Party Monster Quotes

Dude! said a party pony as he unloaded his gear. Did you see that bear guy? He was all like: 'Whoa, I have an arrow in my mouth!

Funny, that no matter where you are in the world, there's always someone eager to help you destroy yourself.

I'm not normally one to take advice from my fictional characters, but there comes a point in every girl's life where she reaches a crossroads: a night alone with her sweatpants and her favorite television show, or a party with real, live, breathing people.

If we're all going to hell in a handbasket, we might as well make it a party on the way down

And elsewhere in the woods, there is another party, one taking place inside a hollow hill, full of night-blooming flowers. There, a pale boy plays a fiddle with newly mended fingers while his sister dances with his best friend. There, a monster whirls about, branches waving in time with the music, There, a prince of the Folk takes up the mantle of king, embracing a changeling like a bother, and, with a human boy at his side, names a girl his champion.

Never miss a party...good for the nerves--like celery.

I wanted to meet the monster. Why go down if you can go up?

I make art for the sake of art . . . and for my own selfish gratification, because I’m an artistic monster.

I give you bitter pills, in a sugar coating. The pills are harmless - the poison's in the sugar

Watch out for the average--they're usually hiding something big.

There are people who have too much space between their ears, and given the time, do nothing but free fall forever inside their head. It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse.

True love is jealousy in disguise: A man cannot restrict his lover from going to the club because he hates her, he actually hates the men who would come around and touch her.

Drug addicts are so funny that way. Just spinning around, lost in their own little world. Doing so much, accomplishing so little. How sad.

People die all around us all the time. Drop like flies. Overdose. Aids. Sometimes they kill themselves. People come. They go. Dying is the same as rehab or moving back to Missouri. It just means I won't be seeing them again

We didn't wish -- wishes are wasted... We didn't hope -- because our future was inevitable... And we didn't pray -- we were on our own.

Some people, given just the right amount of pressure, taken out of their usual, comfortable environments, don’t need much encouragement at all to become monsters. And sometimes you just get a strong sense about people, and you can’t explain it; you simply know it, in some deeper part of yourself.

It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry innerverse.

No, Michael, I do not trust you on a boat, I do not trust you on a goat. I do not trust you here. I do not trust you there. I do not trust you anywhere.

People can be monsters, or vulnerable as lambs. They—no, we—are perpetrators and victims at the same time. It takes so little to tip the scale one way or the other. This is the world we live in,

When you let the wolves guard the hen house, there's bound to be a few chicken dinners.

Teenage bodies should be filled with Vonnegut and meatball subs, not opiates that create glassy-eyed party monsters.

At first it's bliss. It's drunken, heady, intoxicating. It swallows the people we were - not particuarly wonderful people, but people who did our best, more or less - and spits out the monsters we are becoming. Our friends despise us. We are an epic. Everything is grand, crashing, brilliant, blinding. It's the Golden Age of Hollywood, and we are a legend in our own minds, and no one outside can fail to see that we are headed for hell, and we won't listen, we say they don't understand, we pour more wine, go to the parties, we sparkle, fly all over the country, we're on an adventure, unstoppable, we've found each other and we race through our days like Mr. Toad in his yellow motorcar, with no idea where the brakes are and to hell with it anyway, we are on fire, drunk with something we call love.

There are times when the world slips out of control. It's like an accident that is happening too quickly , and you can't stop it, you can't think about it, you have no choice but to lean back and watch as everything changes forever.

I had seen other stop-motion animated features, and they were either not engaging or they're just too bizarre. There was one I liked when I was a kid called Mad Monster Party. People thought Nightmare was the first stop-motion animated monster musical, but that was.

And what do we have here? A scary monster, cowboy, and a fairy princess! Here's a hit of ecstasy, run along now.

So let's start at the very begining (a very good place to start...)

She had been to a tea-party with an antediluvian monster, and that they had been waited on by up-to-date men-servants.

Just spinning around, lost in their own little world. Doing so much, accomplishing so little. How sad.

Humans have fallen so far since the early days when they’d just throw you a party when you killed a monster.

So put your costume on, honey! Ruby said. Set Harlequin free! That party monster of yours is screaming to come out. Let the monster out!

Female monsters take things as personally as they really are. They study facts. Even if rejection makes them feel like the girl who's not invited to the party, they have to understand the reasons why. ... Every question, once it's formulated, is a paradigm, contains its own internal truth. We have to stop diverting ourselves with false questions. And I told Warren: I aim to be a female monster too.

Sometimes I wonder if the bars make the monsters and not the other way around.

We're like two peas in a pod""Pity the pod

I don’t know how you look at the inside of your head — what metaphor you choose — but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful.

A few short years ago, the Nazi Party was some angry men in one beer hall. Germany had no army, wasn't allowed an army. Don't underestimate them. That's been everyone's mistake.

looked over at the campfire, where three party ponies were teaching Tyson to operate a paintball gun. I hoped they knew what they were getting into.

People want this to be an anomaly.... we can handle monsters, we can't handle our neighbors doing these things. we can't believe these are the same people we see at Christmas parties, and basketball games.

If letters had eyebrows, these would be arched.

god should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men. —ELISABETH HEWER

I traded with Jesiba for your freedom last week. I have the papers in my desk. I wanted to throw a party for it- to surprise you.' The bathroom door began warping, bending. Bryce sobbed. 'I bought you and now I set you free, Lehabah.' Lehabah's smile didn't falter. 'I know,' she said. 'I peeked in your drawer.' And despite the monster trying to break loose behind them, Bryce choked on a laugh before she begged. 'You are a free person- you do not have to do this. You are free, Lehabah.' Yet Lehabah remained at the foot of the stairs. 'Then let the world know that my first act of freedom was to help my friends.

and so it came to pass that i was strapped to a gurney and covered in raw liver and slabs of beef that very quickly turned rancid under the bright spotlights. there exists a videotape somewhere that documents me being wheeled about the dance floor by two burly "orderlies," while i desperately search for a bathroom big enough to accommodate the stretcher so i can do a bump of cocaine. watching me retch from the decomposing meat, and simultaneously fiend for drugs, makes for an entertaining time, indeed. when i told my mother the extremes i went to in order to make a living, she just shook her head and said, "now don't you wish you'd finished college, dear?" mothers are so wise, sometimes.

When I was younger, my brother told me that he had the power to shrink me to the size of an ant. In fact, he said, he used to have another sister, but he shrank her down and stepped on her. He also told me that when you became a grown-up, you were admitted into a private party that was full of monsters and horror movie characters. There was Chucky, drinking a cup of coffee. And the mummy on the cover of the Hardy Boys book that used to freak me out, except he was doing the twist while Jason from 'Friday the 13th' played the alto sax. He told me you stayed at the party as long as you had to, making conversation with these creatures, and that was why adults were never afraid of anything. I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn't mean you're fearless. It just means you fear different things.

Centaurs!” Annabeth yelled. The Party Pony army exploded into our midst in a riot of colors: tie-dyed shirts, rainbow Afro wigs, oversize sunglasses, and war-painted faces. Some had slogans scrawled across their flanks like HORSEZ PWN or KRONOS SUX. Hundreds of them filled the entire block. My brain couldn’t process everything I saw, but I knew if I were the enemy, I’d be running. “Percy!” Chiron shouted across the sea of wild centaurs. He was dressed in armor from the waist up, his bow in his hand, and he was grinning in satisfaction. “Sorry we’re late!” “DUDE!” Another centaur yelled. “Talk later. WASTE MONSTERS NOW!” He locked and loaded a double-barrel paint gun and blasted an enemy hellhound bright pink. The paint must’ve been mixed with Celestial bronze dust or something, because as soon as it splattered the hellhound, the monster yelped and dissolved into a pink-and-black puddle. “PARTY PONIES!” a centaur yelled. “SOUTH FLORIDA CHAPTER!” Somewhere across the battlefield, a twangy voice yelled back, “HEART OF TEXAS CHAPTER!” “HAWAII OWNS YOUR FACES!” a third one shouted. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The entire Titan army turned and fled, pushed back by a flood of paintballs, arrows, swords, and NERF baseball bats. The centaurs trampled everything in their path. “Stop running, you fools!” Kronos yelled. “Stand and ACKK!” That last part was because a panicked Hyperborean giant stumbled backward and sat on top of him.

Why, oh why, must we always go through pigs to get our truffles?

Each man in this stretcher party had gained a reflected majesty. They were footmen to death, and

A group of adventurers is known as a "party," and not just because they like to celebrate their success together in the end. Your party should be as close to you as your family--assuming your family can cast spells, kill monsters, and bring you back from the edge of death.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure for ever?

But he hadn’t always played nice, and his image of youthful excess, which had once garnered free publicity, had sunk him, eliciting awful headlines: “Party Monster’s Bacchanal Ends in Tragedy” had been one of the best ones. Plus, Karina’s father, Evaristo Junco, was a vindictive asshole who had blamed Tristán

He stayed there with her through the night. Every time she struggled to open her eyes, she'd see him, the ghostly outline of white ears against the threatening shadows. Perhaps he had killed her after all. Perhaps he hadn't. There was only one thing Cassidy Evans knew for sure: It had been a marvelous tea party.

My view of writing "Coldest Girl in Coldtown" was to take every single thing that I loved from every vampire book I had ever read and dump it into one book--everything I like--trying to evoke some of the decadence… Vampires are a high-class monster: They want to dress up. They want to drink a lot of absinthe, or force their victims to drink a lot of absinthe. They have big parties and have elegant rituals. I think that's a thing we associate with vampires--they are the royalty of our monsters. We expect them to be rich, we expect them to be well-dressed. I wanted to have some of that be true because I like it, and have some of it not be true because it's kind of weird. I wanted to put in the idea of infection, which I was really interested in and which was a big feature of the vampire books I read growing up. And, the fear and desire for infection--the way in which our urge towards loving vampires is nihilistic. Our fear of them is our survival instincts kicking in.

Bekka treated her role has Frankenstein's bride more like an audition to be Brett's bride. Every part of her body had been colored bright kelly green - even parts that her mother had stressed were 'not to be seen by anyone except God and the inside of a toilet bowl.' Instead of wearing a wig, Bekka had teased and then shellacked her own hair into a windblown cone and she'd used female-mustache bleach to create white streaks. Her seams, made of real suture thread, had been attached to her neck and wrists with clear double-sided costume tape because drawing them on with kohl would not have been 'honoring the character.' Her Costume Castle dress had been exchanged for something 'more authentic' from the Bridal Barn. If Brett didn't see his future in her heavily black-shadowed eyes tonight, he never would. Or so she believed.

I cannot forget the figures of Slobodan Milošević, Charles Taylor and Saddam Hussein, who made terrified fiefdoms out of their "own" people and mounds of corpses on the territory of their neighbours. I was glad to see each of these monsters brought to trial, and think the achievement should (and one day will) form part of the battle‑honours of British Labour. Many of the triumphant pelters and taunters would have left the dictators and aggressors in place: they too will have their place in history.

Actually, dear, don’t wait up for me. My knitting club and I are partying it up tonight at Joyce Becker’s. She’s making monster margaritas.” Julia

THE PARTY PONIES INVADE

Every degree of power involves a corresponding degree of freedo from good and evil.

ROWWF!” Mrs. O’Leary bounded toward me, ignoring the growling monsters on either side. Nico strode forward. The enemy army fell back before him like he radiated death, which of course he did. Through the face guard of his skull-shaped helmet, he smiled. “Got your message. Is it too late to join the party?” “Son of Hades.” Kronos spit on the ground. “Do you love death so much you wish to experience it?” “Your death,” Nico said, “would be great for me.

Jeremy supposed that a Christmas party full of elementary school professionals might be the worst place in the world. He would drift among them helplessly, like a grizzly bear in a roomful of children, expected not to eat anyone.

As he journeyed alone toward the monster that is death, we could do nothing to help him, nor the others still alive; all the words of strength on our lips melted away, our love not great enough to bind them to life, and our hope not enough to will them to live.

City of Vassillian a party of five sage princes with four horses. The princes, who are of course brave, noble and wise, travel widely in distant lands, fight giant ogres, pursue exotic philosophies, take tea with weird gods and rescue beautiful monsters from ravening princesses before finally announcing that they have achieved enlightenment and that their wanderings are therefore accomplished. The second, and much longer, part of each song would then tell of all their bickerings about which one of them is going to have to walk back. All this lay in the planet’s remote past.

Speaking from experince, there are people who have too much space between their ears, and given the time, do nothing but free fall forever inside their heads. It's a spooky thing to be left alone inside an angry inner-verse. Drugs redirect the fall. They cushion it. Give you a parachute. Or maybe just a flashlight and scuba gear. I don't know how you look at the inside of your head-- what metaphor you choose-- but for those of us with endless yawning stretches of interior and nothing but nothing to stop us from getting lost in it, drugs can be wonderfully helpful. For a time.

Let’s say our Republican overlords can convince us that these were just personal quirks of a “black swan” leader who kept us from the horror of…a former secretary of state, U.S. senator, and First Lady becoming president. To avoid the nightmare of having a president who had actually spent decades preparing for the job, it was necessary to nominate a reality-TV figure who talked openly of his desire to have sex with his own daughter and lectured Republican members of Congress on Article XII of the Constitution, which exists only in his mind. This positions Donald Trump as the Necessary Monster history demanded to save the Republican Party.

Do you remember bedtime as a child? I was terrified of the dark. I was terrified of the closed closet door that surely cracked open when I wasn't looking and spewed out ghouls and devils. I took care that no arms or legs protruded from the bed. I sometimes slept with the covers over my head. Sweltering, panting, barely breathing. Not even my hair exposed, lest a monster discover and devour me. I remember begging my father to check under the bed. I remember trying to explain how some monsters had invisibility cloaks. He would kiss my cheek and switch off the light. We stop looking under the bed once we realize that the monsters are inside us. It's funny how they transform. Suddenly they don't mind daylight. Suddenly they dress nicely, speak our language, and share our customs. They sit next to us on the metro and jog around our neighborhoods. They slip things into our drinks at parties and offer us jobs. Sometimes we spot them, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we even do the unthinkable: we invite them to our bed. As adults, we burn down the sanctuaries we created as children. Our inner child freaks out, but its screams are drowned by our moans as our monsters bring us to orgasm.

She found herself thinking about the games that she had played when she was young with other children in the village. Those whose parents hadn’t forbidden them from playing with her, that is. They were princes and princess. Damsels and knights. They built castles of twigs and made woven crowns of bluebells and swanned around the fields as if they were nobles in Verene. The had imagined a life of jewels and parties and feasts— oh, the feasts they had dreamed up—the dances, the balls. Serilda had been so very good at dreaming. Even then, her peers were eager to hear her turn their simple musings into unparalleled adventures. But never had it crossed Serilda’s mind, not for the shortest swallow trill, that it might come true. She would live in a castle. She would be wed to a king. She would be wed to a monster.

Most people read Homer in those stupid eighteenth-century translations,” Gautier said calmly. “They make him sound like Marie-Antoinette nibbling biscuits in the Tuileries. But if you read him in Greek you can see he’s a monster, his people are monsters. The whole thing is like a dinner party for barbarians. They eat with their fingers. They put mud in their hair when they are upset. They spend half the time painting themselves.

Bonaparte had become an almost fabulous monster and in order to defile him in the popular imagination, which, as we pointed out a moment ago, is like the imagination of children, the party of 1814 whipped out every frightening mask it could marshal, one after the other, from the terrible that remains grandiose to the terrible that verges on the grotesque, from Tiberius to the bogeyman. Thus, in speaking of Bonaparte, you were free to sob or to gasp with laughter, provided your reaction was based on hate.

He wants me to go to a party. I haven’t been to a party since Kenny Smith from next door invited me to his birthday when we were eight, and that ended with me getting pushed into his pool and laughed at all the way home. Can I think about it? Yeah, of course. I’m not going. I like to tell myself I might go—I like to tell myself I might do a lot of things—but I and my brain and everyone else know that I’m going to chicken out in the end and barricade myself in my bedroom with a plate of pizza rolls and my Netflix subscription.

You’re not so bad,” she mumbled. “A little freaky looking, sure, but I don’t know what all the fuss is about, honestly. So you look like the grim reaper. Whatever. I think it’s kinda cute, honestly. You’d be a hit at one of Suyin’s Halloween parties, lemme tell ya. The goth kids would go nuts for you.” The claws continued to pet her cheek, and her awareness continued to slip away.” “But don’t get cocky,” she mumbled incoherently. “Doesn’t matter how much they love you, you’re my monster, and I don’t share.” “Isss,” Meph hissed in that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard voice. “Don’t worry.” She smiled faintly. “I’m yours too.

Eight Years Old, Eighteen Years Old Cassidy was barely conscious when the March Hare, finally finished, gingerly lifted her onto her stump and gently slid a teacup onto her finger. She strained her senses and thought she heard a long sigh and the creak of old bones as he settled at the other end of the table. He stayed there with her through the night. Every time she struggled to open her eyes, she'd see him, the ghostly outline of white ears against the threatening shadows. Perhaps he had killed her after all. Perhaps he hadn't. There was only one thing Cassidy Evans knew for sure: It had been a marvelous tea party.

former U.S. senator Alan Simpson from Wyoming. Simpson had spent eighteen years in the Senate, including ten as the Republican whip, the second-ranking senator in his party. He had also been a former juvenile felon. He had been adjudicated as a juvenile delinquent when he was seventeen, for multiple convictions for arson, theft, aggravated assault, gun violence, and, finally, assaulting a police officer. He later confessed: “I was a monster.” His life didn’t begin to change until he found himself imprisoned in “a sea of puke and urine” following another arrest. Senator Simpson knew firsthand that you cannot judge a person’s full potential by his juvenile misconduct.

Never play the princess when you can be the queen: rule the kingdom, swing a scepter, wear a crown of gold. Don’t dance in glass slippers, crystal carving up your toes -- be a barefoot Amazon instead, for those shoes will surely shatter on your feet. Never wear only pink when you can strut in crimson red, sweat in heather grey, and shimmer in sky blue, claim the golden sun upon your hair. Colors are for everyone, boys and girls, men and women -- be a verdant garden, the landscape of Versailles, not a pale primrose blindly pushed aside. Chase green dragons and one-eyed zombies, fierce and fiery toothy monsters, not merely lazy butterflies, sweet and slow on summer days. For you can tame the most brutish beasts with your wily wits and charm, and lizard scales feel just as smooth as gossamer insect wings. Tramp muddy through the house in a purple tutu and cowboy boots. Have a tea party in your overalls. Build a fort of birch branches, a zoo of Legos, a rocketship of Queen Anne chairs and coverlets, first stop on the moon. Dream of dinosaurs and baby dolls, bold brontosaurus and bookish Belle, not Barbie on the runway or Disney damsels in distress -- you are much too strong to play the simpering waif. Don a baseball cap, dance with Daddy, paint your toenails, climb a cottonwood. Learn to speak with both your mind and heart. For the ground beneath will hold you, dear -- know that you are free. And never grow a wishbone, daughter, where your backbone ought to be.

This is who I write about and who I write for. For the girls they were, for the girl I was, for girls everywhere who are just like we used to be. For the black and brown girls. For the girls on the merry-go-round making the world spin. For the wild girls and the party girls, the loudmouths and the troublemakers. For the girls who are angry and lost. For the girls who never saw themselves in books. For the girls who love girls, sometimes in secret. For the girls who believe in monsters. For the girls on the edge who are ready to fly. For the ordinary girls. For all the girls who broke my heart. And their mothers. And their daughters. And if I could reach back through time and space to that girl I was, to all my girls, I would tell you to take care, to love each other, fight less, dance dance dance until you're breathless. And goddamn, girl. Live.

Bryce couldn’t stop the sob that wrenched its way out of her. “You’re free, Lehabah.” The words rippled through the library as Bryce wept. “I traded with Jesiba for your freedom last week. I have the papers in my desk. I wanted to throw a party for it—to surprise you.” The bathroom door began warping, bending. Bryce sobbed, “I bought you, and now I set you free, Lehabah.” Lehabah’s smile didn’t falter. “I know,” she said. “I peeked in your drawer.” And despite the monster trying to break loose behind them, Bryce choked on a laugh before she begged, “You are a free person—you do not have to do this. You are free, Lehabah.” Yet Lehabah remained at the foot of the stairs. “Then let the world know that my first act of freedom was to help my friends.” Syrinx shifted in Bryce’s arms, a low, pained sound breaking from him. Bryce thought it might be the sound her own soul was making as she whispered, unable to bear this choice, this moment, “I love you, Lehabah.” The only words that ever mattered. “And I will love you always, BB.” The fire sprite breathed, “Go.

Ali major social entities such as nations, linguistic groups, rehgious communities, party organizations have been elevated to the dignity of the supreme collective that overshadows ali other collectives and claims the submission of the whole personality of ali rightthinking men. But an individual can renounce autonomous action and unconditionally surrender his self only in favor of one collective. Which collective this ought to be can be determined only by a quite arbitrary decision. The collective creed is by necessity exclusive and totalitarian. It craves the whole man and does not want to share him with any other collective. It seeks to establish the exclusive supreme validity of only one system of values. There is, of course, but one way to make one's own judgments of value supreme. One must beat into submission ali those dissenting. This is what ali representatives of the various collectivist doctrines are striving for. They ultimately recommend the use of violence and pitiless annihilation of ali those whom they condemn as heretics. Collectivism is a doctrine of war, intolerance, and persecution. If any of the collectivist creeds should succeed in its endeavors, ali people but the great dictator would be deprived of their essential human quality. They would become mere soulless pawns in the hands of a monster.

The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular intellectual disbelief in it. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned commonsense everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats, and liberals at large, have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks white men as history’s greatest monster and prime time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working people. “We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker’s George Packer. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.” “The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.” That black people who’ve lived under centuries of such derision and condescension have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by theories of intersectionality, throttled by bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

In a letter written to the play's director, Peter Wood, on 30th March 1958, just before the start of rehearsals, Pinter rightly refused to add extra lines explaining or justifying Stanley's motives in withdrawing from the world into a dingy seaside boarding-house: 'Stanley cannot perceive his only valid justification - which is he is what he is - therefore he certainly can never be articulate about it.' But Pinter came much closer than he usually does to offering an explanation of the finished work: We've agreed: the hierarchy, the Establishment, the arbiters, the socio- religious monsters arrive to affect censure and alteration upon a member of the club who has discarded responsibility (that word again) towards himself and others. (What is your opinion, by the way, of the act of suicide?) He does possess, however, for my money, a certain fibre - he fights for his life. It doesn't last long, this fight. His core being a quagmire of delusion, his mind a tenuous fuse box, he collapses under the weight of their accusation - an accusation compounded of the shit- stained strictures of centuries of 'tradition'. This gets us right to the heart of the matter. It is not simply a play about a pathetic victim brainwashed into social conformity. It is a play about the need to resist, with the utmost vigour, dead ideas and the inherited weight of the past. And if you examine the text, you notice how Pinter has toughened up the original image of the man in the Eastbourne digs with 'nowhere to go'. Pinter's Stanley Webber - a palpably Jewish name, incidentally - is a man who shores up his precarious sense of self through fantasy, bluff, violence and his own manipulative form of power-play. His treatment of Meg initially is rough, playful, teasing: he's an ersatz, scarpegrace Oedipus to her boardinghouse Jocasta. But once she makes the fateful, mood-changing revelation - 'I've got to get things in for the two gentlemen' - he's as dangerous as a cornered animal. He affects a wanton grandeur with his talk of a European concert tour. He projects his own fear on to Meg by terrorising her with stories of nameless men coming to abduct her in a van. In his first solo encounter with McCann, he tries to win him over by appealing to a shared past (Maidenhead, Fuller's tea shop, Boots library) and a borrowed patriotism ('I know Ireland very well. I've many friends there. I love that country and I admire and trust its people... I think their policemen are wonderful'). At the start of the interrogation he resists Goldberg's injunction to sit down and at the end of it he knees him in the stomach. And in the panic of the party, he attempts to strangle Meg and rape Lulu. These are hardly the actions of a supine victim. Even though Stanley is finally carried off shaven, besuited, white-collared and ostensibly tamed, the spirit of resistance is never finally quelled. When asked how he regards the prospect of being able to 'make or break' in the integrated outer world, he does not stay limply silent, but produces the most terrifying noises.

Sister didn't have to make a special valentine for Billy Grizzwold. She found the perfect one for him at the card store. It showed a scary-looking Frankenbear-type monster with a bolt on each side of his neck. It said: Monsters come in every shape and size. But when it comes to creepy, you take the prize! She'd sign it, "Guess Who." She couldn't wait to see Billy's face when he opened it at the class Valentine's Day party. But Sister forgot to watch when Billy opened her valentine because among the valentines she received was one that took her breath away. It was all hearts and flowers and inside it said, “Will you be my special friend?” “Wow!” said Lizzy Bruin. “It must have cost a whole dollar!” “It’s signed, ‘Guess who,’” said Sister. “Who do you suppose it’s from?” “Well, I know who you hope it’s from,” said Lizzy. “If somebody sent me a beautiful valentine that cost a whole dollar, I’d sure want to know who it was from. There’s Herbie over by the punch bowl. Go ask him.” Sister started for the punch bowl, but Billy Grizzwold blocked her way. He had the valentine Sister had sent him. “I’ll be glad to get you some punch,” said Billy. “And throw it down my back?” said Sister. “No, nothing like that,” said Billy. “I’m sorry about all the stuff I did. And I really don’t blame you for sending me this. It’s really pretty funny. How’d you like that valentine I sent you?” “You sent me?” said Sister. “You sent me this valentine?” “Yep,” said Billy. “I saved up for weeks to get it.” Sister was confused. She didn’t know what to say, so she just said, “Thanks.

Why has this happened? In brief, the state has grown into a cancer – a leveling monster that cannot be restrained. It cannot be restrained because it is the product of our own making. We are the authors of this profligacy; and I fear that in our present state of degeneracy we are more likely to join the party of plunder than rally to fiscal sanity. Who is bold enough to propose austerity at the present time? How many baby boomers, now retiring, would readily forego their Medicare and Social Security in order to save the federal budget? The answer must be a very low number indeed.

That's a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon phenomenon, in the English speaking world and the United States. One dream of anarchism—and the only kind that survived—was ultra-right anarchism, which you see in the libertarian parry, which is just loved by the big corporations and the investment firms and so on. Not that they believe in it. They know perfectly well that they'll never get rid of the state because they need it for their own purposes, but they love to use this as an ideological weapon against everyone else. So the libertarian parry is very warmly accepted within mainstream business circles who really ridicule it privately because they know perfectly well that they're not going to survive without a massive state subsidy, so they want a powerful state. But they like the libertarian ideology which they can use as a battering ram against everyone else. If you actually pursued the ideals of the libertarian party you would create the worst totalitarian monster that the world has ever seen. Actually, I have lots of personal friends there. For years, the only journals I could write in were ultra-right libertarian journals because we agree on a lot of things. For example, we agree on the opposition to American imperialism. For example, nobody would publish the first article that I was able to write on East Timor. They published it, back in the late seventies. That's the only article that appeared in the United States on the subject in the seventies. They also published many other things and we remained personal friends. Although there is a big area of difference.

He reaches out for the cup on the sink, and I notice the thin lines on his wrists. It's only now that he's not wearing a jumper in the bright, unnatural kitchen light that I can see them. He sees me looking. "Life's a party." I don't say anything and he laughs, tapping me on the arm before getting another cup for himself and making the tea.

That dog’s smarter than I am.” She winked at Ash, and Ashley giggled. Then she left the house. Kristin gazed through the window and in the near distance, saw Rick, Madison, Danny and Quincy on their boat coming into dock. She immediately understood what her daughter hadn’t voiced. The dog’s real family was here now. Ashley would be left out. “The hordes will want lunch, so I’ve got to leave,” said Cathy. “I came over to invite you guys to supper. We’ll grill outside - very informal. I hope you can make it.” Kristin did not have a social calendar, but neither was she sure about having Rick’s “hands-on” family in her personal life. Still, after last night’s get together, it was probably too late for keeping many secrets. “What can we bring to the party?” “Oh, goody!” Cathy was back in form. “Rick will be happy.” The two women walked outside in time to see Quincy race toward Ashley and cover her with kisses. “Ugh!” Ashley protested. “You’re all wet and yucky, Quince.” She stepped back. “You would be too if you kept jumping in the lake for a swim.” Rick joined them, tee shirt soaked, hair standing on end. Eyes bright. He jerked his head toward his sister. “From now on, it’s either the hound or your monsters. Not both.” She punched him lightly on the arm. “Sure, sure, sure. When I see it, I’ll believe it. Ricky, the kids play you the way you play a fish - pulling in the line, letting it out, pulling it in until they catch you. And they always catch you.” She grinned at Kristin. “A real fish might escape, but this fish doesn’t have a chance with the kids. He

When are voters in both political parties going to realize that politics is a two-way street? The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government. Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.

Who the fuck throws beholders at a first level party?” I snapped. “The whole concept of a random monster encounter is that it neither need be fair nor level appropriate.

First: Spend at least six hours getting ready. Study yourself in the mirror at home. Is your hairdo media-friendly? Will your outfit read in black and white? Does your “look” inspire at least two clever sound bites?

Some of the villagers were excellent cooks. They made baked potatoes, cakes, rabbit stews and steaks. It was all so delicious, and I totally pigged out. I was being a little fatty, but I didn’t care. We deserved it. We had earned it after all that digging and building. So, I ate to my heart’s content. Then I partied and mingled with everyone. Not before long, night came upon us. We were all standing outside when we heard the noises from monsters increase little by little. Everyone was anxious and worried about the monsters breaking through the dirt wall. So, I ran to the top of the tower to check out the enemy. From my elevation, I saw the horde of monsters outside our newly built wall. They were clawing and

Lenin had created the conditions for the rise of Stalin, but like Dr Frankenstein the monster outgrew him. He suffered a cerebral haemorrhage on 24 May 1922 and from this time forward his involvement in political affairs was sporadic. Too late he realised, on 25 December 1922, that Stalin represented a real threat to the stability of the Party. He penned a postscript to his famous “Testament”. This called for the removal of Stalin as General Secretary but significantly not from the Politburo. Despite Lenin’s request, the “Testament” was only discussed in the Central Committee, and Stalin’s offer to resign as General Secretary was rejected by Zinoviev and Kamenev. They had now formed a triumvirate with him, and during Lenin’s illness Zinoviev had assumed nominal leadership of the Party. Fearing that any demotion of Stalin would lead to the elevation of Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev not only supported him, but hushed up the letters of Lenin.

All he’s ever said is that he wants things to go back to the way they were before, when Euronext came to his house for parties and no one thought he was a monster. He could have been angry with you for the lies you told about him, but he isn’t. Even after everything, he wants to be part of this village, and I think that makes him a better person than any of us, don’t you?

Getting It Right" Your ankles make me want to party, want to sit and beg and roll over under a pair of riding boots with your ankles hidden inside, sweating beneath the black tooled leather; they make me wish it was my birthday so I could blow out their candles, have them hung over my shoulders like two bags full of money. Your ankles are two monster-truck engines but smaller and lighter and sexier than a saucer with warm milk licking the outside edge; they make me want to sing, make me want to take them home and feed them pasta, I want to punish them for being bad and then hold them all night long and say I’m sorry, sugar, darling, it will never happen again, not in a million years. Your thighs make me quiet. Make me want to be hurled into the air like a cannonball and pulled down again like someone being pulled into a van. Your thighs are two boats burned out of redwood trees. I want to go sailing. Your thighs, the long breath of them under the blue denim of your high-end jeans, could starve me to death, could make me cry and cry. Your ass is a shopping mall at Christmas, a holy place, a hill I fell in love with once when I was falling in love with hills. Your ass is a string quartet, the northern lights tucked tightly into bed between a high-count-of-cotton sheets. Your back is the back of a river full of fish; I have my tackle and tackle box. You only have to say the word. Your back, a letter I have been writing for fifteen years, a smooth stone, a moan someone makes when his hair is pulled, your back like a warm tongue at rest, a tongue with a tab of acid on top; your spine is an alphabet, a ladder of celestial proportions. I am navigating the North and South of it. Your armpits are beehives, they make me want to spin wool, want to pour a glass of whiskey, your armpits dripping their honey, their heat, their inexhaustible love-making dark. I am bright yellow for them. I am always thinking about them, resting at your side or high in the air when I’m pulling off your shirt. Your arms of blue and ice with the blood running to make them believe in God. Your shoulders make me want to raise an arm and burn down the Capitol. They sing to each other underneath your turquoise slope-neck blouse. Each is a separate bowl of rice steaming and covered in soy sauce. Your neck is a skyscraper of erotic adult videos, a swan and a ballet and a throaty elevator made of light. Your neck is a scrim of wet silk that guides the dead into the hours of Heaven. It makes me want to die, your mouth, which is the mouth of everything worth saying. It’s abalone and coral reef. Your mouth, which opens like the legs of astronauts who disconnect their safety lines and ride their stars into the billion and one voting districts of the Milky Way. Darling, you’re my President; I want to get this right! Matthew Dickman, The New Yorker: Poems | August 29, 2011 Issue

While I was getting boogers wiped in my hair during Biology, he was being spit on in Social Studies. A common story. But there was a day, a sunny day in May, I’m sure, when at exactly 2 P.M., we both looked out of the window of our different schools and … What? We didn’t wish—wishes are wasted … We didn’t hope—because our future was inevitable … And we didn’t pray—we were on our own. So we sent out energy bullets: “This is for New York.” “This is for when I get there.” Little pockets of energy, to be saved and accumulated and used upon arrival. I was so scared it was all going to be gone by the time I got there. Ninth grade, tenth grade—can’t this thing go any faster? In the magazine, there were funny people with funny names like John Sex, who had wild white hair and a snake!—and didn’t that just open up a kaleidoscope of new possibilities? And how long the years are—endless! And the minutiae of your daily life! So tedious, when there are BIG THINGS happening a thousand miles away. And when you go to bed at night, it’s hard to believe those people, those fabulous, daunting people, are out there right now! So we wait, and we endure, and someday we will be there, and we will make it. And, by golly, we did.

I wasn’t… I’m not like that, the girl you met at that party. I’ve never killed anyone before in my life.” “Well, we all start somewhere, love.

I’m surprised to see you here, though. Without a pair of handcuffs, that is.” “I can assure you my bedroom habits have nothing to do with what parties I attend.

What did that make Adam? Watching his dad choose the monster, seeing his brother lie down for the demon, how could he want to party too?

Who, me? He said it like I was a detective who always ran into murders wherever she went, or an anime protagonist who’s always stirring up chains of battles with powerful baddies. Nah, I was just your average fifteen-year-old girl in a bear onesie who’d been summoned to this other world by a god. The only trouble I’d stirred up was the tunnel to Mileela and the 10,000 monsters and the stuff at Misa’s birthday party when I’d gone to beat the crap out of people! Which, uh…hmm. Okay, considering how little time I’d actually been here, when you think about it, maybe that did count for a lot of incidents. Now I just felt guilty.

Instinct tells me to fall deep into a well of silence. Keep your meth-fired mouth shut, it commands. [Oh, just try that with the monster screaming, Let's party!]

There was no way to predict how people would take news that required them to shift their paradigms. Most of the time such news just bounced off them, the way horrific shite about a candidate bounces off a party’s faithful because they can’t face the fact that they voted for a monster and they may in fact be monsters themselves. Easier to just deny it all, call it fake news. No introspection required.

It says something about the mood of the time that a New Labour government with an overwhelming parliamentary majority and nearly 11 million voters at the 2001 elections should nonetheless have been moved to respond in this way to the propaganda of a neo-Fascist clique which attracted the support of just 48,000 electors in the country at large: one-fifth of 1 percent of the vote and only 40,000 more votes than the Monster Raving Loony Party. France

contrast, despite the moral and financial bankruptcy of Wall Street, the Obama administration had shrunk from a decisive confrontation with money power. The consequences, Krugman believed, were serious: ‘My sense is that in the face of this catastrophe, people needed some sign, a kind of symbolic sense of who was to blame.’71 By failing to define an enemy, Obama helped create a political monster, the Tea Party, ‘that’s now come and bitten him. If you’re not going to point fingers at the people who actually caused the problem, then those fingers may end up pointed at you.

You okay, Ruthie?" Oh, just throwing up in my mouth. "Did she just give you her number?" He chuckles. "Indeed. She insisted I write down her contact information so I can send her a message." Isn't that cute. "Lucky you." Kazex's smile fades as he studies me. "You sure you're all right? You look troubled." I hate seeing the happiness fade from his face. I hate that I'm the big party pooper for the day. It just makes how I'm feeling worse. I'm the problem, not Kazex. He doesn't owe me anything. "I ate something that disagreed with me. Tell the others I'm going back to the ship, all right?" A look of concern crosses his face. "I'll come with you⁠—" I put a hand up, silencing him. He's going to be kind and friendly and patient like he always is, and I'll just lose it even more. "I don't need you." When he flinches, I feel like a monster. God, I'm just making this worse by the moment. "I'm going back alone. You find the others. I'll see you back home.

An Austrian national who was said to be obsessed with Jews, Bishop Hudal moved about Rome throughout the war in a chauffeured car that flew the flag of Greater Germany. Two and a half years after the Allied victory, he hosted a Christmas party attended by hundreds of Nazi war criminals living in Rome under his protection. With Hudal’s help, many would find sanctuary in South America. Adolf Eichmann received assistance from Bishop Hudal, as did Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Treblinka extermination camp. All with the knowledge and tacit support of Pope Pius XII, who believed such monsters to be a valuable asset in the global fight against Soviet communism.

It’s a theory I have. That people don’t change; sometimes their mask slips off and you see the real person they are.” He tapped on the mug shot. “The monster behind the mask.” Sometimes it’s not the people that change. It’s the mask that falls off.

For the first generations to confront the reality of dinosaurs, much of the fascination with the towering creatures had the same tangled roots that it does for six-year-olds today. These were the ideal sort of monsters—big, scary, and, best of all, dead.