For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow.

And what is fear of need but need itself?

Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?

And there are those who have little and give it all.

These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty.

There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward.

It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give when unasked, through understanding.

And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses?  And what is it you guard with fastened doors?

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters a house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

...Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at about a dozen corpses.  Because they had no ideology. 

Idelology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.  That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.  That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills, by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their motherland; the colonizers by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late) by equality, brotherhood and the happiness of future generations. 

...  by 1966, eighty-six thousand Nazi criminals had been convicted in West Germany...  And during the same period, in our own country about ten men have been convicted...  Here is a riddle not for us contemporaries to figure out:  Why is Germany allowed to punish it's evildoers and Russia is not.  What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body?...

A country which has condemned evil 86,000 times from the rostrum of the court and irrevocably condemned it in literature and among it's young people, year by year, step by step, is purged of it. 

...In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future....  It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!

[Buddha's] tranquil expression touched me more than the tortured look I have seen on images of Christ.  Buddhism teaches man to transcend the material world and view life and death as trivial.  Christianity urges man to cherish life and fear death.

She tosses her tissue into the air and it floats through the night like a patch of day.

It's easy to be kind when you're poor...  Sharing is a virtue that modern society seems to have lost.

Did you know that the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was formed sixty years after the founding of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and as an offshoot of it?

In fact, by the late 1960's it was no longer necessary to produce literature, scholarship or art - or even be involved in such matters, except as a consumer - in order to qualify as an intellectual.

For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.  The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws.  But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule.  If Mormons don't like my plays, let them write their own.  If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters.  If teachers and grammar school editor find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture. 

Sheffield offered his services as a fellow drinker and a guide...  He was a crack shot.  He shot trout from the rivers; a cigarette packer from the police commissioner's mouth; and had a habit of picking off ladies high heels.

He is wearing leather sandals, a pullover shirt of course white liene with leg-of-mutton sleeves, a leather jerkin, and brown velour trousers with flared bottoms.  The trousers are supported by a wide belt with a huge brass buckle that Serpico found in a flea market.  Emblazoned on teh buckle are the heads of two bearded gentlemen of historical note, Hentry Wells and William Fargo.  Between them are crossed American flags and underneath the legend since 1852.  On Serpico's right wrist there is a silver bracelet, and on his left is a double strand of varicolored quartz love beads.  His shirt is open almost to his waist, and suspended for a slender gold chain around his neck is a gold Winnie-the-Pooh.  ...  Serpico has dressed with some care for this uptown visit. 

When Seprico said the thing that troubled him the most was the possibility of rumors getting started [about homosexuality], the chaplain replied that rumors did not mean anything.  "After all," he said solemnly, "they even say things about me."

No people that passes abruptly from a state of subservience under the rule of a despot to the completely unfamiliar state of political independence can be said to have a fair chance of making democratic institutions work.

There could and, I think, there should be legislation to prevent political candidates not merely from spending more than a certain amount of money on their election campaigns, but also to prevent them from resorting to the kind of anti-rational propoganda that makes nonsense of the whole democratic process.

Nebraska is like a 75,000-square-mile bare batch.  In the middle of the state is a river called teh Platte, which at some times of the year is two or three miles wide.  It looks impressive until you realize that it is only about four inches deep.  You could cross it in a wheelchair.  On a landscape without any contours or depressions to shape it, the Platte just lies there, like a drink spilled across a table-top.  It is the most exciting thing in the state.

In eigthy days," responded Mr.  Fogg.  "So we haven't a moment to lose."

"But the trunks?" gasped Passepartout, unconsciously swaying his head from right to left. 

"We'll have no trunks; only an overnight bag, with two shirts and three pairs of stockings for me, and the same for you.  We'll buy our clothes on the way."

Fueled by indignation, B.A.'s adrenal gland took up a quick collection and donated a hefty dose of adrenaline to The A-Team's cause, giving B.A.  a brief burst of superhuman strength that allowed him to strain his bonds to the breaking point.

When faced with something out of the ordinary and a bit too much like hard work, Chinese public servants will often say 'no'.  It's much easier than actually doing something...  There was only one way around this problem and that was making refusing to sell me a ticket more difficult than selling me one.

You just go away' he snarled in broken English.  Rather than becoming violent, I decided to play dumb tourist and pretend I didn't understand a word he said.  I smiled inanely, pointing at my ticket...

London and Paris, in order to induce their civil servants to go work in the colonies, created for those amenable to the idea a grand quality of life.  A minor clerk from the post office in Manchester received upon arrival in Tanganyika [Tanzania] a villa with a garden and swimming pool, cars, servants, holidays in Europe, etc.  Members of the colonial bureaucracy lived truly magnificently.  And now, between one day and the next, the inhabitants of the colony receive their independence.  They take over the colonial state in an unaltered form.  They even take great care not to alter anything, because such a state offers fantastic privileges...  in the blink of an eye, a new ruling class arises -- a bureaucratic bourgeoisie that creates nothing, produces nothing, but merely governs the society and reaps the benefits.

But with time I came to understand that seeing a robbery as a humiliation and as an affront is an emotional luxury.  Living among the poverty of my neighborhood, I realized that a theft, even a petty theft, can be a death sentence.  To steal is to commit manslaughter, murder.  A solitary woman had her little corner in my street, and her sole possession was a pot.  she made a living buying beans for credit from the vegetable vendors, cooking them, seasoning them with a sauce, and selling them to passerbys.  For many, this bowl of beans was the only daily meal.  One night, a piercing cry awoke us.  The entire alleyway stirred.  the woman was running around in a circle, despairing, frenzied:  thieves had snatched her pot, and she had lost the one thing she depended on for her livelihood.

The Karimojong walk around naked and insist upon this custom, seeing the human body as beautiful (and in fact they are magnificently built, tall and slender).  Their intransigence on this score has yet another basis:  most of the Europeans who reached them in the early years of African exploration rapidly fell ill and died, from which the Karimojong deduced that clothing causes illness, and getting dressed is tantamount to sentencing yourself to death.  (In their system of belief, furthermore, suicide is the greatest sin imaginable.) that is why they were desperately afraid of clothing.  Amin, who believed that going naked demeans Africans, issued a decree against the custom and his troops executed on the spot anyone they caught without clothes.  The terrified Karimojong would obtain whatever they could a piece of fabric, a shirt, or pants, roll this up into a little bundle, and carry it around with them.  Upon hearing that army vehicles were nearby, or that a government agent had been seen nosing about, they would get dressed, and with great relief remove everything again as soon as the coast was clear.

Sudan was the first country in Africa to gain independence after World War II.  Prior to that it was a British colony, distinct entities artificially, bureaucratically glued together:  the Arab-Muslim North and the black-Christian (and animistic) South.  A long standing antagonism and hatred existed between these two populations, because the northern Arabs for years had invaded the South, captured its inhabitants, and sold them into slavery.

How could these two hostile worlds coexist in one independent nation?  They could not -- and that is exactly what the British wanted.  In those years, the European powers were convinced that they could formally give up their colonies, while continuing de facto to govern them -- being needed in Sudan, for example, for continual reconciliation between the Muslims of the North and the Christians and animists of the South.  Before long, however, these imperial delusions lay in tatters.  As early as 1962, the first North-South civil war erupted in Sudan.

"The paradox of our world:  If one figures in the cost of transporting, servicing, warehousing, and preserving food, then the cost of a single meal (typically, a handful of corn) for a refugee in some camp, for example in Sudan, is higher than the price of a dinner in the most expensive restaurant in Paris."

These were the 1960s, and in various corners of the world one still came upon hand-cranked phonographs.  Leshina had such a phonograph, and one completely worn and scratched-up record.  It was a recording of Churchill's 1940 speech, in which he summoned Englishmen to wartime renunciations and sacrifice.  The woman set the phonograph up in her yard and cranked the handle.  From the green-painted metal tube rose a low, horse rumbling, grunting, and gurgling, in which one could pick out some traces of an emotional, dramatic voice, though the sounds were by now incomprehensible and devoid of meaning.  Leshina explained to the onlookers -- and the gaping crowds kept growing in number -- that this was God's voice anointing her his emissary and commanding absolute obeisance.  More and more gathered around her.  Her followers, for the most part poor people without a penny to their names, with superhuman effort raised a temple to her in the bush and began conducting prayers there.  At the start of each mass, Churchill's booming bass worked them into an ecstatic trance.  But African leaders are ashamed of such religious cults, and President Kenneth Kaunda sent out the army against Leshina.  Several hundred innocent people were murdered, and tanks reduced the clay temple to dust.

During pre-colonial times, and hence not so long ago, more than ten thousand little states, kingdoms, ethnic unions, and federations existed in Africa.  Roland Oliver, a historian at the University of London, draws attention to the general paradox in his book, The African Experience (1991):  it has become parlance to say that the European colonists partitioned Africa.  Partitioned?  Oliver marvels.  Colonialism was a brutal unification, brought about by fire and sword!  Ten thousand entities were reduced to fifty.

It was a small dog, a Japanese breed.  His name was Lulu.  He was allowed to sleep in the Emperor's great bed.  During various ceremonies, he would run away from the Emperor's lap and pee on dignitaries' shoes.  The august gentlemen were not allowed to flinch or make the slightest gesture when they felt their feet getting wet.  I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth.  This was my job for ten years.

In those years existed two images of Haile Selassie.  One, known to international opinion, presented the Emperor as a rather exotic, gallant monarch, distinguished by his indefatigable energy, a sharp mind, and profound sensitivity, a man who made a stand against Mussolini, recovered his Empire and his throne, and had ambitions of developing his country and playing an important role in the world.  The other image, formed gradually by a critical and initially small segment of Ethiopian opinion, showed the monarch as a ruler committed to defending his power at any cost, a man who was above all a great demagogue and theatrical paternalist who used words and gestures to mask the corruption and servility of a ruling elite that he had created and coddled.  And, as often happens, both these images were correct.

We India people, we look at people more poor, more low, more hard than us and we be thanking God we are not them.  So we are happy.  But you white peoples, you are looking at the people above you all the times, and you are thinking, why aren't I be them?

Vigorous writing is concise.  A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.  This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

When you are too young to shave optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are intertwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.

Writing is seduction.

How much [writing] did you get today?" his friend asked.
Joyce (still in despair; still sprawled face-down on his desk):  'Seven [words]'
'Seven?  But James....  that's good, at least for you!'
'Yes.' Joyce says, finally looking up.  'I suppose it is...  but I don't know what order they go in!'

I'd pour any beers left in the sink.  If I didn't they'd talk to me as I lay in bed until I got up and had another.  And another.  And one more.

You must not come lightly to the blank page! 

The trip left the girl gaga, goofy, tainted, transformed, her nose a busted hymen through which sperm of a thousand colors swam a hootchy-kootchy stroke into her cerebral lagoon.

...  [ the priests ] crossing themselves so furiously that it was a wonder no wrists were sprained... 

Seems to me that the so-called happy people are the ones who are trivial.  Avoiding reality and never thinking about anything important.

Reality is subjective and there is an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard anything as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe.  Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized.  But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous.  When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself.  And you get to take yourself oh so seriously.  Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much.  Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means that he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. 

Priscilla who only knew six words in French and that was counting menage a trois as three.

Traveling is more fun -- shit, life is more fun -- if you can treat it as a series of impulses.