or improve the world with ingenuity and originality.
The alchemist has a way with words, when they speak you stop and listen. The alchemist is witty in any language (Creole or patois).
Let’s renounce the colonial concept that using Anglo-Saxon words is a mark of intelligence.
Eg.
Kartel speaks English- Kartel intelligent yuh fawk.
”
”
Crystal Evans (Jamaican Acute Ghetto Itis)
“
In December of each year the Tolowa people gathered together at the Axis Mundi to celebrate the creation of the earth. It’s a ten day celebration beginning at the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year ... It would take days for people to arrive and as the population grew, the new Anglo settlement in Crescent City became a little worried, they thought that the Indians were maybe gathering to ... wipe them out or something. Since they had only been in the area less than a year, the settlers didn’t realize that this was a normal annual thing. So the Tolowa people all across the area and the Yurok further south gathered together at the centre of the world, to dance and celebrate ... They danced all night until morning, and then they rested during the day and prepared food and so forth and then in the evening the dance started again ... And each night the dance became a little more elaborate than the night before ... On about the sixth night ... the local militiamen got together, and they drank some whisky and got a good buzz going, and then they got on their horses and went out and surrounded the village, which was one of the larger towns in the area. And of course we all lived in plankhouses made from redwood then. They lined up along a slough which lies in front of the village and then they began to set the buildings on fire, and as the people were trying to escape they were killed. Anybody who jumped into the slough to get away was gunned down into the water. And it happens that I have a great-great-uncle who survived, he was in the sweat house and he slid out and went into the slough and got away, and then he pushed himself southward in the slough. In the morning the entire village was set aflame, and hundreds of people were burned and killed outright. He said the slough was literally red with the blood of the people, and the babies that were found crying were just tossed into the flames to destroy them as well. So several hundred people perished there at ... Yan’daak’$$$$t, and later the place was called Burnt Ranch. And the local people still know where Burnt Ranch is ... The next year, because Axis Mundi was destroyed, the dance was moved to ‘Eechuulet, and they started to dance there and they were attacked again and my great-grandmother said that there were seven layers of bodies in the dance house when they burned it. They just stacked them in and torched the house down and ... burned them up there. The next year, 1855, there was ... a battle at the mouth of the Smith River, where about seventy of our people were killed. But by this time our numbers were drastically reduced...
”
”
James Wilson (The Earth Shall Weep: A History of Native America)
“
We don't need cameras here; we have enough trouble controlling our eyes! I waste my time looking and not seeing. If a camera helped us to
see, we would be better off-but it would not be us, seeing. A camera distracts you. It makes you less of a person. Words are even worse; they make birds Ay away, and they make us dizzy with noise. Who can pay attention to the world while someone chatters? The books of the Anglos are as noisy as their planes overhead. My mother says that the books fill up our head with words, and take over our eyes, too. We end up seeing what the words told us about. We stop seeing; the noise of the words takes over. I have a cousin who is a New Hopi; he went to a BIA school, and lived with the Anglos in Albuquerque. He came back to us and said that he doesn't look at the mesa anymore. He doesn't watch the clouds, see them meeting, leaving each other, doing a dance for us. He thinks about them; he talks to himself about them. He wishes his head could be quiet, the way it used to be. Stick with the Anglos, and you have a noisy head!
”
”
Robert Coles (Doing Documentary Work (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities))
“
I’m Temple Claybourne, an upright, warm-blooded hairy mammal, Caucasian, skidding into my fourth decade of existence, the progeny of meat-eating Anglo-Saxon tribal chieftains, left-handed, flat of foot, with low cholesterol and a predictably receding hairline, carrying a zero debt load, a nervous driver, nervous in crowds, nervous around women, hungry with curiosity, a collector of comforting, unnecessary things.
”
”
Loyd Boldman (The Gravity Addict)
“
Win said, “Did you do her?” “Yes. Many times. But not in the last seven years.” “Good one. Pray tell, did she stop by to shag for old times’ sake?” “ ‘Shag?’ ” “My Anglo ancestory. Well?” “A gentleman never kisses and tells. But yes.” “And you refused?” “I remain chaste.” “Your chivalry,” Win said. “Some would call it admirable.” “But not you.” “No, I’d call it—and I’m breaking out the big words here so pay attention—really, really moronic.
”
”
Harlan Coben (Promise Me (Myron Bolitar, #8))
“
My friend was wrong who said that this country was so old it does not matter what we Anglos do here. It matters very much. Mesas and mountains, rivers and trees, winds and rains are as sensitive to the actions and thought of humans as we are to their forces. They take into themselves what we give off and give it out again.
”
”
Edith Warner
“
In an examination of 250 Maori skulls--all from an uncivilized age--I found carious teeth present in only two skulls or 0.76 per cent. By taking the average of Mummery's and my own investigations, the incidence of caries in the Maori is found to be 1.2 per cent in a total of 326 skulls. This is lower even than the Esquimaux, and shows the Maori to have been the most immune race to caries, for which statistics are available. Comparing these figures with those applicable to the present time, we find that the descendants of the Britons and Anglo-Saxons are afflicted with dental caries to the extent of 86 per cent to 98 per cent; and after examining fifty Maori school children living under European conditions entirely, I found that 95 per cent of them had decayed teeth
”
”
Anonymous
“
Culturally, though not theologically, I'm a Christian. I was born a Protestant of the white Anglo-Saxon persuasion. And while I do love that great teacher of peace who was called Jesus, and while I do reserve the right to ask myself in certain trying situations what indeed He would do, I can't swallow that one fixed rule of Christianity insisting that Christ is the only path to God. Strictly speaking, then, I cannot call myself a Christian. Most of the Christians I know accept my feelings on this with grace and open-mindedness. Then again, most of the Christians I know don't speak very strictly. To those who do speak (and think) strictly, all I can do here is offer my regrets for any hurt feelings and now excuse myself from their business.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
“
There is no greater will on earth than the will to survive. These fine people, answering my father's call to arms, had the will in spades and droves.
- Lord Tristan Dracanburh, Ethandun
”
”
Alexandra May (Ethandun (The Lost Dacomé Files #2))
“
If this were a novel, you would be able to figure out why my mother screamed. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. You can assume he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character’s actions, as if that’s possible, as if life works that way. I’ve read so many recent novels, particularly those published in the Anglo world, that are dull and trite because I’m always supposed to infer causality. For example, the reason a protagonist can’t experience love is that she was physically abused, or the hero constantly searches for validation because his father paid little attention to him as a child. This, of course, ignores the fact that many others have experienced the same things but do not behave in the same manner, though that’s a minor point compared to the real loss in fulfilling the desire for explanation: the loss of mystery. Causation extraction makes Jack a dull reader.
”
”
Rabih Alameddine (An Unnecessary Woman)
“
My heart's longings always urge me to undertake a journey, to visit the country of a foreign people far across the sea.
”
”
Anonymous
“
My cooking is influenced by the culinary depth of my own British Indian heritage, the cuisine of my husband’s Anglo-Persian heritage, and by the rich array of foods I’ve enjoyed through my love of travel.
Everything is freshly made in my restaurant. And it’s all about comfort food - my own family favourites based on Persian, Indian, Israeli and Palestinian cuisine.
”
”
Food with Varinder
“
Get out of here, Adam! You don't judge people. We're not a plural, or some big bloc, all acting and feeling and saying the same things. You judge individuals. Anyway, it goes both ways. I've got family friends who think all Anglos are drunk wife-bashers slumped in front of Springer with a stubby in their hands."
"Are you serious?"
"Yes. Dead serious. Should I make an excuse for them? Oh they're allowed to think that. After all they've never really had a conversation with a sober Anglo. If it sounds so ridiculous for your background, then why doesn't it for ours?
”
”
Randa Abdel-Fattah (Does My Head Look Big In This?)
“
whom one would care to share a desert island. My subjects represent a range of nationalities, but are chiefly Anglo-Saxon, for this is my own culture. Three rose to lead large forces, most did not. This is a study of fighters, not commanders.
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Max Hastings (Warriors: Portraits from the Battlefield)
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Across Europe, conservatives alarmed by the rise of labour were discovering antidotes in nationalism, racism, and jingoism. Intellectuals, politicians, industrialists, and empire-builders embraced the idea that the masses – the dark, threatening masses stirring in the social depths – could perhaps be distracted by a new kind of ‘bread and circuses’: the glory of empire. French philologist, philosopher, and historian Ernest Renan was explicit: it was ‘the only way to counter socialism’, and ‘a nation that does not colonise is condemned to end up with socialism, to experience a war between rich and poor’. Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and colonial pioneer who did more than anyone to establish British imperial rule in Southern Africa, found himself thinking along precisely these lines after witnessing a rowdy meeting of the unemployed in East London. ‘On my way home,’ he later recalled, ‘I pondered over the scene, and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.
”
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Neil Faulkner (Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920)
“
But when people in Hong Kong, New York, or anywhere else I made my home, asked me the origins of my last name I always explained it, and myself, as Mennonite. It was a very convenient label. I wasn’t just another Anglo-Saxon male, I was a Mennonite. It gave me a story to tell, because if a Mennonite travels far enough away from Manitoba he becomes exotic.
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Cameron Dueck (Menno Moto)
“
Until recently - perhaps mid-2010s - accounts of being a foreigner in Japan were dominated by white, usually male, Anglo-centric perspectives. (Alright, not that much as changed.) They talk about 'doing the gaijin nod when you see another gaijin on the street.' (No one has ever done this to me.) They talk about playing the 'gaijin card' to get out of sticky situations, like, say, pretending not to speak any Japanese when they've forgotten to buy the correct ticket for the express train, so the hapless station attendant decides to let them go. There's a certain group of people (men) who drift through life here with the barest smattering of Japanese for decades relying on their Japanese spouses (wives) to keep the cogs of daily life spinning; this will never be viable for me. I will never experience the minor celebrity of being a white person in rural Japan (on balance, much healthier for one's ego), nor will I ever be someone people approach and fawn over because they want to make foreign friends (eventually, I realised this was also better), nor will local people ever compliment my looks (there was always a small part of me that wished I was noticeably beautiful). I've been perceived as a Japanese woman in unexpected ways. For example, at a musical gathering, an older white man once turned to me and asked: So whose wife are you? It took a great deal of self-restraint not to slap him.
”
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Florentyna Leow (How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart)
“
As William scoured England and Roger besieged Palermo, Emperor Romanos IV was marching out to fight Alp Arslan, the Seljuk sultan, who was making advances into today’s Anatolia, the beginning of its transformation into a Turkish heartland. But Arslan’s chief war was against the Fatimiyya caliphs, so he renewed an earlier treaty with Romanos, then headed southwards into Syria. But, provoked by Seljuk raids, the emperor advanced with a disorganized army of Varangians, Pechenegs and Anglo-Saxons. Arslan headed north but offered a generous peace which Romanos impulsively rejected. At Manzikert, on 26 August 1071, unwisely dividing his army and feuding with his generals, Romanos was routed.[*5] Arslan made him bow low, resting his boot on the imperial neck, but then he raised him to his feet, asking, ‘What would you do if I were brought before you as a prisoner?’ ‘Perhaps I’d kill you,’ replied Romanos, ‘or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople.’ ‘My punishment is far heavier,’ said Arslan. ‘I forgive you, and set you free.
”
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Simon Sebag Montefiore (The World: A Family History of Humanity)
“
So I see people mocking my usage of patois… or Jamaican creole which is a form of pidgin created from Afrikaan, Spanish and English languages. This is a Jamaican page by a Jamaican author. The person in the video is Jamaican. It’s common for people to think English is an indication of intelligence albeit only 20% of the world’s population speaks English and only 5% are native English speakers. I mean English itself is a creole of sorts with words from Celtic, Slavic and Latin languages..
Smartest people in the world are Asians (Chinese, Japanese and Indians) their native languages are Hindi, Mandarin and Creole Cantonese. Swahili and Igbo are big creole languages in Africa.
Linguistic discrimination is not even warranted based on how languages are developed.
Glottophobics are as bad as racist with their linguicism.
English is just a superstrate language due to Anglo- Saxon colonization and the British empire…
English is still a superstrate because of large English speaking populations such as America, England, South Africa, Nigeria and Canada.
”
”
Crystal Evans (Jamaican Patois Guide)
“
The sight of the pale-yellow façade of 82 Queen with the large golden numerals on the small black awning over the narrow entrance always made me smile. It was one of the grand dames of the Charleston restaurant scene. Opened in 1982 and comprised of three adjoining eighteenth-century town houses and a courtyard, it was the first restaurant to combine the local African, French, Caribbean, and Anglo-Saxon tastes to create a new culinary genre known as Lowcountry cuisine.
”
”
Victoria Benton Frank (My Magnolia Summer)
“
My thanks to everyone who helped with the creation of this book.
”
”
Marc Morris (The Anglo-Saxons A History of the Beginnings of England: 400–1066)
“
In a crowded cave, one grenade might do the work of twenty bullets. Sword-wielding officers beheaded dozens of willing victims. There were reports of children forming into a circle and tossing a live hand grenade, one to another, until it exploded and killed them all. In a cave filled with Japanese soldiers and civilians, Yamauchi recalled, a sergeant ordered mothers to keep their infants quiet, and when they were unable to do so, he told them, “Kill them yourself or I’ll order my men to do it.” Several mothers obeyed.94 As the Japanese perimeter receded toward the island’s northern terminus at Marpi Point, civilians who had thus far resisted the suicide order were forced back to the edge of a cliff that dropped several hundred feet onto a rocky shore. In a harrowing finale, many thousands of Japanese men, women, and children took that fateful last step. The self-destructive paroxysm could not be explained by deference to orders, or by obeisance to the death cult of imperial bushido. Suicide, the Japanese of Saipan earnestly believed, was the sole alternative to a fate worse than death. The Americans were not human beings—they were something akin to demons or beasts. They were the “hairy ones,” or the “Anglo-American Demons.” They would rape the women and girls. They would crush captured civilians under the treads of their tanks. The marines were especially dreaded. According to a story circulated widely among the Japanese of Saipan, all Marine Corps recruits were compelled to murder their own parents before being inducted into service. It was said that Japanese soldiers taken prisoner would suffer hideous tortures—their ears, noses, and limbs would be cut off; they would be blinded and castrated; they would be cooked and fed to dogs. Truths and half-truths were shrewdly wedded to the more outrageous and far-fetched claims. Japanese newspapers reproduced photographs of Japanese skulls mounted on American tanks. A cartoon appearing in an American servicemen’s magazine, later reproduced and translated in the Japanese press, had suggested that marine enlistees would receive a “Japanese hunting license,” promising “open season” on the enemy, complete with “free ammunition and equipment—with pay!”95 Other cartoons, also reproduced in Japan, characterized the Japanese as monkeys, rats, cockroaches, or lice. John Dower’s study War Without Mercy explored the means by which both American and Japanese propaganda tended to dehumanize the enemy. Among the Japanese, who could not read or hear any dissenting views, the excesses of American wartime rhetoric and imagery lent credibility to the implication that a quick suicide was the path of least suffering. Saipan was the first Pacific battlefield in which Americans had encountered a large civilian population. No one had known what to expect. Would women and children take up weapons and hurl themselves at the Americans?
”
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Ian W. Toll (The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944)
“
The point is that there is a very old idea that the Holy Spirit is functioning in our lives not only to give us power as Christians but also to clean up our lives, lead us toward holiness. I will have to admit that certain kinds of holy Christians have always repelled me. I have never been able to tell whether it is because they make me uncomfortable, knowing that I am far from holy, or whether they are in fact making a serious error in supposing themselves to be holy when in fact all they are is sanctimonious. I will have to admit also, however, that I have met a few Christians who make no show of holiness yet whom I sense to be living on a different plane from my own. These people have a quality that strikes me as being at the heart of real holiness; they do not make me aware of their goodness so much as of their hope. They do not point up my shortcomings in contrast to their saintliness; they point up my potential.
I think Christ must have had this kind of holiness. He would never have attracted men like rough Peter and worldly Matthew otherwise. The secret ingredient in this kind of transforming holiness, I came to think, was love. When I came into contact with love as an overwhelming experience in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, I found that I had been cleaned, built up, healed. I knew a kind of wholeness I'd never dreamed of; and the words whole, holy, and health are all derivatives of the same Anglo-Saxon word haml, meaning "complete." This is the type of sanctification that comes from contact with the Christ-love of the Holy Spirit.
”
”
John Sherrill (They Speak with Other Tongues: A Skeptic Investigates This Life-Changing Gift)
“
Are you a bigot, Mr. O’Brien?” Joanna asked. The room grew still. Raising his bushy eyebrows, Ernie Carpenter shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. The silence lasted so long that Joanna wondered if perhaps she had gone too far, but David O’Brien didn’t appear to be especially offended by the question. In fact, he seemed to like the idea that Joanna was standing up to him and pushing back. “Are you aware that I’m from here originally?” he asked at last, favoring Joanna with an unexpected but grim smile. She nodded. “Not just from Bisbee,” he continued. “But from right here on the outskirts of Naco. My father, Tom O’Brien, died of a ruptured appendix when I was two. Growing up in a border town makes it tough for kids. On both sides. I didn’t transfer to St. Dominick’s in Old Bisbee until I was in the third grade. Before that I was one of the only Anglo kids in Naco Elementary. The Mexican kids down here used to beat me up every day, Sheriff Brady. Not only that, it was a Mexican driving the truck that killed my first family, smashed my legs to smithereens, and sentenced me to a wheelchair for the rest of my natural life. So believe me, if I’ve got my prejudices, maybe I’m entitled. That’s what I told Brianna, and that’s what I’m telling you.
”
”
J.A. Jance (Skeleton Canyon (Joanna Brady, #5))
“
Gaelic has had a far bigger and longer run in Scotland than Scots or English.
Teutonic speech is still a comparative upstart, and its sweeping victory did not begin till well on in the 17th century. A conscientious Chinaman who contemplated a thesis on the literary history of Scotland would have no doubt as to his procedure, 'I will learn a little Gaelic, and read all I can find about Gaelic literature from the oldest Irish poets down to Ban MacIntyre, and nearly a third of my thesis will be on Gaelic literature',
He would be rather mystified when he discovered that historians of Scotland and its literature had known and cared as much about Gaelic literature as about Chinese, and that they had gone on the remarkable assumption that the majority of the Scots were Anglo-Saxons and that their literature began with Thomas the Rhymer, in the reign of Alexander III.
”
”
William Power
“
But let me explain my culture of origin to you, Angela, in case you have never been around White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. You need to understand that we have only one central rule of engagement, and here it is: This matter must never be spoken of again.
We WASPS can apply this rule to anything -- from a moment of awkwardness at the dinner table to a relative's suicide. Asking no further questions is the song of my people.
”
”
Elizabeth Gilbert (City of Girls)
“
My favorite chapter is about dogs. In it the author explains that dogs are not animals. According to him, or her (I don't know what sex authors are in the same way I don't know their names), dogs are a concept. A Doberman is not much like a Cocker Spaniel which shares few characteristics with a Chihuahua; a Saint-Bernard can meet a Pekingese and, theoretically, they can mate, but does that ever happen and would it be a good thing? Because, although zoologically they belong to the same species, in practical terms it's blindingly obvious they're not made for each other. The author went on to say how amazed he (or she) was that his three-year-old daughter (the tendency to mix personal life with reasoning makes me incline towards an Anglo-Saxon writer) could always recognize a dog when she saw one in the street, even though the animals she pointed at so enthusiastically- delighted by an opportunity to display her combined mastery of language and categorization- didn't look anything like each other. If a cat appeared, even a big beefy one, she would not be fooled. If a pony turned up, even the smallest of its lineage, smaller at the wither than a Great Dane, she would not cry 'Dog! Dog!' She knew. Even if they don't bark, have their ears trimmed so they prick up, or are bundled into miniature anoraks to protect them from inclement weather, dogs maintain their conceptual integrity.
”
”
Agnès Desarthe (Chez Moi: A Novel)
“
Etymologically, paroikia (a compound word from para and oikos) literally means “next to” or “alongside of the house” and, in a technical sense, meant a group of resident aliens. This sense of “parish” carried a theological context into the life of the Early Church and meant a “Christian society of strangers or aliens whose true state or citizenship is in heaven.” So whether one’s flock consists of fifty people in a church which can financially sustain a priest or if it is merely a few people in a living room whose priest must find secular employment, it is a parish.
This original meaning of parish also implies the kind of evangelism that accompanies the call of a true parish priest. A parish is a geographical distinction rather than a member-oriented distinction. A priest’s duties do not pertain only to the people who fill the pews of his church on a Sunday morning. He is a priest to everyone who fills the houses in the “cure” where God as placed him. This ministry might not look like choir rehearsals, rector’s meetings, midweek “extreme” youth nights, or Saturday weddings. Instead, it looks like helping a battered wife find shelter from her abusive husband, discretely paying a poor neighbor’s heating oil bill when their tank runs empty in the middle of a bitter snow storm, providing an extra set of hands to a farmer who needs to get all of his freshly-baled hay in the barn before it rains that night, taking food from his own pantry or freezer to help feed a neighbor’s family, or offering his home for emergency foster care. This kind of “parochial” ministry was best modeled by the old Russian staretzi (holy men) who found every opportunity to incarnate the hands and feet of Christ to the communities where they lived. Perhaps Geoffrey Chaucer caught a glimpse of the true nature of parish life through his introduction of the “Parson” in the Prologue of The Canterbury Tales. Note how the issues of sacrifice, humility, and community mentioned above characterize this Parson’s cure even when opportunities were available for “greater” things:
"There was a good man of religion, a poor Parson, but rich in holy thought and deed. He was also a learned man, a clerk, and would faithfully preach Christ’s gospel and devoutly instruct his parishioners. He was benign, wonderfully diligent, and patient in adversity, as he was often tested. He was loath to excommunicate for unpaid tithes, but rather would give to his poor parishioners out of the church alms and also of his own substance; in little he found sufficiency. His parish was wide and the houses far apart, but not even for thunder or rain did he neglect to visit the farthest, great or small, in sickness or misfortune, going on foot, a staff in his hand… He would not farm out his benefice, nor leave his sheep stuck fast in the mire, while he ran to London to St. Paul’s, to get an easy appointment as a chantry-priest, or to be retained by some guild, but dwelled at home and guarded his fold well, so that the wolf would not make it miscarry… There was nowhere a better priest than he. He looked for no pomp and reverence, nor yet was his conscience too particular; but the teaching of Christ and his apostles he taught, and first he followed it himself."
As we can see, the distinction between the work of worship and the work of ministry becomes clear. We worship God via the Eucharist. We serve God via our ministry to others. Large congregations make it possible for clergy and congregation to worship anonymously (even with strangers) while often omitting ministry altogether. No wonder Satan wants to discredit house churches and make them “odd things”! Thus, while the actual house church may only boast a membership in the single digits, the house church parish is much larger—perhaps into the hundreds as is the case with my own—and the overall ministry is more like that of Christ’s own—feeding, healing, forgiving, engaging in all the cycles of community life, whether the people attend
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Alan L. Andraeas (Sacred House: What Do You Need for a Liturgical, Sacramental House Church?)
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increasingly, white women of the South were opening their eyes to the fact that what they’d so long called “the Negro problem” was, instead, “the Anglo-Saxon problem.
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Karen Branan (The Family Tree: A Lynching in Georgia, a Legacy of Secrets, and My Search for the Truth)
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Good God, man!” The major general exploded and thumped the well-padded arm of the chair with his fist, a length of ash fell from the end of the cigar and landed on the rug where Kruger nosed it quizzically to determine if it was edible. “This is not any other killing, this is a recipe for an uprising. The bloody country is on the brink of civil war and I’m damned if it will start in my patch on my watch. You will hold that inquest tomorrow morning... the longer this thing drags on the more dangerous it becomes.
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Dennis Cronin (Michael Sweeney)
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Ever since Spain and Mexico began to settle this part of the Southwest over the course of three hundred years, those people and those communities had protection and respect from both Mexico and Spain. Those governments never stole the land from their people. It was with the arrival of the United States, "the democratic government of the United States, the leader of the free world," that we began to have problems and violations of our land rights. Spain and Mexico have valiantly guarded the archives that document the ownership rights, but people such as members of the Santa Fe Ring have destroyed those records. So I would ask, "Who has caused this problem with the land, Reies or the Anglos?" And every day I would hit on that theme as best I could.
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Reies Lopez Tijerina (They Called Me "King Tiger": My Struggle for the Land and Our Rights (Hispanic Civil Rights))
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The soul is called hugr, Anglo-Saxon hygi, thereby indicating it as desire and inclination, as courage and thought. It inspires a man's behaviour, his actions and his speech are characterised according to whether they proceed out of whole hugr, bold hugr, or downcast hugr. It resides in him and urges him on; thus ends Loki when he has said his say among the gods: “Now I have spoken that which my hugr urged me to say,” thus also Sigurd when he has slain the serpent: “My hugr urged me to it.” It sits within, giving counsel or warning; “my hugr tells me,” is a weighty argument, for when the hugr has told a thing, the matter is pretty well settled. “He seems to me unreliable, you will see he will soon turn the evil side outward; it is against my will that he is with you, for my hugr tells me evil about him,” thus Ingolf exhorts his brother to turn away a vagabond who comes to the place. A winter passed, and Ingolf could say that all had fallen out as his hugr had warned him. And Atli Hasteinson, of noble race, confidently gives directions to his household after the fight with Hrafn: “You, my son, will avenge your father, if you take after your kin, and my hugr tells me you will become a famous man, and your children after you.” And when the hugr is uneasy, as when one can say with Gudrun: “Long I hesitated, long were my hugrs divided in me,” then life is not healthy. But when a man has followed the good counsel from within, and attained his end, then there rises from his soul a shout of triumph, it is his hugr laughing in his breast.— Now and again, the soul has its knowledge directly, as we should say; at times it has acquired it by spying out the land, and then it may chance that the enemy has seen his opponent's hugr coming towards him, whether in human form or in the shape of a beast. He dreams of wolves, and is told that it is the hugrs of men he has
seen.
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Vilhelm Grønbech (The Culture of the Teutons: Volumes 1 and 2)
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In this case, Russia had me reexamining the bullshitty, fake-nice communication that is so common in Anglo culture, and asking myself if this wasn’t somehow making us more insecure around each other and worse at intimacy. I remember discussing this dynamic with my Russian teacher one day, and he had an interesting theory. Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology. People’s displays of unpleasant honesty were rewarded for the simple fact that they were necessary for survival—you had to know whom you could rely on and whom you couldn’t, and you needed to know quickly. But, in the “free” West, my Russian teacher continued, there existed an abundance of economic opportunity—so much economic opportunity that it became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if it was false, than to actually be that way. Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more beneficial than knowing a few people closely. This is why it became the norm in Western cultures to smile and say polite things even when you don’t feel like it, to tell little white lies and agree with someone whom you don’t actually agree with. This is why people learn to pretend to be friends with people they don’t actually like, to buy things they don’t actually want. The economic system promotes such deception. The downside of this is that you never know, in the West, if you can completely trust the person you’re talking to. Sometimes this is the case even among good friends or family members. There is such pressure in the West to be likable that people often reconfigure their entire personality depending on the person they’re dealing with.
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Mark Manson (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life)
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So," said Halide, "I don't think Dot's Anglo-Catholic Mission Society is going to have much good fortune in my country, and she will be wiser not to encourage them to think so. The advancement of Turkish men and women must come from within, it must be a true patriotism, as it has been in the past, when we have progressed so much and so fast. When the masses will also start to advance, it will be as when our ancestors rolled across the Asia hills and plains, nothing could stay them. This will surely be again, when the minds of the Turkish masses roll on like an army and conquer all the realms of culture and high thinking. Then we shall see women taking their places beside men, not only as now in the universities and professions, but in the towns and villages everywhere, they will walk and talk free, spending their money and reading wise books and writing down great thoughts, and when the enemy comes, they will defend their homes like men. All this we shall see, but it must be an all Turkish movement; we shall throw over Islam, as Atatürk bade us, but I think we shall not become Christian, it is not our religion. Sometimes I feel that I should not have done so myself when in London, and that it was to betray my country. And now I love a devout Moslem man, and this makes it difficult. He too is a doctor. He wishes that I throw off the Church of England and that we marry. But I could not be a Moslem wife, and bring up children to all that."
She sighed as she ate her yoghourt. I thought how sad it was, all this progress and patriotism and marching on and conquering the realms of culture, yet love rising up to spoil all and hold one back, and what was the Christian Church and what was Islam against this that submerged the human race and always had? ...it was the great force, and drove like a hurricane, shattering everything in its way, no one had a chance against it, the only thing was to go with it, because it always won.
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Rose Macaulay (The Towers of Trebizond)
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So we can work together and do all this good,” I say, “but the whole time you’re looking at my wife and thinking she’s a mistake? That she’s some Anglo trophy I use to prove something to other people? Even worse, because of some self-hate, to feel better about myself?” He goes quiet, his chest swelling with the deep breath he draws in. I gesture to the proposal abandoned on his desk, my excitement smothered by disappointment and disillusion. “How do you squeeze such big ideas into such a narrow mind? You’re smarter than this, Iz,” I say quietly. “I thought I could follow you. I thought you had answers, solutions.” I walk to the door and give him one last sad, disgusted glance, saying what I’m fully prepared to accept may be my last words to him ever. “Turns out you’re the problem.
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Kennedy Ryan (Grip Trilogy Box Set (Grip, #0.5-2))
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I’ve always like Medieval literature. As a young girl I read mythologies and Norse legends, that sort of thing. I loved Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While I was studying at Middle Tennessee State University for doctoral program I came in contact with more ancient literature. I examined older literature more seriously which intrigued and fascinated me very much; I was drawn to it.
For the book I used all my own translations of Beowulf from my doctorate. Culture is contained in language, if you study a language you’ll see bits of culture, because the words are different and you see into the lives of the people. The Anglo-Saxon language touched me very deeply. Some of it is the heroic. Some of it is the melancholy. But there is also honor. You uphold, you fight to the death. Even if you watch movies, like Marvel comic book movies, like Thor: you want the great ones to win. Its even better if they have a fault. But you want the heroic character to win.
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Deborah A. Higgens
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The question I want to begin with is impossibly overdetermined – it is the question of why we are so afraid.
The particular answer I will trace out derives from my increasing belief that Gothic literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is more than a phenomenon of Anglo-American life. It is a project. To explain and explore this notion, I want to offer a contribution to one of the longest on-going enterprises in fiction studies – the attempt to define the nature of the Gothic in literature. Nearly two hundred years ago, vexed reviewers struggled to explain the amazing, perverse, inescapable, loathsome, irresistible phenomenon of The Monk, by contrasting the narrative strategies of Matthew Gregory Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. From the controversy over the Monk came the first tools for defining Gothic fiction: the distinction between terror and horror. The inadequacy of these useful terms has driven students of the Gothic for the past two centuries to offer other terms, to devise other distinctions.
A distinction common in recent Gothic studies is my starting point. Critics frequently create a binary opposition between inside and outside, between Gothic as an exploration of the unconscious and Gothic as a concern for and even an intervention in social reality. In refusing this bogus binary of Freud versus Marx, I want to define a Gothic praxis that involves – necessarily – the interplay of psychological and social forces. This interplay has determined both the title and the subtitle of my essay.
My title, the nurture of the Gothic, plays obviously on the phrase already old by John Ruskin’s time – the nature of the Gothic – because I believe the nature of the Gothic is to nurture. This belief derives from what I take to be a basic fact of communal life: that societies inflict terrible wounds upon themselves and at the same time develop mechanisms that can help heal these wounds. Gothic fiction from the later eighteenth century to the present is one such mechanism. Not consciously and yet purposively, Anglo-American culture develops Gothic in order to help heal the damage caused by our embrace of modernity. Thus my title: Gothic’s nature is the psycho-social function of nurture; its project is to heal and transform.
To define this healing process, I will begin with the work of a physician, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott. His notions of potential space, transitional objects and play will help me produce a general definition of Gothic that I can then historicise and contextualise, drawing upon such thinkers as Michel Foucault, Michael Taussig, Ross Chambers, and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. This will bring me to the question posed in my subtitle – how can a text be both popular and subversive? Why do we hug closest that which threatens us most? This is another way of asking, how does Gothic nurture? Which is another way of asking, why are we so afraid?
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William Veeder