Pox For Quotes

Astriola. That IS demon pox. You had evidence that demon pox existed and you didnt mention it to me! Et tu, Brute!' He rolled up the paper and hit Jem over the head with it.

Demon pox, oh demon pox Just how is it acquired? One must go down to the bad part of town Until one is very tired. Demon pox, oh demon pox, I had it all along— Not the pox, you foolish blocks, I mean this very song— For I was right, and you were wrong!" "Will!" Charlotte shouted over the noise, "Have you LOST YOUR MIND? CEASE THAT INFERNAL RACKET! Jem—" Jem, rising to his feet, clapped his hands over Will's mouth. "Do you promise to be quiet?" he hissed into his friend's ear. Will nodded, blue eyes blazing. Tessa was staring at him in amazement; they all were. She had seen Will many things—amused, bitter, condescending, angry, pitying—but never giddy before. Jem let him go. "All right, then." Will slid to the floor, his back against the armchair, and threw up his arms. "A demon pox on all your houses!" he announced, and yawned. "Oh, God, weeks of pox jokes," said Jem. "We're in for it now.

Gabriel’s green eyes sought Will. “It was demon pox, wasn’t it? You know all about it, don’t you? Aren’t you some sort of expert?” “Well, you needn’t act as if I invented it,” said Will.

Demon pox, oh, demon pox, Just how is it acquired? One must go down to the bad part of town Until one is very tired. Demon pox, oh, demon pox I had it all along— No, not the pox, you foolish blocks, I mean this very song— For I was right, and you were wrong!

Oh, leave it,” said Jem, kicking Will, not without affection, lightly on the ankle. “She’s annexed my plan!” “Will,” Tessa said firmly. “Do you care more about the plan being enacted or about getting credit for it?” Will pointed a finger at her. “That,” he said. “The second one.

Will: "Nice place to live, isn't it? Let's hope they left something behind other than filth. Forwarding addresses, a few severed limbs, a prostitute or two ..." Jem: "Indeed. Perhaps, if we're fortunate, we can still catch syphilis." "Or demon pox," Will suggested cheerfully, trying the door under the stairs.

Will: Have you ever seen what happens to someone with demon pox? First it lies dormant. One begins to turn yellow and green. Then the swelling sets in - Jem: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS DEMON POX.

I cannot go to school today" Said little Peggy Ann McKay. "I have the measles and the mumps, A gash, a rash and purple bumps. My mouth is wet, my throat is dry. I'm going blind in my right eye. My tonsils are as big as rocks, I've counted sixteen chicken pox. And there's one more - that's seventeen, And don't you think my face looks green? My leg is cut, my eyes are blue, It might be the instamatic flu. I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke, I'm sure that my left leg is broke. My hip hurts when I move my chin, My belly button's caving in. My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained, My 'pendix pains each time it rains. My toes are cold, my toes are numb, I have a sliver in my thumb. My neck is stiff, my voice is weak, I hardly whisper when I speak. My tongue is filling up my mouth, I think my hair is falling out. My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight, My temperature is one-o-eight. My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear, There's a hole inside my ear. I have a hangnail, and my heart is ... What? What's that? What's that you say? You say today is .............. Saturday? G'bye, I'm going out to play!

Their grandchildren had reminded Will of the song about demon pox he had taught them- when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought- and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie.

Will!" Charlotte threw up her hands. "Why didn't you say so?" "You know, the books on demon pox are in the library," Will said with an injured tone. "I wasn't preventing anyone from reading them

Forsooth, I no longer toil in vain, To prove that demon pox warps the brain. So though 'ti pity, it's not in vain That the pox-ridden worm was slain: For to believe in me, you all must deign.

Jem raised his hand, and his witchlight flared into life, frightening a group of blackbeetles. They scurried across the floor, causing Will to grimace. “Nice place to live, isn’t it? Let’s hope they left something behind other than filth. Forwarding addresses, a few severed limbs, a prostitute or two…” “Indeed. Perhaps, if we’re fortunate, we can still catch syphilis.” “Or demon pox,” Will suggested cheerfully, trying the door under the stairs. It swung open, unlocked as the front door had been. “There’s always demon pox.” “Demon pox does not exist.” “Oh ye of little faith,” said Will, disappearing into the darkness under the stairs.

And maybe it would have bitten you in half," said Will. "What you are describing, the transformation into a demon, is the last stage of the pox." "Will!" Charlotte threw up her hands. "Why didn't you say so?" "You know, the books on demon pox are in the library," Will said with an injured tone. "I wasn't preventing anyone from reading them." "Yes, but if Benedict was going to turn into an enormous serpent, you'd think you could at least have mentioned it," said Charlotte. "As a matter of general interest.

Demon pox. There's always demon pox.

Scummer, pox and wound rot!" roared Tunstall, slamming his fist down on the bed. "Gods cursed the pig-tarsed mammering craven currish beef-witted bum-licking gut-griping louts that did this to me! May every flea, leech and hookworm in all creation find and feast upon them!

I was just thinking of bundling up Cecily and feeding her to the ducks at Hyde Park," said Will, pushing his wet hair back and favoring Jem with a rare smile. "I could use your assistance." "Unfortunately, you may have to delay your plans for suicide a bit longer. Gabriel Lightwood is downstairs, and I have two words for you. Two of your favorite words, at least when you put them together." "'Utter simpleton'?" inquired Will. "'Worthless upstart'?" Jem grinned. "'Demon pox,'" he said.

blemish,n. The slight acne scars. The penny-sized, penny-shaped birthmark right above your knee. The dot below your shoulder that must have been from when you had chicken pox in third grade. The scratch on your neck- did I do that? This brief transcript of moments, written on the body, is so deeply satisfying to read.

Demon pox,' said Will with the satisfaction of the truly vindicated.

Demon pox, oh demon pox Just how is it acquired? One must go down to the bad part of town Until one is very tired. Demon pox, oh demon pox, I had it all along— Not the pox, you foolish blocks, I mean this very song— For I was right, and you were wrong!

The wish of death had been palpably hanging over this otherwise idyllic paradise for a good many years. All business and politics is personal in the Philippines. If it wasn't for the cheap beer and lovely girls one of us would spend an hour in this dump. They [Jehovah's Witnesses] get some kind of frequent flyer points for each person who signs on. I'm not lazy. I'm just motivationally challenged. I'm not fat. I just have lots of stored energy. You don't get it do you? What people think of you matters more than the reality. Marilyn. Despite standing firm at the final hurdle Marilyn was always ready to run the race. After answering the question the woman bent down behind the stand out of sight of all, and crossed herself. It is amazing what you can learn in prison. Merely through casual conversation Rick had acquired the fundamentals of embezzlement, fraud and armed hold up. He wondered at the price of honesty in a grey world whose half tones changed faster than the weather. The banality of truth somehow always surprises the news media before they tart it up. You've ridden jeepneys in peak hour. Where else can you feel up a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl without even trying? [Ralph Winton on the Philippines finer points] Life has no bottom. No matter how bad things are or how far one has sunk things can always get worse. You could call the Oval Office an information rain shadow. In the Philippines, a whole layer of criminals exists who consider that it is their right to rob you unhindered. If you thwart their wicked desires, to their way of thinking you have stolen from them and are evil. There's honest and dishonest corruption in this country. Don't enjoy it too much for it's what we love that usually kills us. The good guys don't always win wars but the winners always make sure that they go down in history as the good guys. The Philippines is like a woman. You love her and hate her at the same time. I never believed in all my born days that ideas of truth and justice were only pretty words to brighten a much darker and more ubiquitous reality. The girl was experiencing the first flushes of love while Rick was at least feeling the methadone equivalent. Although selfishness and greed are more ephemeral than the real values of life their effects on the world often outlive their origins. Miriam's a meteor job. Somewhere out there in space there must be a meteor with her name on it. Tsismis or rumours grow in this land like tropical weeds. Surprises are so common here that nothing is surprising. A crooked leader who can lead is better than a crooked one who can't. Although I always followed the politics of Hitler I emulate the drinking habits of Churchill. It [Australia] is the country that does the least with the most. Rereading the brief lines that told the story in the manner of Fox News reporting the death of a leftist Rick's dark imagination took hold. Didn't your mother ever tell you never to trust a man who doesn't drink? She must have been around twenty years old, was tall for a Filipina and possessed long black hair framing her smooth olive face. This specter of loveliness walked with the assurance of the knowingly beautiful. Her crisp and starched white uniform dazzled in the late-afternoon light and highlighted the natural tan of her skin. Everything about her was in perfect order. In short, she was dressed up like a pox doctor’s clerk. Suddenly, she stopped, turned her head to one side and spat comprehensively into the street. The tiny putrescent puddle contrasted strongly with the studied aplomb of its all-too-recent owner, suggesting all manner of disease and decay.

You can not make someone love you. You can not be thin enough or white enough or famous enough. The choice is entirely the other person's. Then again, you might try hypnosis.

I’ve seen you naked before, Maddie.” Her mouth dropped open. “You have not seen me completely naked, thank you very much.” His eyes glittered. “Actually, once before I have, when you were like five. You ran through the house buck-ass naked when you had chicken pox.” “Oh, dear God, why do you remember these things?” She was going to drown herself, right here in the tub.

Demon pox," said Sophie. "Mr. Lightwood's got it, has had for years, and it'll kill him in a right couple of months if he doesn't get the cure. And Mortmain said he can get it for him." The room exploded in a hubbub. Charlotte raced over to Sophie; Henry called after her; Will leaped from his chair and was dancing in a circle.

The question is not why fools fall in love. It is expected of them. When "smart" people fall in love - that's the problem.

People who read books in public places are regarded with suspicion because they appear self-sufficient. When you seem self-sufficient, other people think that you think you're better than them, and they get resentful.

A pox of unique human diseases--many of which cause an uncomfortable swelling--come upon you!

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Marriage is a contract. Love is non-negotiable.

Beware of those who have never been bored, depressed, or angry. There is something seriously wrong with them.

When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world

A pox on all meads!

You know the stories of my grandfather, I am sure?” Jesse asked. Lucie raised an eyebrow. “The one who turned into a great worm because of demon pox, and was slain by my father and uncles?” “I feared your parents would not have considered it the kind of tale suitable for a young lady’s ears,” said Jesse. “I see that was an idle concern.” “They tell it every Christmas,” said Lucie smugly.

Whining is a form of manipulation. People will give anything to make you shut up.

At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.

What does not kill you will make you stronger and more cynical.

At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

One of the advantages of having an imaginary boyfriend is that he exists only for you, therefore he can not be stolen. The disadvantage is that you can not introduce him to your friends.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched as they grew into crises.

Life is a series of random collisions.

In relationships it is best to assume nothing.

A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable dog!

I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn't have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chicken pox. You think it's going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn't have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy forever, and I didn't want that.

Greasy food might not be good for your body, but it does wonders for the soul. A healthy diet may prolong your life, but what would you have to live for? What is the point of living to a hundred if you have to subsist on bland food? One may as well die of boredom.

Everyone declares that love is irrational, and yet everytime this statement is proven correct, they profess amazement. They seem to assume that love will make an exception in their case. It never does.

I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.

We are all the same in that we all want to be different.

The more "normal" the person seems, the sicker she probably is.

Maybe Ridley was like chicken pox; you could only catch it once.

He’ll catch the pox someday,” Pandora persisted darkly, “if he hasn’t already. And then he’ll give it to me.” “You’re being dramatic. And not all rakes have the pox.” “I’m going to ask him if he does.” “Pandora, you wouldn’t! The poor man would be horrified.” “So would I, if I ended up losing my nose.

We like to think that all people have hidden depths, but the fact is that a lot of people are shallow. The vast majority don't have an opinion until they tune in to AM radio or read the papers. Then they become social critics.

The whole idea of it makes me feel like I'm coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light-- a kind of measles of the spirit, a mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number. It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I could shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.

Father . . . ," Gabriel began. "Father is a worm." Will gave a short laugh. He was in gear as if he had just come from the practice room, and his hair curled damply against his temples. He was not looking at Tessa, but she had grown used to that. Will hardly ever looked at her unless he had to. "It's good to see you've come round to our view of things, Gabriel, but this is an unusual way of announcing it." Gideon shot Will a reproachful look before turning back to his brother. "What do you mean, Gabriel? What did Father do?" Gabriel shook his head. "He's a worm," he said again, tonelessly. "I know. He has brought shame on the name of Lightwood, and lied to both of us. He shamed and destroyed our mother. But we need not be like him." Gabriel pulled away from his brother's grip, his teeth suddenly flashing in an angry scowl. "You're not listening to me," he said. "He's a worm. A worm. A bloody great serpentlike thing. Since Mortmain stopped sending the medicine, he's been getting worse. Changing. Those sores upon his arms, they started to cover him. His hands, his neck, h-his face . . ." Gabriel's green eyes sought Will. "It was the pox, wasn't it? You know all about it, don't you? Aren't you some sort of expert?" "Well, you needn't act as if I invented it," said Will. "Just because I believed it existed. There are accounts of it—old stories in the library—

Someday you will look back on all the awful stuff that's happening to you, and fondly smile. Doesn't say much about the future, does it?

While being madly in love is fun, perhaps one should aspire to be sanely in love.

[Calvin, who has the chicken pox, calls Susie on the telephone.] Susie: Hello? Calvin: Hi, Susie! It's me, Calvin! I was wondering if you'd like to come over and play. Susie: Why, sure! Boy, I don't think you've ever invited me to... Calvin's Mom: Calvin, what are you doing? Calvin: Nothing, Mom. Go away. Calvin's Mom: You're contagious! You can't have anyone over to play! Calvin: Shhhh! Shhhh! You'll spoil the whole thing! I was going to trick Susie into catching... HEY! OW! LET GO! Susie: [Hanging up the phone] Any chance of getting transferred, Dad?

...they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver's mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

It had been June, the bright hot summer of 1937, and with the curtains thrown back the bedroom had been full of sunlight, sunlight and her and Will's children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews- Cecy's blue eyed boys, tall and handsome, and Gideon and Sophie's two girls- and those who were as close as family: Charlotte, white- haired and upright, and the Fairchild sons and daughters with their curling red hair like Henry's had once been. The children had spoken fondly of the way he had always loved their mother, fiercely and devotedly, the way he had never had eyes for anyone else, and how their parents had set the model for the sort of love they hoped to find in their own lives. They spoke of his regard for books, and how he had taught them all to love them too, to respect the printed page and cherish the stories that those pages held. They spoke of the way he still cursed in Welsh when he dropped something, though he rarely used the language otherwise, and of the fact that though his prose was excellent- he had written several histories of the Shadowhunters when he's retired that had been very well respected- his poetry had always been awful, though that never stopped him from reciting it. Their oldest child, James, had spoken laughingly about Will's unrelenting fear of ducks and his continual battle to keep them out of the pond at the family home in Yorkshire. Their grandchildren had reminded him of the song about demon pox he had taught them- when they were much too young, Tessa had always thought- and that they had all memorized. They sang it all together and out of tune, scandalizing Sophie. With tears running down her face, Cecily had reminded him of the moment at her wedding to Gabriel when he had delivered a beautiful speech praising the groom, at the end of which he had announced, "Dear God, I thought she was marrying Gideon. I take it all back," thus vexing not only Cecily and Gabriel but Sophie as well- and Will, though too tired to laugh, had smiled at his sister and squeezed her hand. They had all laughed about his habit of taking Tessa on romantic "holidays" to places from Gothic novels, including the hideous moor where someone had died, a drafty castle with a ghost in it, and of course the square in Paris in which he had decided Sydney Carton had been guillotined, where Will had horrified passerby by shouting "I can see the blood on the cobblestones!" in French.

Let’s try it,” he said. “This is serious,” she said. “You could get hurt. Or die.” “But if we can touch, that means we can make out, right?” he asked. “Maybe.” “You want me to risk my life for maybe?” He grinned.

People will hate you for no apparent reason.

The reason men rule is because women let them.

We don't really have a movie industry; we have a trailer industry. The movie guys make five minutes worth of stuff to get people in the theatre, and eighty-five minutes of filler.

No disease is more dangerous than a bad husband, for if a woman catches that Pox, she'll languish from it her entire life.

Empedolces claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebrae; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken

As you go through life, you learn many lessons. Unfortunately these lessons only apply to the specific instances in which you learned them. Therefore you can expect to make horrible mistakes no matter how long you live.

The reason producers make stupid movies is because there are stupid people who will pay to see them.

The expression "madly in love" is apt, for it describes a form of temporary insanity.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie--I found that out. So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter--and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote: Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. HUCK FINN. I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.

Uncle Will frequently gave dramatic readings from the book he was writing on demon pox, which were very droll

Never, ever point out that a woman is eating too much.

He'd tell me love was like the chicken pox, a thing to get through early because it could really kill you in your later years.

Will you keep me safe?” she whispered. ”I promise.” ”Then I’ll go anywhere with you.

A pox on both his testicles! (Esperetta)

Dear five-year-old, What the fuck is wrong with you? Normal children don’t have dead imaginary friends. Normal children don’t pick open every single one of their chicken pox scabs and then stand naked and bleeding in the darkened doorway to their bedroom until someone walks past and asks what they are doing. Furthermore, normal children don’t respond by saying, “I wanted to know what all my blood would look like.” Normal children also don’t watch their parents sleep from the corner of the room. Mom was really scarred by The Exorcist when she was younger, and she doesn’t know how to cope with your increasingly creepy behavior. Please stop. Please, please stop.

Unfortunately, you may have to delay your plans for sororicide a bit longer. Gabriel Lightwood is downstairs, and I have two words for you. Two of your favorte words, at least when you put them together. "'Utter simpleton'?" inquired Will. "'Worthless upstart'?" Jem grinned. "'Demon pox,"' he said.

What we call the wisdom that comes with age is usually simple caution.

NO MUSE IS GOOD MUSE To be an Artist you need talent, as well as a wife who washes the socks and the children, and returns phone calls and library books and types. In other words, the reason there are so many more Men Geniuses than Women Geniuses is not Genius. It is because Hemingway never joined the P.T.A. And Arthur Rubinstein ignored Halloween. Do you think Portnoy's creator sits through children's theater matinees--on Saturdays? Or that Norman Mailer faced 'driver's ed' failure, chicken pox or chipped teeth? Fitzgerald's night was so tender because the fender his teen-ager dented happened when Papa was at a story conference. Since Picasso does the painting, Mrs. Picasso did the toilet training. And if Saul Bellow, National Book Award winner, invited thirty-three for Thanksgiving Day dinner, I'll bet he had help. I'm sure Henry Moore was never a Cub Scout leader, and Leonard Bernstein never instructed a tricycler On becoming a bicycler just before he conducted. Tell me again my anatomy is not necessarily my destiny, tell me my hang-up is a personal and not a universal quandary, and I'll tell you no muse is a good muse unless she also helps with the laundry.

I vant to zuk your blood." He waved his black gloved hands above his head as he tried out his awful Transylvanian accent. "You vish," She replied.

You're murderers," she told the stunned crowd. "You killed him. He was a miracle, and you killed him. Now you've just got me. And I'm a curse.

I read it as if it had been written by someone else, although it was my own experience being recounted. The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. "Maniac-depressive illness." I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts in his land and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun,

Ashleigh’s a manipulative liar,” Jenny said. “She makes Dick Cheney look like Mr. Rogers.” “That is an ugly thing to say about Dick Cheney!” Dr. Goodling snapped. “And my daughter, as well.

We watched each other’s eyes. We were as strangers, in that moment — as intimate as strangers — for strangers know more of us, and can judge of us more without reproach than ever those we love.

I'm caught between wanting to smack the pox patches off this woman's face and to smack Percy because I'm still angry about our kiss. Perhaps I could get them both with a wide swing.

With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.

...for reading, once begun, quickly becomes home and circle and court and family, and indeed, without narrative, I felt exiled from my own country. By the transport of books, that which is most foreign becomes one's familiar walks and avenues; while that which is most familiar is removed to delightful strangeness; and unmoving, one travels infinite causeways, immobile and thus unfettered.

What exactly did we learn in kindergarten? Nothing we wouldn't have learned if we;d stayed home. Okay, we learned that sometimes, by the time you get to the bathroom, it's too late.

Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.

Few things in life are certain, and one of them is that you can turn on the television at three in the morning and someone will be singing and dancing on the Indian channel. Proof of Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence.

I have also read that the Pox was caused by accidentally coinciding climatic, economic, and sociological crises. It would be more honest to say that the Pox was caused by our own refusal to deal with obvious problems in those areas. We caused the problems: then we sat and watched

We must curb ourfury, and allow sadness to diminish, and speak our stories with coolness and deliberation.

...I meditated on the passage of time, and how it may be found in both a dry and a wet or gaseous state; how, though lush, it might be dessicated for storage.

I don’t care who the devil he is. He can go hang. She’s a pickle pocket. A pock picket. Pox on it, you know what I mean.” “Pickpockets

Venice is a Dorian Gray city. Somewhere up there in the world's attic, there's another place with the haggard, poxed and ravaged face of unspeakable evil. And I suspect it's Cardiff.

Oh! if to dance all night, and dress all day, Charm'd the small-pox, or chased old age away; Who would not scorn what housewife's cares produce, Or who would learn one earthly thing of use?

I have watched education become more a privilege of the rich than the basic necessity that it must be if civilized society is to survive. I have watched as convenience, profit, and inertia excused greater and more dangerous environmental degradation. I have watched poverty, hunger, and disease become inevitable for more and more people. Overall, the Pox has had the effect of an installment-plan World War III. In fact, there were several small, bloody shooting wars going on around the world during the Pox. These were stupid affairs—wastes of life and treasure. They were fought, ostensibly, to defend against vicious foreign enemies. All too often, they were actually fought because inadequate leaders did not know what else to do. Such leaders knew that they could depend on fear, suspicion, hatred, need, and greed to arouse patriotic support for war.

She opened her mouth, clamped it shut again. This was new, this sudden favor shown Gloucester, had been brought back with him from Burgundy like some malevolent foreign pox.

There are limits to self-improvement. Inevitably you hit the point where what you are is, well, what you are, and all the teach-yourself videos and easy-to-use equipment on those creatinous home TV shopping things can no longer ward off you confrontation with your self.

Each of these men, philosophers taking ethical measure of an age in which machines think faster than humans but regularly prove at least as flawed, repeatedly smack into a phenomenon that never troubled their intellectual predecessors: although humans have obviously survived every pox and meteor that nature has tossed at it until now, technology is something we toss back at our own peril. "On the bright side, it hasn't killed us yet either," says Nick Bostrom, who, when not refining doomsday data, researches how to extend the human life span.

Sex taken violently under threat is an emotional train wreck that derails not only the law but, more importantly, the sanctity of the soul. Rape strips its victim of her power to make determinations about perhaps the single most intrinsic value in her existence: the right to share intimacy. That loss of control and power of self-determination is a scar on the soul, a pox on the spirit. (58)

And so whether you were six with the chicken pox, nine with the flu, twelve with a broken arm, or fifteen with menstrual cramps, you could count on sixty solid minutes with the company of that old seventies set, lots of one-dollar bets, and advice to neuter your pet, all crunched into the best sick-day game show yet!

You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life as comfortably as possible, having a few decent drawings on the wall, and above all writing well. That's the important thing: well-made sentences...and then a few metaphors. Yes, a few metaphors. They embellish a man's existence.

Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!

Here she tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. 'If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,' Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chieftest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman's beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor fall from a mast-head. 'A pox on them!' she said, realizing for the first time what, in other circumstances, she would have been taught as a child, that is to say, the sacred responsibilities of womanhood...

Tyrion felt a pang of rage. “You fucking son of a pox-ridden ass,” he spat. “I hope you die of a bloody flux.

We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chicken-pox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that.

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom.

There is no cholera, no yellow-fever, no small-pox more contagious than debt.

Beauty patches were first used to cover pox marks then were gradually adopted purely for adornment. (Author’s collection)

Relatively few who could be described as a Red-haired dejenerate Pox-ridden Usuring Son of a Bitch who skulks in Brothels when not drunk and comitting Riot in the Street, I imagine.

There is no refreshment more gratifying to the soul than the sight of Nature in her summer finery, before the heat is at its most intense. She is soothing, but not soporific; intoxicating without inebriation.

[Andrei Sakharov] won his Nobel in 1975 for demanding a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. He, of course, had already tested his. His wife was a pediatrician! What sort of person could perfect a hydrogen bomb while married to a child-care specialist? What sort of physician would stay married to a mate that cracked? "Anything interesting happen at work today, honeybunch?" "Yes. My bomb is going to work just great. And how are you doing with that kid with chicken pox?

He held out the written pass. "This is what they want us to be," he said. "They want us to be nothing but a bill of sale and a letter explaining where we is and instructions for where we go and what we do. They want us empty. They want us flat as paper. They want to be able to carry our souls in their hands, and read them out loud in court. All the time, they're on the exploration of themselves, going on the inner journey into their own breast. But us, they want there to be nothing inside of. They want us to be writ on. They want us to be a surface. Look at me, I'm mahogany." I protested, "A man is known by his deeds." "Oh, that's sure," said Bono. "Just like a house is known by its deeds. The deeds say who owns it, who sold it, and who'll be buying a new one when it gets knocked down.

One feature of the usual script for plague: the disease invariably comes from somewhere else. The names for syphilis, when it began its epidemic sweep through Europe in the last decade of the fifteenth century are an exemplary illustration of the need to make a dreaded disease foreign. It was the "French pox" to the English, morbus Germanicus to the Parisians, the Naples sickness to the Florentines, the Chinese disease to the Japanese. But what may seem like a joke about the inevitability of chauvinism reveals a more important truth: that there is a link between imagining disease and imagining foreignness.

Music hath its land of origin; and yet it is also its own country, its own sovereign power, and all may take refuge there, and all, once settled, may claim it as their own, and all may meet there in amity; and these instruments, as surely as instruments of torture, belong to all of us.

In my fancy, you perch in the Cooperage & I smell the Peel of the Wood, & the Staves are around you & the white Hogsheads newly bound & the Shavings curled and looped upon the Floor, silver and gold--& you are eating a fat Mushroom.

...Often that which most we fear births the resolve that spurs us on to altitudes we could not have achieved, had we continued walking on our customary paths.

I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence. I do not know what we may do, to know another better.

The hafts of the tools were stained black with th sweat of us all, our contributions, black and white alike.

He says, "It's just a hat." But it's not just a hat. It makes Jess think of racism and hatred and systemic inequality, and the Ku Klux Klan, and plantation-wedding Pinterest boards, and lynchings, and George Zimmerman, and the Central Park Five, and redlining, and gerrymandering and the Southern strategy, and decades of propaganda and Fox News and conservative radio, and rabid evangelicals, and rape and pillage and plunder and plutocracy and money in politics and the dumbing down of civil discourse and domestic terrorism and white nationalists and school shootings and the growing fear of a nonwhite, non-English-speaking majority and the slow death of the social safety net and conspiracy theory culture and the white working class and social atomism and reality television and fake news and the prison-industrial complex and celebrity culture and the girl in fourth grade who told Jess that since she--Jess--was "naturally unclean" she couldn't come over for birthday cake, and executive compensation, and mediocre white men, and the guy in college who sent around an article about how people who listen to Radiohead are smarter than people who listen to Missy Elliott and when Jess said "That's racist" he said "No,it's not," and of bigotry and small pox blankets and gross guys grabbing your butt on the subway, and slave auctions and Confederate monuments and Jim Crow and fire hoses and separate but equal and racist jokes that aren't funny and internet trolls and incels and golf courses that ban women and voter suppression and police brutality and crony capitalism and corporate corruption and innocent children, so many innocent children, and the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and birthers and flat-earthers and states' rights and disgusting porn and the prosperity gospel and the drunk football fans who made monkey sounds at Jess outside Memorial Stadium, even though it was her thirteenth birthday, and Josh--now it makes her think of Josh.

I went to him & put my Hand upon his Shoulder. Said he to me, “God forgive me. Her Name — I never knew her Name.” Which meant not a Jot to me — and yet my Heart was the Thing that broke.

The world needed changing - that I knew. Global warming threatened to give us all a lethal tan; war and poverty decimated whole nations; crops worldwide were shriveling; even our brethren beasts menaced us with their monkey pox and bird flu and mad cow disease.

He was possessed of a belief that nothing existed, or to be more precise, that only when things were perceived could we be sure that they existed. He troubled himself in arguments, therefore, that when he was not in his chamber, and no one else was in his chamber, there was no one who could say beyond a shadow of a doubt that his desk still existed... or that the bed had not simply frayed into atoms...[Dr. 03-01] developed the habit of quietly leaving company quite suddenly and charging above-stairs to his bedchamber, throwing open the door, and crying "Ah ha!" He found, always, that matter had retained its dubious solidity in his absence; but this did not deter him.

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom." Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, reading this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us, consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all casualty, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still.

And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung.... Not simply words... and grammar... but melody. It was hard... thus... to learn English... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.

Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.

A man in a topiary maze cannot judge of the twistings and turnings, and which avenue might lead him to the heart; while one who stands above, on some pleasant prospect, looking down upon the labyrinth, is reduced to watching the bewildered circumnavigations of the tiny victim through obvious coils - as the gods, perhaps, looked down on besieged and blood-sprayed Troy from the safety of their couches, and thought mortals weak and foolish while they themselves reclined in comfort, and had only to snap to call Ganymade to theeir side with nectar decanted. So I, now, with the vantage of my years, am sensible of my foolishness, my blindness, as a child. I cannot think of my blunders without a shriveling of the inward parts - not merely the disiccation attendant on shame, but also the aggravation of remorse that I did not demand explanation, that I did not sooner take my mother by the hand, and- I do not know what I regret. I sit with my pen, and cannot find an end to that sentence.

Why Mr. Dickens, in his biography of that particular moment, preferred to focus on the adventures of the orphan parish child, Oliver Twist, remains a matter of speculation and mystery to all subsequent scribes of those long-departed times: of a London nearly two centuries gone, back when it was a pox-infested, grimy, depressing, fog-bound, class-favoring, sprawling, noxious, odorous, and overall distasteful place in which to live and breathe and sicken and die—as opposed to modern times, wherein the pox has been largely attended to; so that’s progress of a sort.

The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. “Manic-depressive illness.” I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts on his lands and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun.

I enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy.  I had no occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping, to procure the favour of any great man, or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire: here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders, or followers, of party and faction; no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no pride, vanity, or affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing-masters.

And that, despite the fact that we'd broken up seven years prior and I'd been the one to finally—firmly and permanently—walk away from him and on toward Henry, his engagement and upcoming wedding still ate away at my emotional landscape, as if him avowing himself to another woman was somehow a blight, a pox on me.

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world

Prince," says I, "it will go down the easier if you Chew." He did not respond; so I repeated my Instructions. Said he, "We take in the Flesh of other Beasts. We pack ourselves full of them. We are their Burial Ground." The Rest of us- his Mess- gaped. He reached into his Mouth, & removed the Gobbet; and placed the Gobbet on his Plate. He regarded the Plate balanced upon his skinny Knees; & all the life left him as he beheld that Mound of Flesh. Poor, unspeaking, tormented Creature.

Vanity ! vanity ! and vanity everywhere, even on the brink of the grave, and among men ready to die for the highest convictions. Vanity ! It must be that it is a characteristic trait, and a peculiar malady of our century. Why was nothing ever heard among the men of former days, of this passion, any more than of the small-pox or the cholera ? Why did Homer and Shakspeare talk of love, of glory, of suffering, while the literature of our age is nothing but an endless narrative of snobs and vanity ?

Demon pox,oh, demon pox, Just how is it acquired? One must go down to the bad part of town Until one is very tired. Demon pox, oh, demon pox I had it all along No, not the pox, you foolish blocks, I mean this very song For I was right, and you were wrong!

I attained a triumph so complete that it is now rare to meet an American with marks of small pox on his face... Benefits are valuable according to their duration and extent... but the benign remedy Vaccination saves millions of lives every century, like the [gift] of the sun, universal and everlasting. [Remark made near the end of his life]

And you said I had daddy issues," Ronan scoffed. "They're like chicken pox," she said. "More than one person can have them at a time.

My boy — we are a tiny race . . . involved in a vast pursuit . . . amidst the cold stars . . . and all bound together by reason and amity.

Awhile back, there was some sort of pox epidemic that killed a bunch of them and left a lot more infertile. New breeding stock. That’s how they see us.

The drink was almost certainly safe. He would probably get pleurisy, quinsy and pox from the cup.

Being young's a sort of sickness, Measles, mumps or chicken pox. Gather all your toys together, Lock them in a wooden box. That means tolchocks, crasting and dratsing, All of the things that suit a boy. When you build instead of busting, You can start your Ode to Joy. Do not be a clockwork orange, Freedom has a lovely voice. Here is good and there is badness, Look on both, then take your choice. Sweet in juice and hue and aroma, Let's not be changed to fruit machines. Choice is free but seldom easy- That's what human freedom means.

New England, would face no real Indian challenge. Indeed, the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm reception Plymouth enjoyed from the Wampanoags. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, was eager to ally with the Pilgrims because the plague had so weakened his villages that he feared the Narragansetts to the west.28 When a land conflict did develop between new settlers and old at Saugus in 1631, “God ended the controversy by sending the small pox amongst the Indians,” in the words of the Puritan minister Increase Mather. “Whole towns of them were swept away, in some of them not so much as one Soul escaping the Destruction.” 29 By the time the Native populations of New England had replenished themselves to some degree, it was too late to

Beside her, Death set down his tea. How do you feel about this woman? I could infect her with a light plague, perhaps. Or we could give her the pox? Blemished skin may do her vanity some good.

Measured against these disasters, we're just not that important. When Earth is done with us, it'll be like, "Well, that Human Pox wasn't great, but at least I didn't get Large Asteroid Syndrome.

It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will. Come, be a man: drown thyself! drown cats and blind puppies. I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness; I could never better stead thee than now. Put money in thy purse; follow thou the wars; defeat thy favour with an usurped beard; I say, put money in thy purse. It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor,—put money in thy purse,—nor he his to her: it was a violent commencement, and thou shalt see an answerable sequestration;—put but money in thy purse.—These Moors are changeable in their wills:—fill thy purse with money: the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as acerb as the coloquintida. She must change for youth: when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice: she must have change, she must: therefore put money in thy purse.—If thou wilt needs damn thyself, do it a more delicate way than drowning. Make all the money thou canst; if sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits and all the tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her; therefore make money. A pox of drowning thyself! it is clean out of the way: seek thou rather to be hanged in compassing thy joy than to be drowned and go without her.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid impact caused a dust cloud so huge that darkness may have pervaded Earth for two years, virtually stopping photosynthesis and leading to the extinction of 75 percent of land animals. Measured against these disasters, we're just not that important. When Earth is done with us, it'll be like, "Well, that Human Pox wasn't great, but at least I didn't get Large Asteroid Syndrome.

The whole idea of it makes me feel Like I’m coming down with something, Something worse than any stomach ache Or the headaches I get from reading in bad light – A kind of measles of the spirit A mumps of the psyche, A disfiguring chicken pox of the soul. You tell me it is too early to be looking back, But that is because you have forgotten The perfect simplicity of being one And the beautiful complexity introduced by two But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit At four I was an Arabian wizard I could make myself invisible By drinking a glass of milk a certain way. At seven I was a solider, at nine a prince. But now I am mostly at the window Watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly Against the side of my tree house, And my bicycle never leaned against the garage As it does today, All the dark blue speed drained out of it. This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, As I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imagry friends, Time to turn the first big number.

I know what I wish. I wish some Day that I might live by a River — one that is strong of current & silent; & above it, in the Pines, the Hawks shall call; & I shall live there in a small House of one Room & play the Violin, & Someone Else shall play the Harpsichord, & we will be far from all Human Habitation. We shall walk by the Banks of that River, & listen to the Buzzing of the Rushes, & that alone shall be our Company.

I’m sure Lord St. Vincent doesn’t have the pox,” Cassandra said. “From what I saw the other night, he has a perfectly handsome nose.” “He’ll catch the pox someday,” Pandora persisted darkly, “if he hasn’t already. And then he’ll give it to me.” “You’re being dramatic. And not all rakes have the pox.” “I’m going to ask him if he does.” “Pandora, you wouldn’t! The poor man would be horrified.” “So would I, if I ended up losing my nose.

You can turn your hand to anything, you clever girl, so do come and give me some advice, for I am in the depths of despair," said Fanny, when the "maid-of-all-work," as Polly called herself, found a leisure hour. "What is it? Moths in the furs, a smokey chimney, or small-pox next door?" asked Polly as they entered Fan's room, where Maud was trying on old bonnets before the looking glass. "Actually I have nothing to wear," began Fan impressively.

And I thought of the Transit of Venus: that though the bodies be vast and distant, and their motions occult, their hesitations retrograde, one could, I thought, with exceeding care and preparation, observe, and in their distance, know them, triangulate to arrive at the ambits of their motivation; and that in this calculation alone, one might banish uncertainty, and know at last what constituted other bodies, and how small the gulf that lies between us all.

The Christian mythologists tell us that Christ died for the sins of the world, and that he came on Purpose to die. Would it not then have been the same if he had died of a fever or of the small pox, of old age, or of anything else?

We believe that the body hath its rights — to move in a reasonable ambit — to raise, to lower its limbs — but across the face of this earth, there are every day those who suffer unforgivable torments, strapped or chained, confined in boxes or in the holds of ships. May the Lord remind me of this always as I walk free upon paths, and may I thus always give thanks unto Him for the strange, small gifts of gesture, of simple tasks done with requisite care and sphere of action.

And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

He found sarcasm to be an adequate defense in such moments. “I could have him killed at any time, my lord,” he said knowingly, his eyes bright. “But it would grieve me to make Elysabeth suffer. So I patiently wait for the man to get the pox.

Sick" "I cannot go to school today," Said little Peggy Ann McKay. "I have the measles and the mumps, A gash, a rash and purple bumps. My mouth is wet, my throat is dry, I'm going blind in my right eye. My tonsils are as big as rocks, I've counted sixteen chicken pox And there's one more--that's seventeen, And don't you think my face looks green? My leg is cut--my eyes are blue-- It might be instamatic flu. I cough and sneeze and gasp and choke, I'm sure that my left leg is broke-- My hip hurts when I move my chin, My belly button's caving in, My back is wrenched, my ankle's sprained, My 'pendix pains each time it rains. My nose is cold, my toes are numb. I have a sliver in my thumb. My neck is stiff, my voice is weak, I hardly whisper when I speak. My tongue is filling up my mouth, I think my hair is falling out. My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight, My temperature is one-o-eight. My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear, There is a hole inside my ear. I have a hangnail, and my heart is--what? What's that? What's that you say? You say today is. . .Saturday? G'bye, I'm going out to play!

I had to tell the school you both had chicken pox,” Charlotte, the twins’ mother, said. “I had to come up with a good excuse for why you had been gone for two weeks and thought ‘traveling in another dimension’ would probably raise a few eyebrows.

Jimmy liked to control his environment. He didn’t drink, so no one took a drink in his presence. He didn’t smoke, so nobody lit up around him. Sometimes he’d get all riled up. He’d get impatient and he’d do things that would remind you of a kid scratching chicken pox. You couldn’t tell him he was going to end up with pockmarks. You couldn’t say a word. You just listened. Jimmy

Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, “This too shall pass”—as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

Empedocles claims that in utero, our backbone is one long solid; and that through the constriction of the womb and the punishments of birth it must be snapped again and again to form our vertebræ; that for the child to have a spine, his back must first be broken.

The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges : the pox and Christianity. Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilisation by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society. Thus one understands that the healthy elements of the Roman world were proof against this doctrine. Yet Rome to-day allows itself to reproach Bolshevism with having destroyed the Christian churches! As if Christianity hadn't behaved in the same way towards the pagan temples.

The times, the seasons, the signs may have been mythical; but the sufferings were not. I lay in the dark with the breathing of men around me and knew that then, at that selfsame moment, where dawn groped across the sea, my brethren lay bound in ships, one body atop another, smelling of their green wounds and faeces; I knew in dark houses, there was torture, arms held down, firebrands approaching the soft skin of the belly or arm; and still - there is screaming in the night; there is flight; mothers sob for children they shall not see again; girls feel the weight of men atop them; men cry for their wives; boys dangle dead in the barn; and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap. It was for this that we labored and fought, risking our very lives.

Though day, the crickets called in the grass; my mother’s singing rose from the camp. I lifted my arms; I could not help it. The breeze itself was warm; the islands soft with moss; the loons calling melancholy in forgotten bays; and Life in all its operations seemed unspeakably generous.

In the modern world it is not bricks and roads, cannon and swords that define power. No; it is paper. Books of law, deeds of ownership, writs of forbiddance and permission. Titles of lordship, directives of the king's sub-Ministry for Associated Trade. Memoranda from that last desk alone could sink and shake kingdoms, decide the fates of thousands across the sea. Ink runs thicker than blood. Paper: more powerful than an army or the pox.

You aren’t a monster, Nivellen,” the witcher said dryly. “Pox, that’s something new. So what am I? Cranberry pudding? A flock of wild geese flying south on a sad November morning? No? Maybe I’m the virtue that a miller’s buxom daughter lost in spring? Well, Geralt, tell me what I am. Can’t you see I’m shaking with curiosity?

Black seamen - or "Black Jacks" as African sailors were known - enjoyed a refreshing world of liberty and equality. Even if they were generally regulated to jobs such as cooks, servants, and muscians and endured thier fellow seamen's racism, they were still freemen in the Royal Navy. One famous black sailor wrote, "I liked this little ship very much. I now became the captian's steward, in which I was very happy; for I was extremely well treated by all on board, and I had the leisure to improve myself in reading and writing.

They say, still, that no Wizarding duel ever matched that between Dumbledore and Grindelwald in 1945. Those who witnessed it have written of the terror and the awe they felt as they watched these two extraordinary wizards do battle. Dumbledore’s triumph, and its consequences for the Wizarding world, are considered a turning point in magical history to match the introduction of the International Statute of Secrecy or the downfall of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Albus Dumbledore was never proud or vain; he could find something to value in anyone, however apparently insignificant or wretched, and I believe that his early losses endowed him with great humanity and sympathy. I shall miss his friendship more than I can say, but my loss is as nothing compared to the Wizarding world’s. That he was the most inspiring and the best loved of all Hogwarts headmasters cannot be in question. He died as he lived: working always for the greater good and, to his last hour, as willing to stretch out a hand to a small boy with dragon pox as he was on the day that I met him.

There is no cholera, no yellow-fever, no small-pox, more contagious than debt.

and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap. It

That is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide: death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands. ... black people did not die ... the decedent ... took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate.

It's like this, Bunny Boy, if you walk up to an oak tree or a bloody elm or something - you know, one of those big bastards - one with a thick, heavy trunk with giant roots that grow deep in the soil and great branches that are covered in leaves, right, and you walk up to it and give the tree a shake, well, what happens?' (...) 'I really don't know, Dad,' (...) 'Well, nothing bloody happens, of course!' (...) 'You can stand there shaking it till the cows come home and all that will happen is your arms will get tired. Right?' (...) 'Right, Dad,' he says. (...) 'But if you go up to a skinny, dry, fucked-up little tree, with a withered trunk and a few leaves clinging on for dear life, and you put your hands around it and shake the shit out of it - as we say in the trade - those bloody leaves will come flying off! Yeah?' 'OK, Dad,' says the boy (...) 'Now, the big oak tree is the rich bastard, right, and the skinny tree is the poor cunt who hasn't got any money. Are you with me?' Bunny Junior nods. 'Now, that sounds easier than it actually is, Bunny Boy. Do you want to know why?' 'OK, Dad.' 'Because every fucking bastard and his dog has got hold of the little tree and is shaking it for all that it's worth - the government, the bloody landlord, the lottery they don't have a chance in hell of winning, the council, their bloody exes, their hundred snotty-nosed brats running around because they are too bloody stupid to exercise a bit of self-control, all the useless shit they see on TV, fucking Tesco, parking fines, insurance on this and insurance on that, the boozer, the fruit machines, the bookies - every bastard and his three-legged, one-eyed, pox-riden dog are shaking this little tree,' says Bunny, clamping his hands together and making like he is throttling someone. 'So what do you go and do, Dad?' says Bunny Junior. 'Well, you've got to have something they think they need, you know, above all else.' 'And what's that, Dad?' 'Hope... you know... the dream. You've got to sell them the dream.

By educating me at home, my parents were able to give me individualized attention without the usual distractions that kids in regular school experience, like dating and friendship. Not to mention that traditional school can be dangerous. I’ve heard about kids catching the flu and chicken pox, even Judaism. And how about those poor kids lugging all those heavy books to and from school every day? My books never went anywhere, just like me. I felt so bad when I’d see kids on my street giggling and chasing each other around with those awkward backpacks.

In Georgian England, sweeps and climbing-boys were regarded as general cesspools of disease—dirty, consumptive, syphilitic, pox-ridden—and a “ragged, ill-looking sore,” easily attributed to some sexually transmitted illness, was usually treated with a toxic mercury-based chemical and otherwise shrugged off. (“Syphilis,” as the saying ran, “was one night with Venus, followed by a thousand nights with mercury.”)

Many promised him their voices: Fralegg the Strong, clever Alvyn Sharp, humpbacked Hotho Harlaw. Hotho offered him a daughter for his queen. “I have no luck with wives,” Victarion told him. His first wife died in childbed, giving him a stillborn daughter. His second had been stricken by a pox. And his third … “A king must have an heir,” Hotho insisted. “The Crow’s Eye brings three sons to show before the kingsmoot.” “Bastards

At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you became as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked "this too shall pass" - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something that everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgettingone how painful it had been at the time.

I declare it well befits me to thank our God for simpler pleasures than these, than teak or gold or India cloth. Daily, in my youth, should not I have fallen upon my knees and thanked Him who died for us upon the Cross for the warmth of kindled fires, for the freedom to swing my hands in the air? Should I not have praised Him for the liberty to open doors and pass through them, for the escape from drudgery, and most, my mother’s hand to hold?

On May 14th, 1796, Jenner scratched the arm of a boy named James Phipps, introducing into his skin a droplet of cowpox pus that he had scraped from a blister on the hand of Sarah Nelmes, a dairy worker. He called this pus “the Vaccine Virus”—the word vaccine is derived from the Latin word for cow. The boy developed a single pustule on his arm, and it healed rapidly. A few months later, Jenner scratched the boy’s arm with lethal infective pus that he had taken from a smallpox patient—today, this is called a challenge trial. The boy did not come down with smallpox. Edward Jenner had discovered and named vaccination—the practice of infecting a person with a mild or harmless virus in order to strengthen his or her immunity to a similar disease-causing virus. “It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice,” Jenner wrote in 1801.

When I meet another man, and he is just himself—even if he is an ignorant Mexican pitted with small-pox—then there is no question between us of superiority or inferiority. He is a man and I am a man. We are ourselves. There is no question between us.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.

The Mayflower sped across the white-tipped waves once the voyage was under way, and the passengers were quickly afflicted with seasickness. The crew took great delight in the sufferings of the landlubbers and tormented them mercilessly. "There is an insolent and very profane young man, Bradford wrote, "who was always harrassing the poor people in their sickness, and cursing them daily with greivous execrations." He even laughed that he hoped to 'throw half of them overboard before they came to their journey's end.' The Puritans believe a just God punished the young sailor for his cruelty when, halfway through the voyage, 'it pleased God...to smite the young man with a greivous disease, of which he died in a desperate manner." He was the first to be thrown overboard.

Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, has put his signature first on all the articles against Wolsey. They say one strange allegation has been added at his behest. The cardinal is accused of whispering in the king’s ear and breathing into his face; since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch. When he hears this he thinks, imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor’s head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe anything; putting it out there, to the shepherds on the hills, to Tyndale’s plowboy, to the beggar on the roads and the patient beast in its byre or stall; out there to the bitter winter winds, and to the weak early sun, and the snowdrops in the London gardens.

We all felt our world slipping away, in cascades and cataracts, the promises of temporary change becoming less and less temporary. Didn’t we feel so much safer? Weren’t safe and healthy worth more to us than large weddings and overcrowded schools? Hadn’t the pox been spread by people working and attending school when they should have stayed home? Never mind that they didn’t stay home because they couldn’t afford to. The talking heads were in agreement that necessity would fuel innovation. Good things were coming fast, they promised; I stopped watching the news.

He was searching his memory when suddenly a strange figure appeared in front of them, on horseback, trotted for a moment, then turned round in the saddle. His blood froze; he remained rooted to the spot in horror. That equivocal, sexless face was green, with terrible eyes of an icy light blue beneath purple lids; postules encircled its mouth; extraordinarily thin arms, bare from the elbows down and shaking with fever, emerged from ragged sleeves, and the fleshless thighs shivered in high boots which were far too large. The dreadful gaze was fixed on Des Esseintes, boring into him, chilling him to the marrow, while the bulldog woman, now in even greater panic, clung to him with her head thrown back on her rigid neck, screaming blue murder. And instantly he grasped the meaning of the horrifying vision. He was looking at the figure of the Pox.

Hate was reserved for front-page villains. Abstractions: the pox, the bombers, the bombs, the gunmen, the guns, the chaos they sowed, the politicians who wielded restriction in the name of freedom and safety, or the ones who didn’t stop them, or the ones who were sure it would only be temporary.

Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east. What was their languid grace but the softness of chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart. And he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines, dying fallings of sweet airs, the proud pavan: and saw with the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the pox fouled wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again.

If you fall for a dark-eyed beauty, pretty as a picture, with lips as sweet as a luscious rasberry, and a gentle face, unrumpled by kisses, like an apple-blossom petal in May, and she becomes your love—then do not say that love is yours: even though you cannot tire of her rounded breasts, of her slender frame that melts in your embrace like wax before a flame. . . . The day will come, that cruel hour will come, the fatal moment will come, when he face will fade, rumpled by kisses, her breasts will no longer quiver at your touch: all this will come to pass; and you will be alone with your own shadow amidst the sunscorched deserts and the dried up springs, where flowers do not bloom and the sunlight plays on the dry skin of a lizard; and you might even see the hairy black tarantula’s lair, all enmeshed in the threads of its web . . . And then your thirsting voice will be raised from the sands, calling longingly to your homeland. --- But if your love is otherwise, if her browless face has once been touched by the black blemish of the pox, if her hair is red, her breasts sagging, her bare feet dirty, and to any extent at all her stomach protrudes, and still she is your love—then that which you have sought and found in her is the sacred homeland of your soul.

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves

She had also heard other things, scary things, things that made no sense to her. Some said her father had murdered King Robert and been slain in turn by Lord Renly. Others insisted that Renly had killed the king in a drunken quarrel between brothers. Why else should he have fled in the night like a common thief? One story said the king had been killed by a boar while hunting, another that he’d died eating a boar, stuffing himself so full that he’d ruptured at the table. No, the king had died at table, others said, but only because Varys the Spider poisoned him. No, it had been the queen who poisoned him. No, he had died of a pox. No, he had choked on a fish bone.

Marriage is a paradox second only to life itself. That at the age of twenty or so, with little knowledge of each other and a dangerous overdose of self-confidence, two human beings should undertake to commit themselves for life – and that church and state should receive their vows with a straight face – all this is absurd indeed. And it is tolerable only if it is reveled in as such. A pox on all the neat little explanations as to why it is reasonable that two teenagers should be bound to each other until death. It is not reasonable. It happens to be true to life, but it remains absurd. Down with the books that moralize reasonably on the subject of why divorce is wrong. Divorce is not a wrong; it is a metaphysical impossibility. It is an attempt to do something about life rather than with it - to work out the square root of –I rather than to use it. Up with the absurdity of marriage then. Let the peasant rejoice. He is a very odd ball on a very odd pool table, and his marriage is one of the few things left to him that will roll properly in this game. And up with the marriage service. Let the peasant go back and read it while he rejoices - preferably in the old unbowdlerized version still used by the Church of England. It is full of death and cast iron. And it is one of the great remaining sanity markers. The world is going mad because it has too many reasonable options, and not enough interest or nerve to choose anything for good. In such a world, the marriage service is not reasonable, but it is sane; which is quite another matter. The lunatic lives in a world of reason, and he goes mad without making sense; it is precisely paradox that keeps the rest of us sane. To be born, to love a woman, to cry at music, to catch a cold, to die – these are not excursions on the narrow road of logic; they are blind launchings on a trackless sea. They are not bargains, they are commitments, and for ordinary people, marriage is the very keel of their commitment, the largest piece of ballast in their small and storm-tossed boat. Its unqualified hurling of two people into their deathbead is absurd, but so is the rest of that welter of unqualified hurlings we call life. You cannot contract out of being born, out of crying, out of loving, out of dying; you cannot contract out of marriage. It may be uncomfortable, it certainly is absurd; but it is not abnormal.

they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver’s mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle. And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

High and mighty guzzlers, and you, O all you precious pox-ridden—while you have the leisure and I have nothing else more important to do, let me ask you a question: why does everybody say, as if it were proverbially true, that the world is no longer flat? Understand, please, that "flat" here means "without zest, unsalted, insipid, washed-out": taking it metaphorically, it signifies "crazy, foolish, senseless, rot-brained." Would you argue, as indeed one might logically infer, that if we say that the world has been flat, now we have to say that it's become wise? What was it that made it flat? Why was it flat? Why should it be wise? What do you think ancient stupidity was? What do you think constitutes our present wisdom? What made it flat? What has made it wise? Are there more lovers of flatness or more lovers of wisdom? Just exactly when was it flat? Just exactly when was it wise? Who's responsible for that earlier flatness? Who's responsible for that later wisdom? Why did that ancient flatness end right now, and not at some other time? Why did our present wisdom begin right now, and not sooner? What harm did our earlier flatness do us? What good is this new wisdom? How did we get rid of our ancient flatness? How was our present wisdom brought about?

At seventeen, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light-years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, "This too shall pass" — as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a mild nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

So Seals throws down his napkin and pushes back his chair and rises and demands to know who did it. Christ. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, he says. And then he began to point out possible culprits and to demand that they own up. It was you, wasnt it? Jesus. I tried to hiss him down. By now several large and unruly-looking chaps had gotten to their feet. The manager arrived just in the nick and we got Seals seated but he continued to mutter and they rose all over again. Do you know what I find particularly galling, he told them. It’s having to share the women with you lot. To listen to you fuckwits holding forth and to see some lissome young thing leaning forward breathlessly with that barely contained frisson with which we are all familiar the better to inhale without stint an absolute plaguebreath of bilge and bullshit as if it were the word of the prophets. It’s painful but still I suppose one has to extend a certain latitude to the little dears. They’ve so little time in which to parlay that pussy into something of substance. But it nettles. That you knucklewalkers should even be allowed to contemplate the sacred grotto as you drool and grunt and wank. Let alone actually reproduce. Well the hell with it. A pox upon you. You’re a pack of mudheaded bigots who loathe excellence on principle and though one might cordially wish you all in hell still you wont go. You and your nauseating get. Granted, if everyone I wished in hell were actually there they’d have to send to Newcastle for supplementary fuel. I’ve made ten thousand concessions to your ratfuck culture and you’ve yet to make the first to mine. It only remains for you to hold your cups to my gaping throat and toast one another’s health with my heart’s blood. Ah well, Squire, I tell you everything and you

What is the Ego? Suppose a man puts himself at a window to see those who pass by. If I pass by, can I say that he placed himself there to see me? No; for he does not think of me in particular. But does he who loves someone on account of beauty really love that person? No; for the small-pox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will cause him to love her no more. And if one loves me for my judgment, memory, he does not love me, for I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where, then, is this Ego, if it be neither in the body nor in the soul? And how love the body or the soul, except for these qualities which do not constitute me, since they are perishable? For it is impossible and would be unjust to love the soul of a person in the abstract, and whatever qualities might be therein. We never, then, love a person, but only qualities. Let us, then, jeer no more at those who are honoured on account of rank and office; for we love a person only on account of borrowed qualities.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter—and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote: Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn. I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Near the exit to the blue patio, DeCoverley Pox and Joaquin Stick stand by a concrete scale model of the Jungfrau, ... socking the slopes of the famous mountain with red rubber hot-water bags full of ice cubes, the idea being to pulverize the ice for Pirate's banana frappes. With their nights' growths of beard, matted hair, bloodshot eyes, miasmata of foul breath, DeCoverley and Joaquin are wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier. Elsewhere in the maisonette, other drinking companions disentangle from blankets (one spilling wind from his, dreaming of a parachute), piss into bathroom sinks, look at themselves with dismay in concave shaving mirrors, slab water with no clear plan in mind onto heads of thinning hair, struggle into Sam Brownes, dub shoes against rain later in the day with hand muscles already weary of it, sing snatches of popular songs whose tunes they don't always know, lie, believing themselves warmed, in what patches of the new sunlight come between the mullions, begin tentatively to talk shop as a way of easing into whatever it is they'll have to be doing in less than an hour, lather necks and faces, yawn, pick their noses, search cabinets or bookcases for the hair of the dog that not without provocation and much prior conditioning bit them last night. Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast:flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjuror's secret by which-- though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off--- the genetic chains prove labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations. . . so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail. Is there any reason not to open every window, and let the kind scent blanket all Chelsea? As a spell, against falling objects. . . .

But wait, stop, it’s not supposed to end this way! You’re the fantasy, you’re what I’m leaving behind. I can’t pack you up and take you with me.” “That was the most self-centered thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Jane blinked. “It was?” “Miss Hayes, have you stopped to consider that you might have this all backward? That in fact you are my fantasy?” The jet engines began to whir, the pressure of the cabin stuck invisible fingers into her ears. Henry gripped his armrest and stared ahead as though trying to steady the machine by force of will. Jane laughed at him and settled into her seat. It was a long flight. There would be time to get more answers, and she thought she could wait. Then in that moment when the plane rushed forward as though for its life, and gravity pushed down, and the plane lifted up, and Jane was breathless inside those two forces, she needed to know now. “Henry, tell me which parts were true.” “All of it. Especially this part where I’m going to die…” His knuckles were literally turning white as he held tighter to the armrests, his eyes staring straight ahead. The light gushing through the window was just right, afternoon coming at them with the perfect slant, the sun grazing the horizon of her window, yellow light spilling in. She saw Henry clearly, noticed a chicken pox scar on his forehead, read in the turn down of his upper lip how he must have looked as a pouty little boy and in the faint lines tracing away from the corners of his eyes the old man he’d one day become. Her imagination expanded. She had seen her life like an intricate puzzle, all the boyfriends like dominoes, knocking the next one and the next, an endless succession of falling down. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. She’d been thinking so much about endings, she’d forgotten to allow for the possibility of a last one, one that might stay standing. Jane pried his right hand off the armrest, placed it on the back of her neck and held it there. She lifted the armrest so nothing was between them and held his face with her other hand. It was a fine face, a jaw that fit in her palm. She could feel the whiskers growing back that he’d shaved that morning. He was looking at her again, though his expression couldn’t shake off the terror, which made Jane laugh. “How can you be so cavalier?” he asked. “Tens of thousands of pounds expected to just float in the air?” She kissed him, and he tasted so yummy, not like food or mouthwash or chapstick, but like a man. He moaned once in surrender, his muscles relaxing. “I knew I really liked you,” he said against her lips. His fingers pulled her closer, his other hand reached for her waist. His kisses became hungry, and she guessed that he hadn’t been kissed, not for real, for a long time. Neither had she, as a matter of fact. Maybe this was the very first time. There was little similarity to the empty, lusty making out she’d played at with Martin. Kissing Henry was more than just plain fun. Later, when they would spend straight hours conversing in the dark, Jane would realize that Henry kissed the way he talked--his entire attention taut, focused, intensely hers. His touch was a conversation, telling her again and again that only she in the whole world really mattered. His lips only drifted from hers to touch her face, her hands, her neck. And when he spoke, he called her Jane. Her stomach dropped as they fled higher into the sky, and they kissed recklessly for hundreds of miles, until Henry was no longer afraid of flying.

was common for local authorities, knowing the unpopularity of the press, to dump their undesirables. But these conscripts were wretched, and the volunteers were little better. An admiral described one bunch of recruits as being “full of the pox, itch, lame, King’s evil, and all other distempers, from the hospitals at London, and will serve only to breed an infection in the ships; for the rest, most of them are thieves, house breakers, Newgate [Prison] birds, and the very filth of London.” He concluded, “In all the former wars I never saw a parcel of turned over men half so bad, in short they are so very bad, that I don’t know how to describe it.

I think we're all just doing our best to survive the inevitable pain and suffering that walks alongside us through life. Long ago, it was wild animals and deadly poxes and harsh terrain. I learned about it playing The Oregon Trail on an old IBM in my computer class in the fourth grade. The nature of the trail has changed, but we keep trekking along. We trek through the death of a sibling, a child, a parent, a partner, a spouse; the failed marriage, the crippling debt, the necessary abortion, the paralyzing infertility, the permanent disability, the job you can't seem to land; the assault, the robbery, the break-in, the accident, the flood, the fire; the sickness, the anxiety, the depression, the loneliness, the betrayal, the disappointment, and the heartbreak. There are these moments in life where you change instantly. In one moment, you're the way you were, and in the next, you're someone else. Like becoming a parent: you're adding, of course, instead of subtracting, as it is when someone dies, and the tone of the occasion is obviously different, but the principal is the same. Birth is an inciting incident, a point of no return, that changes one's circumstances forever. The second that beautiful baby onto whom you have projected all your hopes and dreams comes out of your body, you will never again do anything for yourself. It changes you suddenly and entirely. Birth and death are the same in that way.

There was a moment of stillness before something in him seemed to snap. she pounced on her with a sort of tigerish delight, and clamped his mouth over hers. She squeaked in surprise, wriggling in his hold, but his arms clamped around her easily, his muscles as solid as oak. He kissed her possessively, almost roughly at first, gentling by voluptuous degrees. Her body surrendered without giving her brain a chance to object, applying itself eagerly to every available inch of him. The luxurious male heat and hardness of him satisfied a wrenching hunger she hadn't been aware of until now. It also gave her the close-but-not-close-enough feeling she remembered from before. Oh, how confusing this was, this maddening need to crawl inside his clothes, practically inside his skin. She let her fingertips wander over his cheeks and jaw, the neat shape of his ears, the taut smoothness of his neck. When he offered no objection, she sank her fingers into his thick, vibrant hair and sighed in satisfaction. He searched for her tongue, teased and stroked intimately until her heart pounded in a tumult of longing, and a sweet, empty ache spread all through her. Dimly aware that she was going to lose control, that she was on the verge of swooning, or assaulting him again, she managed to break the kiss and turn her face away with a gasp. "Don't," she said weakly. His lips grazed along her jawline, his breath rushing unsteadily against her skin. "Why? Are you still worried about Australian pox?" Slowly it registered that they were no longer standing. Gabriel was sitting on the ground with his back against the grass-covered mound, and- heaven help her- she was in his lap. She glanced around them in bewilderment. How had this happened? "No," she said, bewildered and perturbed, "but I just remembered that you said I kissed like a pirate." Gabriel looked blank for a moment. "Oh, that. That was a compliment." Pandora scowled. "It would only be a compliment if I had a beard and a peg leg." Setting his mouth sternly against a faint quiver, Gabriel smoothed her hair tenderly. "Forgive my poor choice of words. What I meant to convey was that I found your enthusiasm charming." "Did you?" Pandora turned crimson. Dropping her head to his shoulder, she said in a muffled voice, "Because I've worried for the past three days that I did it wrong." "No, never, darling." Gabriel sat up a little and cradled her more closely to him. Nuzzling her cheek, he whispered, "Isn't it obvious that everything about you gives me pleasure?" "Even when I plunder and pillage like a Viking?" she asked darkly. "Pirate. Yes, especially then." His lips moved softly along the rim of her right ear. "My sweet, there are altogether too many respectable ladies in the world. The supply has far exceeded the demand. But there's an appalling shortage of attractive pirates, and you do seem to have a gift for plundering and ravishing. I think we've found you're true calling." "You're mocking me," Pandora said in resignation, and jumped a little as she felt his teeth gently nip her earlobe. Smiling, Gabriel took her head between his hands and looked into her eyes. "Your kiss thrilled me beyond imagining," he whispered. "Every night for the rest of my life, I'll dream of the afternoon in the holloway, when I was waylaid by a dark-haired beauty who devastated me with the heat of a thousand troubled stars, and left my soul in cinders. Even when I'm an old man, and my brain has fallen to wrack and ruin, I'll remember the sweet fire of your lips under mine, and I'll say to myself, 'Now, that was a kiss.'" Silver-tongued devil, Pandora thought, unable to hold back a crooked grin. Only yesterday, she'd heard Gabriel affectionately mock his father, who was fond of expressing himself with elaborate, almost labyrinthine turns of phrase. Clearly the gift had been passed down to his son.

There is an implication to be found in the statement of Surgeon Verneuil, though probably not meant by him, to which assent must be given when understood. It is TRUE that there is no such THING as tetanus, small pox. syphilis, etc., as is implied by the general use of nosological terms. Disease is not a thing, an entity: it is a condition, and the error of regarding the condition of disease as an entity has confirmed, where it has not originated, much of the prevailing erroneous treatment of the sick. Nosological terms have a use; it is that of bringing to the mind of the physician a group of pathological symptoms, which may or may not be present in the case of the patient under consideration; from them, *when present*, the diseased condition of the patient can be recognized and treated. Unfortunately, through not understanding this truth, attempts are frequently made to treat, *not the patient*, but the name, which has been given to a collection of morbid symptoms. A broken limb is a thing; the inflammation which results from it is a condition, and if gangrene ensues the *gangrene* is not a *thing*, but a condition to be taken into consideration with all the other symptoms in the treatment of the patient. The surgeon, Verneuil, had probably a glimmering perception of this truth, but he misapplied it, for his theory and practice, as a physician, and the theory and practice of nearly all modern medicine assume that the condition to be treated is a thing having a name and this name is treated instead of the patient. –Source: *The Blood and its Third Anatomical Element* by Antoine Béchamp, 1912, Translated by Montague R. Leverson