[while standing at the entrance to the Triple Rock church watching the service with much dancing and Hallelujah choruses, a heavenly light shines down on Jake and he has an epiphany] Jake: The band? The band. Reverend Cleophus James: DO YOU SEE THE L...
[Jake Blues is released on parole and gets back all the things he wore when he was arrested] Corrections Officer: One Timex digital watch, broken. One unused prophylactic. [looks disgusted, picks something up with his pen] Corrections Officer: One so...
Sister Mary Stigmata: [after chasing Jake and Elwood out of her office with a ruler for using foul language] You are such a disappointing pair. I prayed so hard for you. It saddens and hurts me that the two young men whom I raised to believe in the T...
Lorraine Baines: Kids, we're gonna have to eat this cake by ourselves. Your Uncle Joey didn't make parole again. [drops the cake on the dining table. It reads "Welcome Home, Uncle Joey"] Lorraine Baines: I think it would be nice if you all dropped hi...
It is a Bush administration official on the moment when torture breaks a victim: The job of the interrogator is to safely help the terrorist do his duty to Allah, so he then feels liberated to speak freely. From Neil Gaiman's account of a torturer in...
If one morning in the Spring, a stranger came and said to me, Your mother, father, brother, sister, uncle, lover, friend, is dead. From a b-52, napalm bombing, search and destroy mission, air attack, Tet offensive, My Lai massacre, failed escape, I w...
I have heard your orators speak on many questions. One among them the so-called vital question of money which is above all things the most coveted commodity but I, as a Jainist, in the name of my countrymen and of my country, would offer you as the m...
Raining. Oh, brother, a scratch on the fender. Damn rabbi on his unicycle. Wait a minute, where are my car keys? Could have sworn I left them in this pocket. No, just some loose change and ticket stubs from the all-black version of Elaine Stritch’ ...
And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the p...
Lily appeared, wearing her nightclothes, in the doorway. She gave an impatient sigh. 'This is certainly a very LONG private conversation,' she said. 'And there are certain people waiting for their comfort object.' Lily,' her mother said fondly, 'you'...
I think of me and Melanie when we were younger, on the high dive at the pool in Mexico. We would always hold hands as we jumped, but by the time we swam back up to the surface, we'd have let go. No matter how we tried, once we started swimming, we al...
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sicknes...
Trains are relentless things, aren't they, Monsieur Poirot? People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same. I am talking nonsense, but you know what I mean." "Yes, yes, I know. Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a go...
I am life,’ the girl said. ‘What?’ he said, startled. ‘To you, I am life. What are you, thirty-eight? Forty? What have you learned? Have you done anything? Look at me, look. I’m life and when you’re done with me, some of it rubs off on yo...
It had not occurred to him how he must appear to an outsider, to the world. For a moment he saw himself as he must thus appear; and what Edith said was part of what he saw. He had a glimpse of a figure that flitted through smoking-room anecdotes, and...
Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was ninetee...
Then he asked my age and I asked his. That's the tradition in China. If we know each other's ages we can understand each other's past. We Chinese have been collective for so long, personal histories are not worth mentioning. Therefore as soon as Xiao...
She has no head for politics, craves good jewelry, trusts too readily, marries too early. Then one by one she sends away her friends and stands apart, smug sapphire, her answer to everything a slender zero, a silent shrug--and every day still hears m...
One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question "Do people actually forget traumatic events such ...
The two women did more than resolve a major problem, they went on to form a political alliance and launch a coup. Cixi was twenty-five years old and Empress Zhen a year younger. Facing them were eight powerful men in control of the state machine. The...
Louis: 1791 was the year it happened. I was 24, younger than you are now. But times were different then, I was a man at that age: the master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans. I had lost my wife in childbirth, and she and the infant had...
