Noodles: Who is Secretary Bailey? Deborah Gelly: Secretary Bailey is a rich businessman. He came to the United States as an immigrant and made a lot of money in San Francisco and L.A., where he's lived for 30 years. Noodles: I know all that, it's all...
Narrator: In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. Naturally, the stench was foulest in Paris, for Paris was the largest city in Europe. And nowhere in Paris was that stench ...
Judge Turpin: Oh yes... such practices. The Geishas of Japan, the concubines of Siam, the catamites of Greece, the harlots of India. I have them all here, drawings of them. Everything you've ever dreamed of doing with a woman. Would you like to see? ...
Stalker: Let everything that's been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside worl...
[first lines] Sarah Connor: [narrating] Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines. The computer which con...
[first lines and off-screen] Balthasar: [narrating, off screen] In the Year of our Lord, Judea - for nearly a century - had lain under the mastery of Rome. In the seventh year of the reign of Augustus Caesar, an imperial decree ordered every Judean e...
This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as f...
It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart. Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and n...
Rocco was gripped with the panic he often experienced around her, around himself. He seemed to be both here now and simultaneously five years in the future looking back at this moment, at the loss of this moment. He was always sliding past the nownes...
. . . when we take upon ourselves his yoke of obedience, his yoke is easy, his burden is light (Matt. 11:28-30). When is a burden light? It is when we find our burdensome lives caught up, elevated, borne aloft by something greater than our lives. Mis...
For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and p...
Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to ba...
I am no ecological Pollyana. I have borne, and will continue to bear, feelings of wholehearted melancholy over the ecological state of the earth. How could I not? How could anyone not? But I am unwilling to become a hand-wringing nihilist, as some en...
Our faces are so close to one another right now, and all I can do is selfishly think how easy it would be for me to lean forward and kiss him like I’ve dreamed about for the last couple of weeks. One kiss, and then I’d let him go. One kiss, to re...
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride...
Every angel is terrifying. Through the darkness, they move silently... I will go down into death with you. I must go where I must go To see what I must see In that place where no one knows... ... This is where love is taking me. You have been leading...
My mother lived alone in the ruins of the great Library, which was called Compleat, and a very passionate and dashing Library indeed. Under the slightly blackened rafters and more than slightly caved-in walls, my mother lived and read and dreamed, al...
Development means a capacity for self-sustaining growth. It means that an economy must register advances which in turn will promote further progress. The loss of industry and skill in Africa was extremely small, if we measure it from the viewpoint of...
Ah, Drilos. I wanted someone to talk to, but I never counted on a conversation quite so hilarious. Not only are you saying I’m the multiverse, but also that I’m becoming something devoid of existence? Ridiculous. Right now I’m just a disembodie...
We sleep, allowing gravity to hold us, allowing Earth- our larger body- to recalibrate our neurons, composting the keen encounters of our waking hours (the tensions and terrors of our individual days), stirring them back, as dreams, into the sleeping...
The universe dilated within him, above him. Something like joy stirred in Lancaster’s being, a sublime ecstasy born of terror. His heart felt as if it might burst, might leap from his chest. His cheeks were wet. Drops of blood glittered on his bare...
