All the while Martin attempted to catch his aunt with a remorseful gaze, but the young woman was reabsorbed into her mother’s orbit, and though Anna embraced him, pressed on him the importance of visiting soon, he could feel that she was already ve...
I was just four when a hired teenage field hand attempted to molest me. Miraculously, I got away, and I told my dad. My father made three important choices that day: He listened to me, he believed me, and he took action. I was one of the fortunate on...
Firstly you must always implicitly obey orders, without attempting to form any opinion of your own regarding their propriety. Secondly, you must consider every man your enemy who speaks ill of your king; and thirdly you must hate a Frenchman as you h...
Francie was ten years old when she first found an outlet in writing. What she wrote was of little consequence. What was important was that the attempt to write stories kept her straight on the dividing line between truth and fiction. If she had not f...
Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attemp...
One of the ultimate ironies of eternity is that the adversary, who is miserable precisely because he has no physical body, invites and entices us to share in his misery through the improper use of our bodies. The very tool he does not have and cannot...
There had always been a conflict in me between mystery and meaning. I had pursued tha latter, worshipped the latter as a doctor. As a socialist and rationalist. But then I saw that the attempt to scientize reality, to name it and categorize it and vi...
On Screen Text: [first lines, the text that appears on screen] In 1814, the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled to the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy. Fearing an attempt to rescue him, his British captors would shoot anyone who came ...
Capt. Vasili Borodin: [reading aloud the morse-code message from the approaching US warship] Red October. Red October. Halt and stay where you are. Do not attempt to submerge or you will be fired upon... Capt. Vasili Borodin: [to Ramius] Captain! I t...
[attempting to push Santa down the pipe] Shock: I think he might be too big! [she tries again, he groans] Lock: No, he's not! If he can go down a chimney... he can fit... [shoves] Lock: down... [shoves again] Lock: ...here! [Santa slides down the pip...
Colonel Dax: Too much has happened. Someone's got to be hurt. The only question is who. General Mireau's assault on the Ant Hill failed. His order to fire on his own troops was refused. But his attempt to murder three innocent men to protect his own ...
[after Jack "rescues" Rose from her suicide attempt, he holds Lovejoy back to scab some cigarettes] Lovejoy: You'll want to tie those. [He points at Jack's boots] Lovejoy: It's interesting. The young lady slipped so suddenly and you still had time to...
In fact, among the people I met, the term served essentially as a synonym for 'fucked up'. I'd been in the country about three days when a car that was sent to take me to an interview failed to start. After several attempts to get it going, the drive...
In the attempt to find the just measure of horror and terror, I came upon the writing of Carole Gill whose work revealed a whole new dimension to me. The figure of the gothic child was there. Stoker's horror was there. Along with the romance! At the ...
An effort was made to spread this new materialist atheism with its Communist consequence "by the sword" (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion of neighboring countries with consequent further massacres and the extension of the area of despo...
I can imagine that the oceanic feeling could become connected with religion later on. That feeling of oneness with the universe which is its ideational content sounds very like a first attempt at the consolations of religion, like another way taken b...
I made an attempt to reach him in his grief. I said, "I've had this pain. To tell you it will go away would be a lie. It will never go away. But, if you live long enough, it will cease to torture and will instead favor you. As we rely on the bitterne...
To be 'for animals' is not to be 'against humanity.' To require others to treat animals justly, as their rights require, is not to ask for anything more nor less in their case than in the case of any human to whom just treatment is due. The animal ri...
Fire is no laughing matter. In a drunken attempt to appear womanly, my neighbor tried to burn her pubes off when she was fifteen, but it hurt too much to get it completely smooth. My friend had sex with her two years later and said her clit looked li...
Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the propheti...
The conventional use of words and of narrative structure is deliberately subverted in decadent fiction; language deviates from the established norms in an attempt to reproduce pathology on a textual level. With its emphasis on aberration and artifice...
