Memoirists

"It matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish ... to do otherwise is to legitimize it."

"God, Satan, Paradise, and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year, when I quite abruptly lost my faith. ... and afterwards, to prove my new-found atheism, I bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich, and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down. ... From that day to this I have thought of myself as a wholly secular person."

"Nowadays, however, a powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Muhammad into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. Powerful taboos have been erected. One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed (these and one other; I also tried to write about the place of women in Islamic society, and in the Koran). It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against, and set alight."

"The zealots also attack me by false analogy, comparing my book to pornography and demanding a ban on both. Many Islamic spokesmen have compared my work to anti-Semitism. But intellectual dissent is neither pornographic nor racist. I have tried to give a secular, humanist vision of the birth of a great world religion. For this, apparently, I should be tried under the Race Relations Act, or if not that perhaps the Public Order Act. Any old act will do. The justification is that I have "given offense." But the giving of offense cannot be a basis for censorship, or freedom of expression would perish instantly. And many of us who were revolted by the Bradford flames will feel that the offense done to our principles is at least as great as any offense caused to those who burned my book."

"It is a funny view of the world that a book can cause riots."

"The responsibility for violence lies with those who perpetrate it."

"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes."

"Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Melange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world... The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves."

"What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist."

"It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to be self-evidently true; but I suggest that the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of his being "elsewhere"... human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capably only of fractured perceptions. Partial beings, in all the senses of that phrase. Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because of our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to the death."

"I don't think there is a need for an entity like God in my life."

"I do not envy people who think they have a complete explanation of the world, for the simple reason that they are obviously wrong."

"Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination of the heart."

"To make Gandhi appeal to the Western market, he had to be sanctified and turned into Christ – an odd fate for a crafty Gujarati lawyer – and the history of one of the century's greatest revolutions had to be mangled."

"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step outside the frame."

"The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skits, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list — yes, even the short skirts and the dancing — are worth dying for? The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared."

"Children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison."

"Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", everyone of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."

"Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit."

"The world, somebody wrote, is the place we prove real by dying in it."

"For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an "affair." ... And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? ... What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: "Not a lot." But I refuse to give in to despair ... because ... I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the ... upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a ... novelist can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the scapegoat for ... its discontents... . (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)"

"I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that ... I wanted to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul... . The really important conversations I had in this period were with myself. I said: Salman, you must send a message loud enough to ... make ordinary Muslims see that you aren't their enemy, and you must make the West understand a little more of the complexity of Muslim culture ..., and start thinking a little less stereotypically... . And I said to myself: Admit it, Salman, the Story of Islam has a deeper meaning for you than any of the other grand narratives. Of course you're no mystic, mister... . No supernaturalism, no literalist orthodoxies ... for you. But Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was. ... Don't let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family. ... I reminded myself that I had always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the "secular Muslim," who, like the secular Jew, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from the theology... . But, Salman, I told myself, you can't argue from outside the debating chamber. You've got to cross the threshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim."

"Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some "friends" turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them . I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn't about to let me, of all people, argue in favor of one."

"I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I'd dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I've always understood as freedom. Not me, not in this lifetime, no chance. Actually Existing Islam, which has all but deified its Prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification, which has supplanted a priest-free religion by a priest-ridden one, which makes literalism a weapon and redescription a crime, will never let the likes of me in."

"Ibn Rushd's ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed "Actually Existing Socialism" of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit. There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise."

""Our lives teach us who we are." I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to ... my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go. "Free speech is a non-starter," says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."

"When I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, that there is a sense of play in the way people use language. Most people in India are multilingual, and if you listen to the urban speech patterns there you'll find it's quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It's the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase."

"It's fun to read things when you don't know all the words. Even children love it. One of the things any great children's writer will tell you is that children like it if in books designed for their age group there is a vocabulary just slightly bigger than theirs. So they come up against weird words, and the weird words excite them. If you describe a small girl in a story as "loquacious," it works so much better than “talkative.” And then some little girl will read the book and her sister will be shooting her mouth off and she will say to her sister, "Don't be so loquacious." It is a whole new weapon in her arsenal."

"Nothing really improves us. Whatever improves one person will disimprove another. Some people are paralyzed by the consciousness of death, other people live with it. ... The fatwa certainly made me think about it a lot more than I ever had. I guess I know I'm going to die, but then, so are you. And one of the things that I thought a lot about at the time of the fatwa and ever since is that quite a few of the people I really care about died during this period, all about the same age as I am, and they were not under a death sentence. They just died, of lung cancer, AIDS, whatever. It occurred to me that you don't need a fatwa, it can happen anytime."

"I've been worrying about God a little bit lately. It seems as if he's been lashing out, you know, destroying cities, annihilating places. It seems like he's been in a bad mood. And I think it has to do with the quality of lovers he's been getting. If you look at the people who love God now, you know, if I was God, I'd need to destroy something."

"What kind of God is it who's upset by a cartoon in Danish?"

"There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that."

"Two things form the bedrock of any open society—freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country."

"The phrase of "crackdown" that the Indian army uses really is a euphemism of mass destruction. And rape. And brutalisation. That happens all the time. It's still happening now. … The decision to treat all Kashmiris as if they're potential terrorists is what has unleashed this, the kind of "holocaust" against the Kashmiri people. And we know ourselves, from most recent events in Europe, how important it is to resists treating all Muslims as if they're terrorists, but the Indian army has taken the decision to do the opposite of that, to actually decide that everybody is a potential combatant to treat them in that way. And the level of brutality is quite spectacular. And, frankly, without that the jihadists would have had very little response from the Kashmiri people who were not really traditionally interested in radical Islam. So now they're caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, and that's the tragedy of the place."

"In an ideal world you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen but we don't live in a sane world."

"'Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. 'This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. 'I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. 'Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect."

"It is clear that India has not behaved at all well in Kashmir; that the Indian military forces seem like, feel like and behave like an occupying army; that there are too many accusations of violence, rape, and murder for it all to be made up; and the Pakistani side has constantly exacerbated the situation by the use of jihadist groups, and by the funding of groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad and so on."

"I have to say it has been alarming to see publishers looking to bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming [...] The idea that James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical. I think that has to be resisted. Books have to come to us from their time and be of their time, and if that's difficult to take, don’t read them. Read another book, but don't try and remake yesterday's work in the light of today's attitudes."

"The freedom to publish, of course, is also the freedom to read, the freedom to write what you want, to be able to choose what you want to read and not have it decided for you externally — and the freedom to publish books that ought to be published and sometimes are difficult to publish because of pressure from this or that group."

"There is no right in the world not to be offended. That right simply doesn't exist. In a free society, an open society, people have strong opinions, and these opinions very often clash. In a democracy, we have to learn to deal with this. And this is true about novels, it's true about cartoons, it's true about all these products."

"A question I have often asked is, "What would an inoffensive political cartoon look like?" What would a respectful cartoon look like? The form requires disrespect and so if we are going to have in the world things like cartoons and satire, we just have to accept it as part of the price of freedom."

"The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam. This very minor extremist cult, Wahhabism, was suddenly propagated across the Muslim world through madrassas and has created generations now who are steeped in this harsher, more paranoid, more confrontational version of Islam."

"[On the period immediately after the Iranian fatwa when Rushdie was in hiding.] I really resist the idea of being dragged back to that period of time that you insist on bringing up."

"I'm not a geopolitical entity. I'm someone writing in a room."

"One of the benefits of being a writer, I think, is that if what you're doing for a living is examining your life, hopefully by the time you reach this advanced age, you understand something about yourself and why you think what you think. Of course, other writers go in different directions."

"I grew up in a very female world with three younger sisters, so I was always comfortable around women, which was one of the reasons I hated my boarding school [Rugby], because there were no girls or women there. I think a lot of men are scared of women, and if the women are competent, brilliant or self-assured, they become even scarier. But to me, that's enormously attractive. I can't dream of having as a friend, or anything else in my life, a woman who is not those things."

"[Is there more support for censorship now?] I don't know if there's more of it, but it's certainly more obvious. There's a youthful progressive movement, much of which is extremely valuable, but there does seem to be within it an acceptance that certain ideas should be suppressed, and I just think that's worrying. Wherever there has been censorship, the first people to suffer from it are underprivileged minorities. So if in the name of underprivileged minorities you wish to endorse a suppression of wrongthink, it's a slippery slope."

"I'll tell you quite truthfully that the great wound in my life [from then] is India, because of the way I and my work have been treated there"

"[On meeting E.M. Forster on several occasions while an undergraduate at King's College, Cambridge] He was very encouraging when he heard that I wanted to be a writer [...] And he said something which I treasured, which is that he felt that the great novel of India would be written by somebody from India with a Western education. I hugely admire A Passage to India, because it was an anti-colonial book at a time when it was not at all fashionable to be anti-colonial [...] What I kind of rebelled against was Forsterian English, which is very cool and meticulous. I thought, If there's one thing that India is not, it's not cool. It's hot and noisy and crowded and excessive. How do you find a language that's like that?"

"[Since the fatwa of 1989, and not allowing it to affect his writings.] There was a moment when there was a 'me' floating around that had been invented to show what a bad person I was [...] "Evil." "Arrogant." "Terrible writer." "Nobody would've read him if there hadn't been an attack against his book." Et cetera. I've had to fight back against that false self. My mother used to say that her way of dealing with unhappiness was to forget it. She said, "Some people have a memory. I have a forget-ory."... If somebody arrives from another planet who has never heard of anything that happened to me, and just has the books on the shelf and reads them chronologically, I don't think that alien would think, Something terrible happened to this writer in 1989. The books go on their own journey. And that was really an act of will."

"[Rushdie was stabbed in August 2022, leading to life-changing injuries, by an admirer of Ayatollah Khomeini. His novel, Victory City, was about to be published.] I'm hoping that to some degree it might change the subject. I've always thought that my books are more interesting than my life [...] Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree."

"I'm going to tell you really truthfully, I'm not thinking about the long term [...] I'm thinking about little step by little step. I just think, Bop till you drop."

"I've got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don't. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don't have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there's a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. When I have a book in my head, it's as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape."

"Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is "impartial" about attempted murder, @BernardineEvari? (Asking for a friend.)"

"Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus Caesar, but the poetry of Ovid has outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam's life was ruined by Joseph Stalin, but his poetry has outlasted the Soviet Union. The poet Lorca was murdered by the thugs of General Franco, but his art has outlasted the fascism of the Falange."

"[Y]ou will find elements of magic realism in literature from all over the world—not just in Latin America. You will find it in Scandinavian sagas, in African poetry, in Indian literature written in English, in American literature written by ethnic minorities. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice Hoffman all use this style."

"If a blasphemer [Rushdie] can be given the title "Sir" by the West despite the fact he has hurt the feelings of Muslims, then a mujahid [Osama bin Laden] who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam, Saifullah."

"Rushdie shows us with what fantasy our sort of history must now be written — if, that is, we are to penetrate it, and perhaps even save it."

"When Salman Rushdie published Midnight's Children [1981], it seemed to set tongues free in India in an odd way. Suddenly, younger writers realized that they didn't need to write correct and perfect English in the English tradition, but they could use Indian English and use it for any purpose whatsoever - for writing comic books, satiric books, or even for writing serious books."

"'I never thought of myself as a writer about religion until religion came after me', Salman Rushdie says. 'Religion was part of my subject, of course... nevertheless... I had to confront what was confronting me and to decide what I wanted to stand up for in the face of what so vociferously, repressively and violently stood against me. At that time it was difficult to persuade people that the attack on The Satanic Verses was part of a broader global assault on writers, artists, and fundamental freedoms.""

"In the face of this ukase, which amounts to a life sentence as well as a death sentence on a reflective, autonomous individual, no wonder that people change the subject and take refuge in precedent or analogy. It's natural to do so when faced with a challenge that is so alarmingly singular. Yes, there are other death squads and assassins and proscriptions and archipelagos and all the rest of it. Yes, there are existing campaigns devoted to the release of so-and-so and the freedom of this-and-that. But when last did a head of government claim to be soliciting the murder of a citizen of another country, for pay, for the offence of literary production? I have heard great argument about it and about, from reminiscences of the Trotsky assassination to Christopher Hill's recall of the Papal incitement against Gloriana, but evermore came out by the same door as in I went. The Salman Rushdie case has no analogue and no precedent."

"[Published six-months after the near-fatal stabbing of Rushdie in August 2022] As it happens, he had cause to worry. In the intervening years, support for Rushdie and for free expression has narrowed ... An August 19 New York City rally of writers gathered in support of Rushdie reprised a 1989 demonstration against the fatwa in which Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, and others participated, but the later iteration "paled in comparison," a Le Monde editorial remarked. Across social media, writers expressed concern for Rushdie's health, but an instinctual solidarity with him and the sense—so strong at the time of the fatwa—that his fate spoke to all of us as members of a liberal society did not materialize. Even among his defenders, free speech took a back seat. Why? One reason is fear. In 2009, the British writer Hanif Kureishi told Prospect Magazine that "nobody would have the balls today to write The Satanic Verses." He might have added that no one would have the balls to defend it. Most writers, Kureishi continued, live quietly, and "they don’t want a bomb in the letterbox.""

"Salman Rushdie, the author of the book Satanic Verses, must be executed on the basis of the religious fatwa by His Eminence Imam Khomeini. He has no escape from this fatwa."

"I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world... that the author of the book titled The Satanic Verses, which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been declared madhur el dam [“those whose blood must be shed”]. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly, wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult Islam again... ."

"I admire Salman Rushdie enormously. Before Midnight's Children, writers of Indian origin writing in English were encouraged by convention to write of their world with detachment and irony. Their method was reductive. They treated their characters as though they were uncomplicated. With Midnight's Children, Rushdie breaks down those conventions. He aggrandizes, and that's marvellously healthy. The sections on Bombay have a superb excess of energy. Many of the writers before him tried, very unfortunately, to "tame" India for foreign readers. The other interesting thing about Salman Rushdie is that he discards British models. His fiction is closer to that of Günter Grass and Márquez than to Forster."

"To the Editors: As writers and scholars from the Islamic world we are appalled by the vilification, bookbanning and threats of physical violence against Salman Rushdie, the gifted author of Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses. This campaign is done in the name of Islam, although none of it does Islam any credit. Certainly Muslims and others are entitled to protest against The Satanic Verses if they feel the novel offends their religion and cultural sensibilities. But to carry protest and debate over into the realm of bigoted violence is in fact antithetical to Islamic traditions of learning and tolerance. We deplore and regret this sort of thing, and we reaffirm our belief in universal principles of rational discussion and freedom of expression."

"I asked him, "How did you manage to keep on writing when writing demands self-abandonment, when you’re being hunted, you're being persecuted?” He said, "You should tell them, 'Fuck you.'" And I said, "Did you know how to say 'fuck you' before it all occurred?" And he said, "No, I didn't know." So I said, "This turmoil taught you to detach and to be able to say 'fuck you' and keep on writing?" And he said, "Yes, this is what you have to learn from this experience.""

"I think when you are Salman Rushdie, you must get bored with people who always want to talk to you about literature."

"In Islam there is a line between let's say freedom and the line which is then transgressed into immorality and irresponsibility and I think as far as this writer is concerned, unfortunately, he has been irresponsible with his freedom of speech. Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again."

"I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini — and still don't. The book itself destroyed the harmony between peoples and created an unnecessary international crisis. When asked about my opinion regarding blasphemy, I could not tell a lie and confirmed that — like both the Torah and the Gospel — the Qur'an considers it, without repentance, as a capital offense. The Bible is full of similar harsh laws if you're looking for them. However, the application of such Biblical and Qur'anic injunctions is not to be outside of due process of law, in a place or land where such law is accepted and applied by the society as a whole."

"Almost all Muslims, including the most enlightened, feel offended by Rushdie's novel or, rather, by reports they have read or heard about it. Very few people have actually read the dense and tortuous book, but they do not have to. The very idea of using the prophet Muhammad as a character in a novel is painful to many Muslims. The entire Islamic system consists of the so-called Hodud, or limits beyond which one should simply not venture. Islam does not recognize unlimited freedom of expression. Call them taboos, if you like, but Islam considers a wide variety of topics as permanently closed. Most Muslims are prepared to be broad-minded about most things but never anything that even remotely touches their faith... To Muslims religion is not just a part of life. It is, in fact, life that is a part of religion. Muslims cannot understand a concept that has no rules, no limits. The Western belief in human rights, which seems to lack limits, is alien to Islamic traditions... The fact that Rushdie propagated his heresy in a book is of especial significance to Muslims. Islam is the religion of the book par excellence. Few cultures hold the written and printed word in so much awe as Muslims, even though the vast majority are illiterate. When a Muslim wants to clinch an argument he says, 'It is written.'"

"Seeing the water birds on the lake increase in number day by day, I thought to myself how nice it would be if it snowed before we got back to the Palace—the garden would look so beautiful; and then, two days later, while I was away on a short visit, lo and behold, it did snow. As I watched the rather drab scene at home, I felt both depressed and confused. For some years now I had existed from day to day in listless fashion, taking note of the flowers, the birds in song, the way the skies change from season to season, the moon, the frost and snow, doing little more than registering the passage of time. How would it all turn out? The thought of my continuing loneliness was unbearable, and yet I had managed to exchange sympathetic letters with those of like mind—some contacted via fairly tenuous connections—who would discuss my trifling tales and other matters with me; but I was merely amusing myself with fictions, finding solace for my idleness in foolish words. Aware of my own insignificance, I had at least managed for the time being to avoid anything that might have been considered shameful or unbecoming; yet here I was, tasting the bitterness of life to the very full."

"So all they see of me is a façade. There are times when I am forced to sit with them and on such occasions I simply ignore their petty criticisms, not because I am particularly shy but because I consider it pointless. As a result, they now look upon me as a dullard. "Well, we never expected this!" they all say. "No one liked her. They all said she was pretentious, awkward, difficult to approach, prickly, too fond of her tales, haughty, prone to versifying, disdainful, cantankerous and scornful; but when you meet her, she is strangely meek, a completely different person altogether!" How embarrassing! Do they really look upon me as such a dull thing, I wonder? But I am what I am. Her Majesty has also remarked more than once that she had thought I was not the kind of person with whom she could ever relax, but that I have now become closer to her than any of the others. I am so perverse and standoffish. If only I can avoid putting off those for whom I have a genuine regard."

"To be pleasant, gentle, calm and self-possessed: this is the basis of good taste and charm in a woman. No matter how amorous or passionate you may be, as long as you are straightforward and refrain from causing others embarrassment, no one will mind. But women who are too vain and act pretentiously, to the extent that they make others feel uncomfortable, will themselves become the object of attention; and once that happens, people will find fault with whatever they say or do: whether it be how they enter a room, how they sit down, how they stand up or how they take their leave. Those who end up contradicting themselves and those who disparage their companions are also carefully watched and listened to all the more. As long as you are free from such faults, people will surely refrain from listening to tittle-tattle and will want to show you sympathy, if only for the sake of politeness. I am of the opinion that when you intentionally cause hurt to another, or indeed if you do ill through mere thoughtless behavior, you fully deserve to be censured in public. Some people are so good-natured that they can still care for those who despise them, but I myself find it very difficult. Did the Buddha himself in all his compassion ever preach that one should simply ignore those who slander the Three Treasures? How in this sullied world of ours can those who are hard done by be expected to reciprocate in kind?"

"When my brother...was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father, a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: "Just my luck!" he would say. "What a pity she was not born a man!" But then I gradually realized that people were saying "It's bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good," and since then I have avoided writing the simplest [Chinese] character. My handwriting is appalling."

"It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion."

"Sei Shōnagon is a smug and horrible person. She acts so smart and is always writing in true [Chinese] characters, but if you look closely, you can find lots of mistakes. People who try that hard to be different from everyone else always end up falling behind, with trouble waiting in their future; and people who are that affected act all mono no aware and attend all the interesting events even when they're lonely and bored, so that in the end the affectation stops being an act. How exactly are things going to end well for a person like that?"

"Unforgettably horrible is the naked body. It really does not have the slightest charm."

"Mono no aware."

"I have finally realized how rarely you will find a flawless woman, one who is simply perfect. No doubt there are many who seem quite promising, write a flowing hand, give you back a perfectly acceptable poem, and all in all do credit enough to the rank they have to uphold, but you know, if you insist on any particular quality, you seldom find one who will do. Each one is all too pleased with her own accomplishments, runs others down, and so on. While a girl is under the eye of her adoring parents and living a sheltered life bright with future promise, it seems men have only to hear of some little talent of hers to be attracted. As long as she is pretty and innocent, and young enough to have nothing else on her mind, she may well put her heart into learning a pastime that she has seen others enjoy, and in fact she may become quite good at it. And when those who know her disguise her weaknesses and advertise whatever passable qualities she may have so as to present them in the best light, how could anyone think ill of her, having no reason to suspect her of being other than she seems? But when you look further to see whether it is all true, I am sure you can only end up disappointed."

"No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly," His Highness replied, "...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it."

"Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams."

"Ceaseless as the interminable voices of the bell-cricket, all night till dawn my tears flow."

"It is in general the unexplored that attracts us."

"Though the snow-drifts of Yoshino were heaped across his path, doubt not that whither his heart is set, his footsteps shall tread out their way."

"Does it not move you strangely, the love-bird's cry, tonight when, like the drifting snow, memory piles up on memory?"

"[The art of the novel] does not simply consist in the author's telling a story about the adventures of some other person. On the contrary, it happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart."

"Anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken."

"I have never thought there was much to be said in favor of dragging on long after all one's friends were dead."

"One ought not to be unkind to a woman merely on account of her plainness, any more than one had a right to take liberties with her merely because she was handsome."

"You that in far-off countries of the sky can dwell secure, look back upon me here; for I am weary of this frail world's decay."

"Think not that I have come in quest of common flowers; but rather to bemoan the loss of one whose scent has vanished from the air."

"Heian Japan offers us some of the earliest examples of an attempt by women living in a male-dominated society to define the self in textual terms. Indeed, it is largely because of these works that classical Japanese becomes of more than parochial interest: as a result, the Heian period as a whole will always bear for us a strong female aspect. To a great extent it is the women who are the source of our historical knowledge: they have become our historians, and it is they who define the parameters within which we are permitted to approach their world and their men. In retrospect it is a form of sweet revenge."

"There have been many interpretations over the years of the purpose of this tale. But all of these interpretations have been based not on a consideration of the novel itself but rather on the novel as seen from the point of view of Confucian and Buddhist works, and thus they do not represent the true purpose of the author. To seize upon an occasional similarity in sentiment or a chance correspondence in ideas with Confucian and Buddhist works, and proceed to generalize about the nature of the tale as a whole, is unwarranted. The general appeal of this tale is very different from that of such didactic works. Good and evil as found in this tale do not correspond to good and evil as found in Confucian and Buddhist writings. [...] Generally speaking, those who know the meaning of the sorrow of human existence, i.e., those who are in sympathy and in harmony with human sentiments, are regarded as good; and those who are not aware of the poignancy of human existence, i.e., those who are not in sympathy and not in harmony with human sentiments, are regarded as bad. [...] Since novels have as their object the teaching of the meaning of the nature of human existence, there are in their plots many points contrary to Confucian and Buddhist teachings. This is because among the varied feelings of man's reaction to things—whether good, bad, right, or wrong—there are feelings contrary to reason, however improper they may be. Man's feelings do not always follow the dictates of his mind. They arise in man in spite of himself and are difficult to control. In the instance of Prince Genji, his interest in and rendezvous with Utsusemi, Oborozukiyo, and the Consort Fujitsubo are acts of extraordinary iniquity and immorality according to the Confucian and Buddhist points of view. It would be difficult to call Prince Genji a good man, however numerous his other good qualities. But The Tale of Genji does not dwell on his iniquitous and immoral acts, but rather recites over and over again his awareness of the sorrow of existence, and represents him as a good man who combines in himself all good things in men."

"The purpose of the Tale of Genji may be likened to the man who, loving the lotus flower, must collect and store muddy and foul water in order to plant and cultivate the flower. The impure mud of illicit love affairs described in the Tale is there not for the purpose of being admired but for the purpose of nurturing the flower of the awareness of the sorrow of human existence."

"The Tale of Genji quite clearly breaks in two with Genji's death, but there is an earlier break, as Genji goes into his middle and late forties. If the book may thus be thought of as falling into three parts, the first part still has a great deal of the tenth century in it. The hero is an idealized prince, and, though there are setbacks, his early career is essentially a success story. [...] Then, some two-thirds of the way through the sections dominated by Genji, there comes a tidying up and packing away of things, as by someone getting ready to move on, and the matter of the last eight chapters before Genji's disappearance from the scene is rather different. Enough of romancing, Murasaki Shikibu seems to say, and one may imagine that she is leaving her own youth behind, the sad things are the real things. Shadows gather over Genji's life. The action is altogether less grand and more intimate, the characterization more subtle and compelling, than in the first section. Then, suddenly, Genji is dead. [...] Once more, and very boldly this time, Murasaki Shikibu has moved on. After the three transitional chapters come what are generally called the Uji chapters. The pessimism grows, the main action moves from the capital to the village of Uji, both character and action are more attenuated, and Murasaki Shikibu has a try, and many will say succeeds, at a most extraordinary thing, the creation of the first anti-hero in the literature of the world."

"I have a feeling that wherever I may be in the future, I will be wondering whether there is rain at Ngong."

"There is hardly any other sphere in which prejudice and superstition of the most horrific kind have been retained so long as in that of women, and just as it must have been an inexpressable relief for humanity when it shook off the burden of religious prejudice and superstition, I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open before them."

"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them."

"Man reaches the highest point of lovableness at 12 to 17 — to get it back, in a second flowering, at the age of 70 to 90."

"God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road."

"The cure for anything is salt water — sweat, tears, or the sea."

"Isak Dinesen is also known for this quote."

"Do you know a cure for me?" "Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water." "Salt water?" I asked him. "Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea."

"It is little silly to be a caricature of something of which you know very little, and which means very little to you, but to be your own caricature — that is the true carnival!"

"A fashion always has some meaning. The fashion, or style, of renunciation really meant something then. It was inspired by the war, or it ran parallel to the war, and could not have been conceived without the war... It stood for the will to sacrifice — if the unlimited will to throw away can be called the will to sacrifice. It was arrogant and elegantly cynical — because it is arrogant and elegantly cynical when the symbol of the élite becomes hunger. The superfluous here threw away the necessary quite simply. In its inner essence it was the disdain of death."

"Real art must always involve some witchcraft."

"I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots."

"The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred."

"Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows that they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest."

"I think Marilyn is bound to make an almost overwhelming impression on the people who meet her for the first time. It is not that she is pretty, although she is of course almost incredibly pretty, but she radiates, at the same time, unbounded vitality and a kind of unbelievable innocence. I have met the same in a lion-cub, which my native servants in Africa brought me. I would not keep her, since I felt that it would in some way be wrong...I shall never forget the almost overpowering feeling of unconquerable strength and sweetness which she conveyed. I had all the wild nature of Africa amicably gazing at me with mighty playfulness."

"During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity."

"God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?"

"I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch … and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order … by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery."

"My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady..."

"Love, with very young people, is a heartless business. We drink at that age from thirst, or to get drunk; it is only later in life that we occupy ourselves with the individuality of our wine. A young man in love is essentially enraptured by the forces within himself."

"What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?"

"The consolations of the vulgar are bitter in the royal ear. Let physicians and confectioners and servants in the great houses be judged by what they have done, and even by what they have meant to do; the great people themselves are judged by what they are. I have been told that lions, trapped and shut up in cages, grieve from shame more than from hunger."

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold."

"It was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet like the strong and refined essence of a continent... The views were immensely wide — everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility."

"Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that God and the Devil are one, the majesty coeternal, not two uncreated but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor divided the substance."

"In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet."

"White people, who for a long time live alone with Natives, get into the habit of saying what they mean, because they have no reason or opportunity for dissimulation, and when they meet again their conversation keeps the Native tone."

"There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive."

"I had time after time watched the progression across the plain of the giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long stemmed spackled gigantic flowers slowly advancing. It was, in giant size, the border of a very old, infinitely precious Persian carpet in the dyes of green, yellow and black-brown"

"The true aristocracy and the true proletariat of the world are both in understanding with tragedy. To them it is the fundamental principle of God, and the key, the minor key, to existence. They differ in this way from the bourgeoisie of all classes, who deny tragedy, who will not tolerate it, and to whom the word tragedy means in itself unpleasantness."

"People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of..."

"I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizard, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a river-bed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their colouring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet's luminous tail. Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all colour died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was grey and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag."

"Often since I have, in some sort, shot an Iguana, and have remembered that one in the reserve. Up at Meru I saw a young Native girl with a bracelet on, a leather strap two inches wide, and all embroidered over with very small turquoise-coloured beads which varied little in colour and played in green, light blue and ultra-marine. It was an extraordinarily live thing; it seemed to draw breath on her arm, so that I wanted it for myself, and made Farah buy it from her. No sooner had it come upon my arm that it gave up the ghost. It was nothing now, a small, cheap, purchased article of finery. It had been the play of colors, the duet between the turquoise and the "negre", — that quick, sweet, brownish black, like peat and black pottery, of the Native's skin, — that had created the life of the bracelet. ...I stood in Meru and looked at my pale hand and the dead bracelet, it was as if an injustice had been done to a noble thing, as if truth had been suppressed. So sad did it seem that I remembered the saying of the hero in a book that I had read as a child: "I have conquered them all, but I am standing amongst graves.""

"In a foreign country and with foreign species of life one should take measures to find out whether things will be keeping their value when dead. To settlers I give this advice: "For the sake of your eyes and hearts, shoot not the Iguana.""

"Tragedy should remain the right of human beings, subject, in their conditions or in their own nature, to the dire law of necessity. To them it is salvation and beatification."

"Human talk is a centrifugal function, ever in flight outwards from what is on the talker's mind."

"Man and woman are two locked caskets, of which each contains the key to the other."

"I first began to tell tales to delight the world and make it wiser..."

"Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them. But our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home."

"Of what happened later in the evening nothing definite can here be stated. None of the guests later on had any clear remembrance of it. They only knew that the rooms had been filled with a heavenly light, as if a number of small halos had blended into one glorious radiance. Taciturn old people received the gift of tongues; ears that for years had been almost deaf were opened to it. Time itself had merged into eternity. Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air."

"When later in life they thought of this evening it never occurred to any of them that they might have been exalted by their own merit. They realized that the infinite grace of which General Loewenhielm had spoken had been allotted to them, and they did not even wonder at the fact, for it had been but the fulfillment of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium."

"When soon I sail from here, I may again run into such a storm as the one in Kvasefjord. But this time I shall clearly understand that it is not a play in the theatre, but it is death. and it seems too that then, in the last moment before we go down, I can in in all truth be yours..."

"It never has happened, and it never will happen, and that is why it is told."

"'Are you sure,' she asked, 'that it is God whom you serve?' The Cardinal looked up, met her eyes and smiled very gently. 'That,' he said, 'that, Madame, is a risk which the artists and the priests of this world have to run!'"

"The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept."

"Why, you are to become a story teller, and I shall give you the reasons! Hear then: Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence. Whether a small snotty lass understands it or not."

"Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) ...Isak Dinesen’s masterworks, “The Deluge at Norderney” and “The Monkey,” are so important to me that I keep wearing out the collection they are part of — “Seven Gothic Tales.”"

"As a Nobel Prize winner I cannot but regret that the award was never given to Mark Twain, nor to Henry James, speaking only of my own countrymen. Greater writers than these also did not receive the prize. I would have been happy — happier — today if the prize had been given to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen."

"("Would you agree with Isak Dinesen's idea, "All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story"?) ULG: That's nice, and I like Isak Dinesen. Yes, but it is kind of a tautology, because if you can put them in a story, it means you're already bearing them. You are bearing them as a woman bears her child."

"I exist without the cosmic shadow, But it could not live bereft of me; As the sea exists without the waves, But they breathe not without the sea. Dreams, wakings, states of deep turiya sleep, Present, past, future, no more for me, But the ever-present, all-flowing, I, I everywhere. Consciously enjoyable, Beyond the imagination of all expectancy, Is this, my samadhi state."

"Thou art I, I am Thou, Knowing, Knower, Known, as One!"

"Not an unconscious state Or mental chloroform without wilful return, Samadhi but extends my realm of consciousness Beyond the limits of my mortal frame To the boundaries of eternity, Where I, the Cosmic Sea, Watch the little ego floating in Me."

"Grosser light vanishes into eternal rays Of all-pervading Cosmic Joy. From Joy we come, For Joy we live, In the sacred Joy we melt."

"I, the ocean of mind, drink all creation’s waves. The four veils of solid, liquid, vapor, light, Lift aright. Myself, in everything, Enters the Great Myself. Gone forever, The fitful, flickering shadows of a mortal memory. Spotless is my mental sky, Below, ahead, and high above. Eternity and I, one united ray. I, a tiny bubble of laughter, Have become the Sea of Mirth Itself."

"Love is the song of the soul, singing to God."

"To gaze with looks of wonderment, And to serve all that lives, still or moving. This is to know what love is. He knows who lives it."

"It is the call of the beauty — robed ones To worship the great Beauty. It is the call of God Through silent intelligences And starburst of feelings."

"Love is the Heaven Toward which the flowers, rivers, nations, atoms, creatures — you and I Are rushing by the straight path of action right, Or winding laboriously on error’s path, All to reach haven there at last."

"Away, the partial love That ‘boldens Nature to sit above Her Maker!"

"Nor doomsday’s thunderous roar, Dismantling earth and stars — The cosmic beauties all to mar — Not Nature’s murderous mutiny, Nor man’s exploding destiny Can touch me here."

"In wrath I strike, and set the dark ablaze With the immortal spark of thought, By friction-process brought Of concentration And distraction. The darkness burns With a million tongues; And now I spy All past, all distant things, as nigh."

"I remained alone with the yogi until his disciples arrived in the evening. Bhaduri Mahasaya entered one of his inimitable discourses. Like a peaceful flood, he swept away the mental debris of his listeners, floating them Godward."

"If anyone observed the unpretentious master and myself as we walked away from the crowded pavement, the onlooker surely suspected us of intoxication. I felt that the falling shades of evening were sympathetically drunk with God. When darkness recovered from its nightly swoon, I faced the new morning bereft of my ecstatic mood, but ever enshrined in memory is the seraphic son of Divine Mother—Master Mahasaya!"

"Kriya Yoga, the scientific technique of God-realization, will ultimately spread in all lands, and aid in harmonizing the nations through man's personal, transcendental perception of the Infinite Father."

"In waking, eating, working, dreaming, sleeping, Serving, meditating, chanting, divinely loving, My soul constantly hums, unheard by any: God, God, God!"

"The life of Lord Krishna has been misunderstood by many Western commentators. Scriptural allegory is baffling to literal minds. A hilarious blunder by a translator will illustrate this point. The story concerns an inspired medieval saint, the cobbler Ravidas, who sang in the simple terms of his own trade of the spiritual glory hidden in all mankind: Under the vast vault of blue Lives the divinity clothed in hide. One turns aside to hide a smile on hearing the pedestrian interpretation given to Ravidas' poem by a Western writer: He afterwards built a hut, set up in it an idol which he made from a hide, and applied himself to its worship."

"His interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita and other scriptures testify to the depth of Sri Yukteswarji's command of the philosophy, both Eastern and Western, and remain as an eye-opener for the unity between Orient and Occident. As he believed in the unity of all religious faiths, Sri Yukteswar Maharaj established Sadhu Sabha (Society of Saints) with the cooperation of leaders of various sects and faiths, for the inculcation of a scientific spirit in religion."

"If by this superhuman concentration one succeeded in converting or resolving the two cosmoses with all their complexities into sheer ideas, he would then reach the causal world and stand on the borderline of fusion between mind and matter. There one perceives all created things — solids, liquids, gases, electricity, energy, all beings, gods, men, animals, plants, bacteria — as forms of consciousness, just as a man can close his eyes and realize that he exists, even though his body is invisible to his physical eyes and is present only as an idea."

"Gandhi has sound economic and cultural reasons for encouraging the revival of cottage industries, but he does not counsel a fanatical repudiation of all modern progress. Machinery, trains, automobiles, the telegraph have played important parts in his own colossal life! Fifty years of public service, in prison and out, wrestling daily with practical details and harsh realities in the political world, have only increased his balance, open-mindedness, sanity, and humorous appreciation of the quaint human spectacle."

"Sri Yukteswar used to poke gentle fun at the commonly inadequate conceptions of renunciation. 'A beggar cannot renounce wealth,' Master would say. 'If a man laments: 'My business has failed; my wife has left me; I will renounce all and enter a monastery,' to what worldly sacrifice is he referring? He did not renounce wealth and love; they renounced him!' Saints like Gandhi, on the other hand, have made not only tangible material sacrifices, but also the more difficult renunciation of selfish motive and private goal, merging their inmost being in the stream of humanity as a whole."

""Father, there is little to tell." She (Sri Anandamoyi Ma) spread her graceful hands in a deprecatory gesture. "My consciousness has never associated itself with this temporary body. Before I came on this earth, Father, 'I was the same.' As a little girl, 'I was the same.' I grew into womanhood, but still 'I was the same.' When the family in which I had been born made arrangements to have this body married, 'I was the same... And, Father, in front of you now, 'I am the same.' Ever afterward, though the dance of creation change[s] around me in the hall of eternity, 'I shall be the same.'"

"Brotherhood is an ideal better understood by example than precept!"

""World is a large term, but man must enlarge his allegiance, considering himself in the light of a world citizen," I continued "A person who truly feels: 'The world is my homeland; it is my America, my India, my Philippines, my England, my Africa,' will never lack scope for a useful and happy life. His natural local pride will know limitless expansion; he will be in touch with creative universal currents."

"The Body melts into the universe The universe melts into the soundless voice The sound melts into the all-shining light And the light enters the bosom of infinite joy."

"In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth. He came two thousand years ago and, after imparting a universal path to God's kingdom, was crucified and resurrected; his reappearance to the masses now is not necessary for the fulfillment of his teachings. What is necessary is for the cosmic wisdom and divine perception of Jesus to speak again through each one's own experience and understanding of the infinite Christ Consciousness that was incarnate in Jesus. That will be his true Second Coming."

"There is a distinguishing difference of meaning between Jesus and Christ. His given name was Jesus; his honorific title was "Christ." In his little human body called Jesus was born the vast Christ Consciousness, the omniscient Intelligence of God omnipresent in every part and particle of creation. This Consciousness is the "only begotten Son of God," so designated because it is the sole perfect reflection in creation of the Transcendental Absolute, Spirit or God the Father. It was of that Infinite Consciousness, replete with the love and bliss of God, that Saint John spoke when he said: "As many as received him [the Christ Consciousness], to them gave he power to become the sons of God." Thus according to Jesus' own teaching as recorded by his most highly advanced apostle, John, all souls who become united with Christ Consciousness by intuitive Self-realization are rightly called sons of God...."

"The saviors of the world do not come to foster inimical doctrinal divisions; their teachings should not be used toward that end. It is something of a misnomer even to refer to the New Testament as the "Christian" Bible, for it does not belong exclusively to any one sect. Truth is meant for the blessing and upliftment of the entire human race. As the Christ Consciousness is universal, so does Jesus Christ belong to all...."

"It is an erroneous assumption of limited minds that great ones such as Jesus, Krishna, and other divine incarnations are gone from the earth when they are no longer visible to human sight. This is not so... Jesus Christ is very much alive and active today. In Spirit and occasionally taking on a flesh-and-blood form, he is working unseen by the masses for the regeneration of the world. With his all-embracing love, Jesus is not content merely to enjoy his blissful consciousness in Heaven. He is deeply concerned for mankind and wishes to give his followers the means to attain the divine freedom of entry into God's Infinite Kingdom...."

"These teachings have been sent to explain the truth as Jesus intended it to be known in the world — not to give a new Christianity, but to give the real Christ-teaching: how to become like Christ, how to resurrect the Eternal Christ within one's Self..."

"Many sects, many denominations, many beliefs, many persecutions, many conflicts and upheavals have been created by misinterpretations. Now, Christ reveals the consummate message in the simple words he spoke to an ancient people in a less-advanced age of civilization. Read, understand, and feel Christ speaking to you through this "Second Coming" bible, urging you to be redeemed by realization of the true "Second Coming," the resurrection within you of the Infinite Christ Consciousness."

"How do the receptive perceive truth, whereas the unreceptive "seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand"? The ultimate truths of heaven and the kingdom of God, the reality that lies behind sensory perception and beyond the cogitations of the rationalizing mind, can only be grasped by intuition — awakening the intuitive knowing, the pure comprehension, of the soul."

"Christ has been much misinterpreted by the world. Even the most elementary principles of his teachings have been desecrated, and their esoteric depths have been forgotten. They have been crucified at the hands of dogma, prejudice, and cramped understanding. Genocidal wars have been fought, people have been burned as witches and heretics, on the presumed authority of man-made doctrines of Christianity. How to salvage the immortal teachings from the hands of ignorance? We must know Jesus as an Oriental Christ, a supreme yogi who manifested full mastery of the universal science of God-union, and thus could speak and act as a savior with the voice and authority of God."

"Divine incarnations do not come to bring a new or exclusive religion, but to restore the One Religion of God-realization. Many are the churches and temples founded in his name, often prosperous and powerful, but where is the communion that he stressed — actual contact with God? Jesus wants temples to be established in human souls, first and foremost; then established outwardly in physical places of worship. Instead, there are countless huge edifices with vast congregations being indoctrinated in churchianity, but few souls who are really in touch with Christ through deep prayer and meditation."

"The lack of individual prayer and communion with God has divorced modern Christians and Christian sects from Jesus' teaching of the real perception of God, as is true also of all religious paths inaugurated by God-sent prophets whose followers drift into byways of dogma and ritual rather than actual God-communion. Those paths that have no esoteric soul-lifting training busy themselves with dogma and building walls to exclude people with different ideas. Divine persons who really perceive God include everybody within the path of their love, not in the concept of an eclectic congregation but in respectful divine friendship toward all true lovers of God and the saints of all religions."

"The heart of the great dispensation of Jesus has survived not necessarily in any temporal power of an outer institution, but in those great devotees and saints whose protracted devotions and meditations established within them temples of Christ Consciousness and God-communion... It is such saints and masters who have actually communed with God — those known to history as well as countless anonymous true souls devoted to Christ, hidden in monasteries and convents in wholehearted consecration — who have verily been the "rock" on which Jesus' inner church of Christ communion has endured these two thousand years."

"Yogananda draws parallels between the Christian trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the yoga concept of Sat, Tat and Aum. Both traditions use the trinity to distinguish among the transcendent, divine reality; its immanence in creation; and a sacred, cosmic vibration that sustains the universe, he says.And he asserts that Bible passages used to exclude non-Christians from salvation have been misconstrued. Some Christians believe, for instance, that Jesus' saying that "no one comes to the Father except through me" requires a belief in Jesus the man as God and personal savior. Yogananda, however, asserts that Jesus was referring to the need to achieve the same "Christ consciousness" he personified as a way to achieve oneness with God."Christ has been much misinterpreted by the world," Yogananda wrote. "Even the most elementary principles of his teachings have been desecrated, and their esoteric depths have been forgotten.""

"The Autobiography of a Yogi [is a] guide to meditation and spirituality that [Steve Jobs] had first read as a teenager, then reread in India, and had read once a year ever since."

"Only the brave know how to forgive...A coward never forgave; it is not in his nature."

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me."

"Pray, my dear," quoth my mother, "have you not forgot to wind up the clock?" — "Good G—!" cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time, — "Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?"

"As we jogg on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short do any thing—only keep your temper."

"So long as a man rides his hobbyhorse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him — pray, Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?"

"For every ten jokes, thou hast got a hundred enemies."

"He was within a few hours of giving his enemies the slip forever."

"Whistled up to London, upon a Tom Fool's errand."

"'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause — and of obstinacy in a bad one."

"Persuasion hung upon his lips, and the elements of Logick and Rhetorick were so blended up in him, — and, withall, he had so shrewd guess at the weaknesses and passions of his respondent, — that NATURE might have stood up and said, — "This man is eloquent.""

"Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; —& they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them."

"The history of a soldier's wound beguiles the pain of it."

"The desire of knowledge, like the thirst of riches, increases ever with the acquisition of it."

"Writing, when properly managed, (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation."

"Go poor Devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee? — This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me."

"Trust that man in nothing who has not a conscience in everything."

"Great wits jump."

"Our armies swore terribly in Flanders, cried my uncle Toby, — but nothing to this. — For my own part, I could not have a heart to curse my dog so."

"Of all the cants which are canted in this canting world, — though the cant of hypocrites may be the worst, — the cant of criticism is the most tormenting!"

"As for the clergy — No — If I say a word against them, I'll be shot. — I have no desire, — and besides, if I had, — I durst not for my soul touch upon the subject, — with such weak nerves and spirits, and in the condition I am in at present, 'twould be as much as my life was worth, to deject and contrist myself with so bad and melancholy an account, — and therefore, 'tis safer to draw a curtain across, and hasten from it, as fast as I can, to the main and principal point I have undertaken to clear up, — and that is, How it comes to pass, that your men of least wit are reported to be men of most judgment."

"I have got him fast hung up, quoth Didius to himself, upon one of the two horns of my dilemma — let him get off as he can."

"It had ever been the custom of the family, and by length of time was almost become a matter of common right, that the eldest son of it should have free ingress, egress, and regress into foreign parts before marriage, — not only for the sake of bettering his own private parts, by the benefit of exercise and change of so much air — but simply for the mere delectation of his fancy, by the feather put into his cap, of having been abroad."

"Now or never was the time."

"Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints — without working one — one single miracle with them?"

"My father was as proud of his eloquence as MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO could be for his life, and and for aught I am convinced of to the contrary at present, with as much reason: it was indeed his strength — and his weakness, too. — His strength — for he was by nature eloquent — and his weakness — for he was hourly a dupe to it; and provided an occasion in life would but permit him to shew his talents, or say either a wise thing, a witty, or a shrewd one — (bating the case of a systematic misfortune)— he had all he wanted.— A blessing which tied up my father's tongue, and a misfortune which let it loose with a good grace, were pretty equal: sometimes, indeed, the misfortune was the better of the two; for instance, where the pleasure of the harangue was as ten, and the pain of the misfortune was as five — my father gained half in half, and consequently was as well again off, as if it had never befallen him."

"I am convinced, Yorick, continued my father, half reading and half discoursing, that there is a Northwest Passage to the intellectual world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take with it."

"The Accusing Spirit which flew up to heaven's chancery with the oath, blush'd as he gave it in; and the Recording Angel as he wrote it down, dropp'd a tear upon the word, and blotted it out forever."

"A man should know something of his own country too, before he goes abroad."

"I am sick as a horse."

"Ho! 'tis the time of salads."

"I believe in my conscience I intercept many a thought which heaven intended for another man."

"When issues of events like these my father is waiting for, are hanging in the scales of fate, the mind has the advantage of changing the principle of expectation three times, without which it would not have power to see it out.Curiosity governs the first moment; and the second moment is all economy to justify the expense of the first — and for the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth moments, and so on to the day of judgment — 'tis a point of HONOUR.I need not be told, that the ethic writers have assigned this all to Patience; but that VIRTUE, methinks, has extent of domination sufficient of her own, and enough to do in it, without invading the few dismantled castles which HONOUR has left him upon the earth."

"L—d! said my mother, what is all this story about? — A Cock and a Bull, said Yorick — And one of the best of its kind I ever heard."

"They order, said I, this matter better in France."

"I was at peace with the world before, and this finish’d the treaty with myself."

"No man cares to have his virtues the sport of contingencies—or one man may be generous, as another is puissant;—sed non quoad hanc—or be it as it may,—for there is no regular reasoning upon the ebbs and flows of our humours; they may depend upon the same causes, for aught I know, which influence the tides themselves: ’twould oft be no discredit to us, to suppose it was so: I’m sure at least for myself, that in many a case I should be more highly satisfied, to have it said by the world, “I had had an affair with the moon, in which there was neither sin nor shame,” than have it pass altogether as my own act and deed, wherein there was so much of both."

"When a man is discontented with himself, it has one advantage however, that it puts him into an excellent frame of mind for making a bargain."

"When the heart flies out before the understanding, it saves the judgment a world of pains."

"That grave people hate love for the name’s sake;—That selfish people hate it for their own;—Hypocrites for heaven’s;—"

"A man my good Sir, has seldom an offer of kindness to make to a woman, but she has a presentiment of it some moments before."

"I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, 'Tis all barren!"

"A large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life, by him who interests his heart in everything."

"Tant pis and tant mieux, being two of the great hinges in French conversation, a stranger would do well to set himself right in the use of them before he gets to Paris."

"If ever I do a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one passion and another: whilst this interregnum lasts, I always perceive my heart locked up,—I can scarce find in it to give Misery a sixpence; and therefore I always get out of it as fast as I can—and the moment I am rekindled, I am all generosity and good-will again; and would do anything in the world, either for or with any one, if they will but satisfy me there is no sin in it."

"There is one sweet lenitive at least for evils, which Nature holds out to us: so I took it kindly at her hands, and fell asleep."

"The heart, in spite of the understanding, will always say too much."

"I think I can see the precise and distinguishing marks of national characters more in these nonsensical minutiæ than in the most important matters of state; where great men of all nations talk and stalk so much alike, that I would not give ninepence to choose amongst them."

"Hail, ye small, sweet courtesies of life! for smooth do ye make the road of it."

"Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery! said I,—still thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.—’Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess, addressing myself to Liberty, whom all in public or in private worship, whose taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change.—No tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle, or chymic power turn thy sceptre into iron:—with thee to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled!"

"Man is false to himself and betrays his own succours ten times where nature does it once."

"’Tis a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of Nature, and those affections which arise out of her, which make us love each other,—and the world, better than we do."

"Sweet pliability of man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which cheat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments!"

"Un homme qui rit, said the duke, ne sera jamais dangereux."

"The English, like ancient medals, kept more apart, and passing but few people’s hands, preserve the first sharpnesses which the fine hand of Nature has given them;—they are not so pleasant to feel,—but in return the legend is so visible, that at the first look you see whose image and superscription they bear."

"If Nature has so wove her web of kindness, that some threads of love and desire are entangled with the piece,—must the whole web be rent in drawing them out?—Whip me such stoics, great Governor of Nature! said I to myself:—wherever thy providence shall place me for the trials of my virtue;—whatever is my danger,—whatever is my situation,—let me feel the movements which rise out of it, and which belong to me as a man,—and, if I govern them as a good one, I will trust the issues to thy justice; for thou hast made us, and not we ourselves."

"We get forwards in the world not so much by doing services, as receiving them: you take a withering twig, and put it in the ground; and then you water it, because you have planted it."

"I am positive I have a soul; nor can all the books with which materialists have pester’d the world ever convince me to the contrary."

"God tempers the wind, said Maria, to the shorn lamb."

"Dear Sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows! thou chainest thy martyr down upon his bed of straw—and ’tis thou who lift’st him up to Heaven!—Eternal Fountain of our feelings!"

"[T]he worst of human maladies is poverty — though that is a second lye — for poverty of spirit is worse than poverty of purse, by ten thousand per cent."

"Every time a man smiles,—but much more so, when he laughs, that it adds something to this Fragment of life."

"But this is his way; it is the language of his character; and, though one might wish it to be otherwise, yet I cannot tell what right any of us have to pass a severe sentence upon it, for no other reason in the world, but because our own failings are of a different complexion. And so much for all that."

"Opinion, my dear fellow, somehow or other, rules all mankind; and not like a kind master, or, which would be more congenial, a gentle mistress, but like a tyrant, whose wish is power, and whose gratification is servility. — Opinion leads us by the ears, the eyes, — and, I had almost said, by the nose. It warps our understandings, confounds our judgments, dissipates experience and turns our passions to its purpose. In short, it becomes the governess of our lives, and usurps the place of reason, which it has kicked out of office. — This is among the strange truths which cannot be explained but by that mortifying description which time will display to your experience hereafter, with ten times the credit that would accompany any present endeavours of mine to the same purpose... A mistress, with all her arts and fascinations, may, in time, be got rid of; but opinion, once rooted, becomes a part of ourselves — it lives and dies with us."

"As far as my observation has reached, and the circle of it is by no means, a narrow one — an hard heart is always a cowardly heart. — Generosity and courage are associate virtues; and the character which possesses the former, must, in the nature of mental arrangements, be adorned with the latter. If I perceive a man to be capable of doing a mean action, — if I see him imperious and tyrannical; if he takes advantage of the weak to oppress, or of the poor to grind, or of the downcast to insult, — or is continually on the hunt after excuses not to do what he ought, — I determine such a man, though he may have fought fifty duels, to be a coward. — It is by no means a proof that a man is brave because he does not refuse to fight; — for we all know that cowards have fought, nay, — that cowards have conquered, — but a coward never performed a generous or a noble action: — and thou hast my authority to say, — and thou mightest find a worse, that a hard-hearted character never was a brave one. I say, thou mayst justly call such a man a coward, — and, if he should be spirited into a resentment of thy words — fear him not. — Tristram shall brighten his armour, and scour the rust from off his spear, and aid thee in the combat."

"I shall not die but live — in the mean time dear F. let us live as merrily but as innocently as we can. — It has ever been as good, if not better, than a bishoprick to me — and I desire no other."

"We must bring three parts in four of the treat along with us — In short we must be happy within — and then few things without us make much difference — This is my Shandean philosophy."

"Friendship is the balm and cordial of life, and without it, ’tis a heavy load not worth sustaining."

"There is more of mannerism and affectation in him, and a more immediate reference to preceding authors; but his excellences, where he is excellent, are of the first order. His characters are intellectual and inventive, like Richardson's; but totally opposite in the execution. The one are made out by continuity, and patient repetition of touches: the others, by glancing transitions and graceful apposition. His style is equally different from Richardson's: it is at times the most rapid, the most happy, the most idiomatic of any that is to be found. It is the pure essence of English conversational style. His works consist only of morceaux—of brilliant passages."

"His wit is poignant, though artificial; and his characters (though the groundwork of some of them had been laid before) have yet invaluable original differences; and the spirit of the execution, the master-strokes constantly thrown into them, are not to be surpassed."

"There appears to have been in Sterne a vein of dry, sarcastic humour, and of extreme tenderness of feeling; the latter sometimes carried to affectation, as in the tale of Maria, and the apostrophe to the recording angel: but at other times pure, and without blemish. The story of Le Fevre is perhaps the finest in the English language."

"Time and the river and the mountain are the real heroes of my book [Finnegans Wake]... Yet the elements are exactly what every novelist might use: man and woman, birth, childhood, night, sleep, marriage, prayer, death... There is nothing paradoxical about all this... Only I am trying to build many planes of narrative with a single esthetic purpose... Did you ever read Laurence Sterne...?"

"But after full account has been taken of Sterne's numerous deflections from the paths of literary rectitude—of his indecency, his buffoonery, his mawkishness, his plagiarisms, his wanton digressiveness—he remains, as the author of Tristram Shandy, a delineator of the comedy of human life before whom only three or four humorous writers, in any tongue or of any age, can justly claim precedence. Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Dr. Slop, Mr. and Mrs. Shandy, Obadiah, and the Widow Wadman are of the kin—however the degrees of kinship may be estimated—of Pantagruel and Don Quixote, of Falstaff and Juliet's Nurse, of Monsieur Jourdain and Tartuffe. For the guerilla warfare that he incidentally waged in his own freakish fashion throughout the novel on the pedantries and pretences of learning he deserves many of the honours that have been paid to Pope and Swift. No modern writer has shown a more certain touch in transferring to his canvas commonplace domestic scenes which only a master's hand can invest with point or interest. It is this kind of power especially that glorifies A Sentimental Journey. Defects due to the author's overstrained sensibility practically count for nothing against the artistic and finished beauty of the series of vignettes which Sterne, by his sureness of insight and descriptive faculty, created in A Sentimental Journey out of the simplest and most pedestrian episodes of travel."

"Well then, such strengthening reading during the last Joseph years was provided by two books: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Goethe's Faust—a perplexing combination; but each of the two heterogeneous works has its particular function as a stimulant, and in the connection it was a pleasure for me to know that Goethe had held Sterne in very high esteem, and had called him one of the finest intellects who had ever lived."

"How, in a book for free spirits, should there be no mention of Laurence Sterne, whom Goethe honoured as the most liberated spirit of his century! Let us content ourselves here simply with calling him the most liberated spirit of all time, in comparison with whom all others seem stiff, square, intolerant and boorishly direct."

"Sterne is the great master of ambiguity – this word taken in a far wider sense than is usually done when it is accorded only a sexual signification. The reader who demands to know exactly what Sterne really thinks of a thing, whether he is making a serious or a laughing face, must be given up for lost: for he knows how to encompass both in a single facial expression; he likewise knows how, and even wants to be in the right and in the wrong at the same time, to knot together profundity and farce. His digressions are at the same time continuations and further developments of the story; his aphorisms are at the same time an expression of an attitude of irony towards all sententiousness, his antipathy to seriousness is united with a tendency to be unable to regard anything merely superficially. Thus he produces in the right reader a feeling of uncertainty as to whether one is walking, standing or lying: a feeling, that is, closely related to floating. He, the supplest of authors, communicates something of this suppleness to his reader. Indeed, Sterne unintentionally reverses these roles, and is sometimes as much reader as author; his book resembles a play within a play, an audience observed by another audience. One has to surrender unconditionally to Sterne's caprices – always in the expectation, however, that one will not regret doing so."

"Who is this Yorick? you are pleased to ask me. You cannot, I imagine, have looked into his books: execrable I cannot but call them; for I am told that the third and fourth volumes are worse, if possible, than the two first, which, only, I have had the patience to run through. One extenuating circumstance attends his works, that they are too gross to be inflaming."

"How very much, good Sir, am I (amongst millions) indebted to you for the character of your amiable uncle Toby!—I declare, I would walk ten miles in the dog-days, to shake hands with the honest corporal.—Your Sermons have touch’d me to the heart, and I hope have amended it, which brings me to the point.—In your tenth discourse, page seventy-eight, in the second volume—is this very affecting passage—“Consider how great a part of our species—in all ages down to this—have been trod under the feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither hear their cries, nor pity their distresses.—Consider slavery—what it is—how bitter a draught—and how many millions are made to drink it!”—Of all my favorite authors, not one has drawn a tear in favour of my miserable black brethren—excepting yourself, and the humane author of Sir George Ellison Sarah Scott]."

"The armed forces have acted today solely from the patriotic inspiration of saving the country from the tremendous chaos into which it was being plunged by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.… The Junta will maintain judicial power and consultantship of the Comptroller. The Chambers will remain in recess until further orders. That is all."

"The country is safe, because we have a good intelligence service."

"I am going to die. The person who succeeds me also would die. But elections, you won't have."

"If Senator Kennedy is elected President of the United States, the government of Chile will take the necessary measures."

"Not a single leaf moves in this country if I'm not the one moving it. I want that to be clear!"

"I devalued the peso solely looking after the poor."

"This is not a dictadura [dictatorship/hard rule] but a dictablanda [soft rule]."

"I have a sour face. Maybe that's why they say I'm a dictator."

"My library is filled with UN condemnations."

"The nation is trying to make Chile a country of proprietors, not of proletarians."

"I'm looking at them from above, because God put me there."

"We practically wiped this nation clean of Marxists."

"The rich people are those who create wealth, and you have to treat them well so they continue to give wealth."

"Don't forget that in the history of the world, there was a plebiscite, in which Christ and Barabbas were being judged, and the people chose Barabbas."

"I'm not someone who usually sends out threats. I warn only once. The day they touch one of my men, the rule of law is over."

"He could have a thousand faults, but I do not blame anyone in particular and I despise brutality with which the Nazis acted against Israelites; but the fault is not only of Hitler, but a group of high-ranked dignitaries."

"How very economical! (¡Pero que economía más grande!)"

"To whom are we going to ask to be forgiven? To the one who tried to kill us? To the one who tried to destroy our country? To whom? They are the ones who must ask to be forgiven for everything they did before September 11."

"The only solution to the issue of human rights is oblivion."

"Rome cut off the heads of Christians and they continued to reappear one way or another. Something similar happens with Marxists."

"Had I been a dictator, I would still be governing."

"Tell my friends to get me out of here."

"The freedoms which had been so hard won from colonial domination were being crushed by Soviet-inspired and funded military and political forces. Their clear intention was to deprive the people of their democratic freedoms. As history shows, this is what had happened in the Soviet Union and in Cuba, and continues to be the case in other parts of the world."

"I have lived with my conscience and my own memories for over quarter of a century since the events of 1973.… These are not easy reflections for me. But I am at peace with myself, and with the Chilean people, about what happened. I am clear in my mind that the return to Chile of true democracy, and from that the true freedom to which all individual people are entitled, could not have been achieved without the removal of the Marxist government."

"I was only an aspiring dictator. I was never a real dictator."

"Is it true what Contreras testified before the courts, that the president of the junta and later the president of the Republic was the direct head of DINA? I don't remember, but it is not true. It is not true and if it was, I don't remember. Contreras liked to cajole, wrap around his boss. Contreras gave the orders. It was he who managed the institution."

"Today, near the end of my days, I want to say that I harbor no rancor against anybody, that I love my fatherland above all and that I take political responsibility for everything that was done which had no other goal than making Chile greater and avoiding its disintegration.… I assume full political responsibility for what happened."

"Power must be vested in the armed forces, since only they have the organization and the means to fight Marxism."

"I think Pinochet has been proven to be an evil dictator in the eyes of most people in the world, and most people see Allende as a dreamer and even as a visionary."

"We always think that a powerful dictator is larger than life, but he died of a cold, a very common thing. All of sudden, his authority diminished, like the Witch in the “Wizard of Oz.” It sort of trivializes his power."

"The political future of Chile is a democracy, without a doubt. Pinochet is not eternal; immortality is going to fail him at any moment."

"Although he was authoritarian and ruled dictatorially, Pinochet's support of neoliberal economic policies and his unwillingness to support national businesses distinguished him from classical fascists."

"Friedman, by contrast, hates and fears a government that prohibits use of recreational drugs in your home almost as much as he hates and fears a government that won't let you undersell your politically-powerful competitors. For Friedman, Pinochet is a bad--an aggressive, powerful military dictator--whose evil the Chicago Boys can curb by persuading him to adopt laissez-faire policies."

"I think the Pinochet trial has forced us look one another in the face … to speak to one another, to understand the past and understand that time is not going to solve the problem. In a way it has been a victory for the dead of Chile."

"Augusto Pinochet saved Chile from Communism and set it on the path to economic success. He also ran a regime that killed thousands. Pinochet replaced a threatened Communist dictatorship with a real military one, bringing material prosperity while violently suppressing freedom. He reluctantly laid the foundation for democracy and surrendered power. Thereafter, he faced incessant legal problems."

"I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary. This does not mean, however, that in some historical circumstances personal liberty may not have been better protected under an authoritarian than democratic government. [...] More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende. Nor have I heard any sensible person claim that in the principalities of Monaco or Lichtenstein, which I am told are not precisely democratic, personal liberty is smaller than anywhere else!"

"Fortunately, there have been those whose conscience and consciousness enabled them to see things differently. They correctly perceived Pinochet and DINA officials to be the terrorists—state terrorists. They correctly recognized the right of people to peacefully resist a military regime, especially an anti-democratic regime that has gained power through the violent ouster of a democratically elected regime. Nothing—not even “free-enterprise, Chicago-boys” economic policies—can excuse that sort of state-sponsored thuggery. That’s why people in the libertarian section of the political spectrum, unlike those in the conservative section, have long supported the criminal indictment of Pinochet and his DINA minions—because terror in the name of fighting terror is a grave criminal offense against humanity no matter what economic philosophy the state terrorist happens to hold."

"How is Obama's killing of Abdulrahman any different from Pinochet's murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt? In the one case, a 16-year-old boy has had his life snuffed out because he had the wrong father. In the other case, a man had his life snuffed out because he had the wrong philosophical beliefs. Given that the Letelier and Moffitt killings were treated as murders, why shouldn't the Abdulraham killing be treated as murder too?"

"The United States... supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests. In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died. In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990."

"Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the 11th of September 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. “Chile should not be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible,” said Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Laureate, then the U.S. Secretary of State... Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico and Colombia – they’ve all been the playground for covert – and overt – operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured or have simply disappeared under the despotic regimes that were propped up in their countries."

"The exercise of justice is only possible within the framework of established institutions which command respect. To command respect it is not sufficient to make just pronouncements: it is necessary also to have the power to put them into practice... A general acquiescence towards the established order is required for the exercise of this power, and hence for the just dealings which the citizen expects from it. In return for this expectation of justice, the state expects the allegiance of its citizens; they are constrained in conscience to sanction the most violent and even "unnatural" methods in the suppression of rebellion, provided the aim is as rapid a return as possible to the condition where just dealings become the norm. This is surely what should be said in defence of those, like Chile's General Pinochet, who have had to make the choice between violently establishing an order in which natural justice has a chance, and acquiescing in the ongoing violence and degradation of a society devoted to "social justice". Only those who have no experience of communism will be without sympathy for the General in this dilemma – which is not to say that he ever experienced it as one."

"The great majority of Chileans, even the political opponents of Senator Pinochet, feel wounded at the way we and the Spanish have treated them. They are right to do so. Until the Senator's arrest last October, Chile had achieved three remarkable successes, all of them in large measure due to former President Pinochet. First, it had seen the total defeat of communism at a time when that ideology was advancing throughout the hemisphere. As Eduardo Frei, the former Christian Democrat president of Chile put it: "The military saved Chile". Secondly, Chile has seen the establishment of a thriving, free-enterprise economy which has transformed living standards and made Chile into a model for Latin America. Thirdly, Chile is also remarkable because President Pinochet established a constitution for a return to democracy, held a plebiscite to decide whether or not he should remain in power, lost the vote (though gaining 44 per cent support), respected the result and handed over power to a democratically-elected successor. Chile thus enjoyed prosperity, democracy and reconciliation."

"At last. The specter of Pinochet is removed from Chile... Congratulations to fellow Progressive International member Gabriel Boric... The hard work to redistribute wealth in Chile begins now."

"A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything. (p. 44)"

"One is telling a story about old times when someone breaks in with a little detail that he happens to know, implying that one's own version is inaccurate — disgusting behavior! (p. 46)"

"Splendid Things Chinese brocade. A sword with a decorated scabbard. The grain of the wood in a Buddhist statue. Long flowering branches of beautifully coloured wistaria entwined about a pine tree. (p. 109)"

"Things That Lose by Being Painted Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.Things That Gain by Being Painted Pines. Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene. (p. 138)"

"Sei Shonagon feels modern, almost a proto-feminist in such a paternalistic age that women at court stayed, for the most part, silent and still and available indoors all their lives. She said much, and she said two electrifying things from the still darkness of her domestic prisons. She said them of course very much in her own way, but she said there were two things in life that were absolutely essential, and life would be unbearable without them: the sensuous body and literature. My crude summation would be sex and text. Both have the X factor. She said them with longing and her longing stayed with me."

"It is a loose book, impressionistic, hardly coherent as a continuous narrative. It is full of descriptions of court life, and the retelling of court gossip and descriptions of fashionable shrines and how to get there by the most elegant means. It is a piece of writing replete with those typical Japanese wistful and melancholic evocations of ephemerality. It was written a thousand years ago almost exactly to the year the film was made, and it was written by a woman. To be literate a thousand years ago in the West was pretty uncommon; to be literate and a woman, very unlikely; to be literate, female, and quite brilliant, a well-nigh Western impossibility."

"When another writer in another house is not free, no writer is free."

"The question we writers are asked most often, the favorite question, is: Why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write. I write because I can’t do normal work as other people do. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it. I write because I want others, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but—as in a dream—can’t quite get to. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy."

"I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well."

"Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness."

"When you love a city and have explored it frequently on foot, your body, not to mention your soul, gets to know the streets so well after a number of years that in a fit of melancholy, perhaps stirred by a light snow falling ever so sorrowfully, you'll discover your legs carrying you of their own accord toward one of your favorite promontories."

"The drinking of coffee is an absolute sin! Our Glorious Prophet did not partake of coffee because he knew it dulled the intellect, caused ulcers, hernia and sterility; he understood that coffee was nothing but the Devil's ruse."

"Try to discover who I am from my choice of words and colors, as attentive people like yourselves might examine footprints to catch a thief."

"Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity."

"What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand."

"Yet does illustrating in a new way signify a new way of seeing?"

"For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."

"A letter doesn’t communicate by words alone. A letter, just like a book, can be read by smelling it, touching it and fondling it. Thereby, intelligent folk will say, “Go on then, read what the letter tells you!” whereas the dullwitted will say, “Go on then, read what he’s written!”"

"Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight."

"All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time."

"Tell me then, does love make one a fool or do only fools fall in love?"

"Are you an angel that approaching you should be so terrifying?"

"The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion; if you want to live in that paradise where happy mares and stallions live, open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony."

"Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow."

"Let me first state forthright that contrary to what we've often read in books and heard from preachers, when you are a woman, you don't feel like the Devil."

"There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward."

"T feel like the Devil not because I’ve murdered two men, but because my portrait has been made in this fashion."

"Suddenly, it seemed to me that the entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room."

"In actuality, we don’t look for smiles in pictures of bliss, but rather, for the happiness in life itself. Painters know this, but this is precisely what they cannot depict. That’s why they substitute the joy of seeing for the joy of life."

"A man should always be drunk, Minnie, when he talks politics — it's the only way in which to make them important."

"The whole worl's in a state o' chassis."

"Isn't all religions curious? If they weren't you wouldn't get anyone to believe them."

"If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget for ever the pitiful antics of English Literature's performing flea."

"Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich man to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."

"The Drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candlesticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense nor myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on its roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly."

"Laughter is wine for the soul — laughter soft, or loud and deep, tinged through with seriousness. Comedy and tragedy step through life together, arm in arm, all along, out along, down along lea. A laugh is a great natural stimulator, a pushful entry into life; and once we can laugh, we can live. It is the hilarious declaration made by man that life is worth living."

"She dhresses herself to keep him with her, but it's no use — afther a month or two, th'wondher of a woman wears off."

"There's no reason to bring religion into it. I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible."

"I wouldn't be everlasting' cockin' me earth hear every little whisper that was floatin' around me! It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be dethrimental to keep it."

"there is no such thing as a writer untouched by his time. Even the most inner experience is a response to some outside. That response may lead Kafka to explore the dark region beyond human experience or explanation in The Castle or Sean O'Casey to write from a sense of mission Red Roses for Me."

"The law of silence: Speak little. Say only what you must. Speak only when necessary. Your oratory should be deeds, not words. You accomplish: let others talk."

"The Politician's goal is to build a fortune, ours is to build our homeland flowering and strong. For her we will work and we will build. For her we will make each Romanian a hero, ready to fight, ready to sacrifice, ready to die."

"We wear the clothes and embrace the forms of democracy. Are they worth anything? We don't know yet. But we do know one thing. We know it for sure. That some of the largest and most civilized nations of Europe have discarded those clothes and have acquired new ones. Did they get rid of them forever? Other nations are doing their best to dispose of them and to get new ones also. Why? Have all nations gone mad? Are the Rumanian politicians the only wise men in the world? Somehow I doubt it."

"Democracy is incapable of perseverance. Since it is shared by political parties that rule for one, two, or three years, it is unable to conceive and carry out plans of longer duration. One party annuls the plans and efforts of the other. What is conceived and built by one party today is destroyed by another tomorrow. In a country in which much has to be built, in which building is indeed the primary historical requirement, this disadvantage of democracy constitutes a true danger. It is a situation similar to that which prevails in an establishment where masters are changed every year, each new master bringing in his own plans, ruining what was done by some, and starting new things, which will in turn be destroyed by tomorrow's masters."

"Democracy cannot wield authority, because it cannot enforce its decisions. A party cannot move against itself, against its members who engage in scandalous malfeasance, who rob and steal, because it is afraid of losing its members. Nor can it move against its adversaries, because in so doing it would risk exposure of its own wrongdoings and shady business."

"Democracy serves big business. Because of the expensive, competitive character of the multiparty system, democracy requires ample funds. It therefore naturally becomes the servant of the big international Jewish financiers, who enslave her by paying her. In this manner, a nation's fate is placed in the hands of a clique of bankers."

"If the multitude does not understand or understands only with difficulty several laws that are immediately necessary to its life, how can it be imagined by someone that it -which in a democracy must be led through itself-could understand the most difficult natural laws; or that it would know intuitively the most subtle and imperceptible norms of human leadership, norms that project beyond itself, its life, its life's necessities, or which do not apply directly to it but to a more superior entity, the nation?"

"For making bread, shoes, ploughs, farming, running a streetcar, one must be specialized. Is there no need for specialization when it comes to the most demanding leadership, that of a nation? Does one not have to possess certain qualities?"

"A people is not capable of governing itself. It ought to be governed by its elite. Namely, through that category of men born within its bosom who possess certain aptitudes and specialties. Just as the bees raise their "queen" a people must raise its elite. The multitude likewise, in its needs, appeals to its elite, the wise of the state."

"Here are two opposite ideas, one containing truth, the other the lie. Truth-of which there can be but one-is sought. The question is put to a vote. One idea polls 10,000 votes, the other 10,050. Is it possible that 50 votes more or less determine or deny truth? Truth depends neither on majority nor minority; it has its own laws and it succeeds, as has been seen, against all majorities, even though they be crushing."

"Can the people choose its elite? Why then do soldiers not choose the best general? In order to choose, this collective jury would have to know very well: a) The laws of strategy, tactics, organization, etc. and b) To what extent the individual in question conforms through aptitudes and knowledge to these laws. No one can choose wisely without this knowledge."

"That is why we believe that the leading elite of a country cannot be chosen by the multitude. To try to select this elite is like determining by majority vote who the poets, writers, mechanics, aviators or athletes of a country ought to be."

"Democracy elects men totally lacking in scruples, without any morals; those who will pay better, thus those with a higher power of corruption; magicians, charlatans, demagogues, who will excel in their fields during the electoral campaign. Several good men would be able to slip through among them, even politicians of good faith. But they would be the slaves of the former."

"In Romania, particularly since the war, democracy has created for us, through this system of elections, a "national elite" of Romano-Jews, based not on bravery, nor love of country, nor sacrifice, but on betrayal of country, the satisfaction of personal interest, the bribe, the traffic of influence, the enrichment through exploitation and embezzlement, thievery, cowardice, and intrigue to knock down any adversary. This "national elite," if it continues to lead this country, will bring about the destruction of the Romanian state."

"Therefore, in the last analysis, the problem facing the Romanian people today, on which all others depend, is the substitution of this fake elite with a real national one based on virtue, love and sacrifice for country, justice and love for the people, honesty, work, order, discipline, honest dealing, and honor."

"But I repeat my question: "Who indicates everyone's place within an elite and who sizes up everyone? Who establishes the selection and consecrates the members of the new elite?" I answer: "The previous elite.""

"On what must an elite be founded? a) Purity of soul. b) Capacity of work and creativity. c) Bravery. d) Tough living and permanent warring against difficulties facing the nation. e) Poverty, namely voluntary renunciation of amassing a fortune. f) Faith in God. g) Love."

"The new Romanian elite, as well as any other elite in the world, must be based on the principle of social selection. In other words, a category of people endowed with certain qualities which they then cultivate, is naturally selected from the nation's body, namely from the large healthy mass of peasantry and workingmen, which is permanently bound to the land and the country. This category of people becomes the national elite meant to lead our nation."

"The type of man who lives nowadays in the Romanian political scene, I have already found in history: under his rule, nations died and states were destroyed."

"The young man who joins a political party is a traitor to his generation and to his race."

"It is a new form of leadership of states, never encountered yet. I don't know what designation it will be given, but it is a new form. I think that it is based on this state of mind, this state of high national consciousness which, sooner or later, spreads to the periphery of the national organism. It is a state of inner light. What previously slept in the souls of the people, as racial instinct, is in these moments reflected in their consciousness, creating a state of unanimous illumination, as found only in great religious experiences. This state could be rightly called a state of national oecumenicity. A people as a whole reach self-consciousness, consciousness of its meaning and its destiny in the world. In history, we have met in peoples nothing else than sparks, whereas, from this point of view, we have today permanent national phenomena. In this case, the leader is no longer a 'boss' who 'does what he wants', who rules according to 'his own good pleasure': he is the expression of this invisible state of mind, the symbol of this state of consciousness. He does not do what he wants, he does what he has to do. And he is guided, not by individual interests, nor by collective ones, but instead by the interests of the eternal nation, to the consciousness of which the people have attained. In the framework of these interests and only in their framework, personal interests as well as collective ones find the highest degree of normal satisfaction."

"I reject republicanism. At the head of races, above the elite, there is Monarchy. Not all monarchs have been good. Monarchy, however, has always been good. The individual monarch must not be confused with the institution of Monarchy, the conclusions drawn from this would be false. There can be bad priests, but this does not mean that we can draw the conclusion that the Church must be ended and God stoned to death. There are certainly weak or bad monarchs, but we cannot renounce Monarchy. The race has a line of life. A monarch is great and good, when he stays on this line ; he is petty and bad, to the extent that he moves away from this racial line of life or he opposes it. There are many lines by which a monarch can be tempted. He must set them all aside and follow the line of the race. Here is the law of Monarchy."

"Romania is dying because of a lack of men, not a lack of programs."

"The law of honor: Go along only on the paths of honor. Fight, and never be a coward. Leave the path of infamy to others. Better to fall in an honorable fight than win by infamy."

"We shall create a spiritual atmosphere, a moral atmosphere, in which the heroic man may be born and on which he can thrive. This hero will lead our people on the road of its greatness."

"I could not define how I entered into the struggle. Probably like a man who, walking the street, with his preoccupations, his needs and his own thoughts, surprised by the fire which is consuming a house, takes off his jacket and rushes to give help to those who are the prey of flames. With the common sense of a young man of twenty or so, this is the only thing I understood in all I was seeing : that we were losing the Fatherland, that we would no longer have the Fatherland, that, with the unwitting support of the miserable, impoverished and exploited Romanian workers, the Jewish horde would sweep us away."

"I started with an impulse of my heart, with that instinct of defense which even the least of the worms has, not with the instinct of personal self-preservation, but of defense of the race to which I belong. This is why I have always had the feeling that the whole race rests on our shoulders, the living, and those who died for the Fatherland, and our entire future, and that the race struggles and speaks through us, that the hostile flock, however huge, in relation to this historical entity, is only a handful of human detritus which we will disperse and defeat... The individual in the framework and in the service of his race, the race in the framework and in the service of God and of the laws of the divinity: those who will understand these things will win even though they are alone. Those who will not understand will be defeated."

"When we speak of the Rumanian nation, we refer not only to the Rumanians currently living on the same territory, with the same past and same future, the same habits, the same language, the same interests. When we speak of the Rumanian nation we refer to all Rumanians, dead or alive, who have lived on this land of ours from the beginnings of history and will live on it also in the future."

"A people becomes aware of its existence when it becomes aware of its entirety, not only of its component parts and their individual interests."

"Its culture: the fruit of its life, the product of its own efforts in thought and art. This culture is not international. It is the expression of the national genius, of the blood. The culture is international in its brilliance but national in origin. Someone made a fine comparison: bread and wheat may be internationally consumed, but they always bear the imprint of the soil from which they came."

"But the most important of all is the spiritual patrimony, because it alone bears the seal of eternity, it alone transcends all times. The ancient Greeks are with us today not because of their physiques, no matter how athletic--those are only ashes now--nor because of their material wealth, if they had such, but because of their culture."

"A nation lives forever through its concepts, honor, and culture. It is for these reasons that the rulers of nations must judge and act not only on the basis of physical and material interests of the nation but on the basis of the nation's historical honor, of the nation's eternal interests. Thus: not bread at all costs, but honor at all costs."

"The question may thus be asked: What are the norms for international behavior? The nations' animal instincts? The tiger in them? Do the laws of the fishes in the sea or of the beasts in the forest apply?"

"The ultimate goal is not life. It is resurrection. The resurrection of nations in the name of Jesus Christ the Savior. Creation and culture are only means--not the purpose--of resurrection. Culture is the fruit of talent, which God implanted in our nation and for which we are responsible. A time will come when all the world's nations will arise from the dead, with all their dead, with all their kings and emperors. Every nation has its place before God's throne. That final moment, "resurrection from the dead," is the highest and most sublime goal for which a nation can strive. The nation is thus an entity that lives even beyond this earth. Nations are realities also in the other world, not only on this one. To us Rumanians, to our nation, as to every nation in the world, God assigned a specific mission; God has given us a historical destiny. The first law that every nation must abide by is that of attaining that destiny, of fulfilling the mission entrusted to it."

"Are we going to be the weak and cowardly generation that will relinquish, under threats, the Rumanian destiny and renounce our national mission?"

"Is it not frightening, that we, the Romanian people, no longer can produce fruit? That we do not have a Romanian culture of our own, of our people, of our blood, to shine in the world side by side with that of other peoples? That we be condemned today to present ourselves before the world with products of Jewish essence? That today, at this moment, when the world expects that the Romanian people appear to show the fruit of our national blood and genius, we present ourselves with an infection of Judaic cultural caricature?"

"Consider the attitude our great Vasile Conta held in the Chamber in 1879. Fifty years earlier the Romanian philosopher demonstrated with unshakeable scientific arguments, framed in a system of impeccable logic, the soundness of racial truths that must lie at the foundation of the national state..."

"We do not remember that our people - during our sad but proud Romanian history - at any time tolerated being dishonoured. Our fields are full of the dead, but not of cowards. Today we are free men with the consciousness of our rights. Slaves we are not and never were. We receive death, but not humiliation. Rest assured, we have sufficient moral strength left to find an honourable exit from a life we cannot support without honour and dignity."

"To you, who have been struck, maligned or martyred, I can bring the news, which I wish to carry more than the frail value of a casual rhetorical phrase: soon we shall win. Before your columns, all our oppressors will fall. Forgive those who struck you for personal reasons. Those who have tortured you for your faith in the Romanian people, you will not forgive. Do not confuse the Christian right and duty of forgiving those who wronged you, with the right and duty of our people to punish those who have betrayed it and assumed for themselves the responsibility to oppose its destiny. Do not forget that the swords you have put on belong to the nation. You carry them in her name, In her name you will use them for punishment-unforgiving and unmerciful. Thus and only thus, will you be preparing a healthy future for this nation."

"Prayer is decisive element of victory. Wars are won by those who have managed to attract from elsewhere, from the skies, the mysterious forces of the invisible world and to secure their support. These mysterious forces are the souls of the dead, the souls of our ancestors, who once were, like us, linked to our clods, to our furrows, who died for the defense of this land and are still linked today to it by the memory of their lives and by us, their sons, their grandsons, their great grandsons. But, above the souls of the dead, there is God. Once these forces are attracted, they are of considerable power, they defend us, they give us courage, will, all the elements necessary to victory and which make us win. They bring in panic and terror among the enemies, paralyse their activity. In the last analysis, victories do not depend only on material preparation, on the material forces of the belligerents, but on their power to secure the support of spiritual forces. The fairness and the morality of actions and the fervent, insistent call for them in the form of rite and collective prayer attract such forces."

"If Christian mysticism and its goal, ecstasy, is the contact of man with God through a leap from human nature to divine nature, national mysticism is nothing other than the contact of man and crowds with the soul of their race through the leap which these forces make from the world of personal and material interests into the outer world of race. Not through the mind, since this anyone can do, but by living with their soul."

"We will kill in ourselves a world in order to build another, a higher one reaching to the heavens."

"The Legionaries have been called by God to sound the trumpet for the resurrection of Romania after centuries of darkness and oppression."

"This moment of brotherhood in the same faith and of pledging to fight for our Christian country against the cheating Judaic hordes, will never be forgotten. We who were fighting each other but yesterday, were now embracing. The orientation guidelines in our (student) meetings were the writings of our national geniuses Bogdan Petriceicu Hajdeu, Vasile Conta, Mihail Eminescu, Vasile Alecsandri, etc. but especially the writings and lectures of Professor Cuza, the writings of Professor Paulescu, the lessons in national education of Professor Gavanescul."

"We have studied the Jewish problem scientifically. Essentially it is an abnormal situation that the Jews should live among other races, whereby they violate the great natural law that every race shall live in its own country."

"In one year I learned as much about anti-Semitism as would be enough for three mens' lifetimes. For you cannot wound the sacred convictions of a people, what their heart loves and respects, without causing deep pain and shedding the heart's blood. It was 17 years ago, and my heart bleeds yet."

"There is, among all those various parts of the world who serve their people, a kinship of sympathy, as there is such a kinship among those who labour for the destruction of peoples."

"Because we have political parties led by Romanians, through which Judaism speaks ; Romanian papers, written by Romanians, through which the Jew and his interests speak ; Romanian lecturers, thinking, writing and speaking Hebraically, but in the Romanian language."

"Mussolini has destroyed communism and Freemasonry; he implicitly declared war upon Judaism too."

"Those who think that the Jews are poor unfortunates, arrived here by chance, carried by the wind, led by fate, and so on, are mistaken. All the Jews who exist on the face of the earth form a great community, bound by blood and Talmudic religion. They are parts of a truly implacable state, which has laws, plans and leaders who formulate these plans and carry them through. The whole thing is organised in the form of a so-called 'Kehillah'. This is why we are faced, not with isolated Jews, but with a constituted force, the Jewish community. In any of our cities or countries where a given number of Jews are gathered, a Kehillah is immediately set up, that is to say the Jewish community. This Kehillah has its leaders, its own judiciary, and so on. And it is in this small Kehillah, whether at the city or at the national level, that all the plans are formed : how to win the local politicians, the authorities ; how to work one's way into circles where it would be useful to get admitted, for example, among the magistrates, the state employees, the senior officials ; these plans must be carried out to take a certain economic sector away from a Romanian's hands ; how an honest representative of an authority opposed to the Jewish interests could be eliminated ; what plans to apply, when, oppressed, the population rebels and bursts in anti-Semitic movements."

"As forests in Bucovina, all those mountains laden with first belonging to the Orthodox Church, which was now infused with politics, and estranged, were given to the Jew Anhauh for exploitation of the firewood at the unheard-of price of 10 lei per cubic yard, while the Romanian peasant had to pay 3.50 lei. The mountains' forests fall under the merciless Jewish axe. Poverty and sorrow spreads over the Romanian villages, mountains become barren rock, while Anhauh and his kin carry constantly and tirelessly their gold-laden coffers over the border. The partner-in-crime of the Jew in exploiting the misery of thousands of peasants, was the Romanian politician who gorged himself on his portion of this fabulous profit."

"The Jewish problem is no utopia, but a grave life and death problem for the Romanian nation, the country's leaders grouped by political parties becoming more and more like toys in the hands of the Judaic manipulators."

"Besides, large-scale general plans : 1) they will seek to break the bonds between earth and heaven, doing their best to spread, on a large scale, atheistic and materialistic theories, degrading the Romanian people, or even just its leaders, to a people separated from God and its dead, they will kill them, not with the spear, but by cutting the roots of their spiritual life ; 2) they will then break the links of the race with the soil, material spring of its wealth, attacking nationalism and any idea of Fatherland and homeland ; determined to succeed, they will seek to seize the press ; 4) they will use any pretext, since in the Romanian people there are dissensions, misunderstandings, and quarrels, to divide them into as many antagonistic parties as possible ; 5) they will seek to monopolise more and more the means of existence of Romanians ; 6) they will systematically drive them to dissoluteness, annihilating family and moral force without forgetting to degrade and daze them through alcoholic drinks and other poisons. And, in truth, anyone who would want to kill and conquer a race could do it by adopting this system."

"A country has the Jews it deserves. Just as mosquitoes can thrive and settle only in swamps, likewise the former can only thrive in the swamps of our sins."

"At Posada, Calugareni, on the Olt, jiu and.Cerna rivers, at Turda; in the mountains of the unhappy and forgotten Moti of Vidra, all the way to Huedin and Alba-Iulia (the torture place of Horia and his brothers-in-arms), there are everywhere testimonies of battles and tombs of heroes. All over the Carpathians, from the Oltenian mountains at Dragoslavele and at Predeal, from Oituz to Vatra Dornei, on peaks and in valley bottoms, everywhere Romanian blood flowed like rivers. In the middle of the night, in difficult times for our people, we hear the call of the Romanian soil urging us to battle. I ask and I expect an answer: By what right do the Jews wish to take this land from us? On what historical argument do they base their pretensions and particularly the audacity with which they defy us Romanians, here in our own land? We are bound to this land by millions of tombs and millions of unseen threads that only our soul feels, and woe to those who shall try to snatch us from it."

"The Jews are our enemies and as such they hate, poison, and exterminate us. Romanian leaders who cross into their camp are worse than enemies: they are traitors. The first and fiercest punishment ought to fall first on the traitor, second on the enemy. If I had but one bullet and I were faced by both an enemy and a traitor, I would let the traitor have it."

"From this Legionary school a new man will have to emerge, a man with heroic qualities; a giant of our history to do battle and win over all the enemies of our Fatherland, his battle and victory having to extend even beyond the material world into the realm of invisible enemies, the powers of evil. Everything that our mind can imagine as more beautiful spiritually; everything the proudest that our race can produce, greater, more just, more powerful, wiser, purer, more diligent and more heroic, this is what the Legionary school must give us! A man in whom all the possibilities of human grandeur that are implanted by God in the blood of our people be developed to the maximum. This hero, the product of Legionary education, will also know how to elaborate programs; will also know how to solve the Jewish problem; will also know how to organize the state well; will also know how to convince other Romanians; and if not, he will know how to win, for that is why he is a hero. This hero, this Legionary of bravery, labor, and justice, with the powers God implanted in his soul, will lead our Fatherland on the road of its glory."

"Legionary life is beautiful, not because of riches, partying or the acquisition of luxury, but because of the noble comradeship which binds all Legionaries in a sacred brotherhood of struggle."

"Wherever the Legionary’s hand and soul show up, a garden appears."

"Then legionaries wrote down several maxims I collected either from the Gospels or from other writings. They embelished our walls. Here are some of them: "God carries us on His victorious chariot." "Whoever wins.... I shall be his God." "He who does not have a sword, let him sell his cloak and buy one." "Fight bravely for faith." "Avoid carnal pleasures, for they kill the soul." "Be vigilant." "Do not destroy the hero that is in you." "Brothers in fortune... as in misfortune." "Whoever knows how to die, will never be a slave." "I await the resurrection of my Fatherland and the destruction of the hordes of traitors," etc."

"On November 8, the feast of Saints Archangels Michael and Gabriel, we were discussing the possible name for this youth organization. I said: "Let it be 'Michael the Archangel'." My father said: "There is in the church, on the left hand door of the altar, an icon of St. Michael." "Let us go see it!" Mota, Garneata, Corneliu Georgescu, Radu Mironovici, Tudose and I went to look at it and we were truly amazed. The icon appeared to us of unsurpassed beauty. I was never, attracted by the beauty of any icon. But now, I felt bound to this one with all my soul and I had the feeling the Archangel was alive. Since then, I have come to love that icon. Any time we found the church open, we entered and prayed before that icon. Our hearts were filled with peace and joy."

"Fascism, without neglecting the other sides of social life, is especially concerned with the State, Hitlerism, without neglecting all its other main preoccupations, gives special attention to race. The Legionary Movement embodies something deeper, being concerned with the soul. In other words, Fascism’s outer shape would correspond to a man’s clothing, Hitlerism gives precedence to what we find underneath the clothing, meaning the body, while the preoccupations of the Legionaries go beyond the clothing and the body, reaching deep into the human soul."

"There was suddenly a hush in the crowd. A tall, darkly handsome man dressed in the white costume of a Rumanian peasant rode into the yard on a white horse. He halted close to me, and I could see nothing monstrous or evil in him. On the contrary. His childlike, sincere smile radiated over the miserable crowd, and he seemed to be with it yet mysteriously apart from it. Charisma is an inadequate word to define the strange force that emanated from this man. He was more aptly simply part of the forests, of the mountains, of the storms on the snow-covered peaks of the Carpathians, and of the lakes and rivers. And so he stood amid the crowd, silently. He had no need to speak. His silence was eloquent; it seemed to be stronger than we, stronger than the order of the prefect who denied him speech. An old, whitehaired peasant woman made the sign of the cross on her breast and whispered to us, "The emissary of the Archangel Michael!" Then the sad little church bell began to toll, and the service which invariably preceded Legionary meetings began. Deep impressions created in the soul of a child die hard. In more than a quarter of a century I have never forgotten my meeting with Corneliu Zelea Codreanu."

"In the fight against the communism in history, only Codreanu didn't give up. He was a new kind of Jesus."

"Through a group of Legionaries who part comes towards us a young, tall, slender man, with an uncommon expression of nobleness, frankness and energy imprinted on his face : azure grey eyes, open forehead, genuine Roman-Aryan type : and, mixed with virile traits, something contemplative, mystical in the expression. This is Corneliu Codreanu, the leader and founder of the Romanian 'Iron Guard', the one who is called 'assassin', 'Hitler's henchman', 'anarchist conspirator', by the world press, because, since 1919, he has been challenging Israel, and the forces which are more or less in cahoots with it, at work in the Romanian national life."

"There is no doubt, that in this world, there are all sorts of people who look nice, but are empty inside; who do not feel either moral or spiritual aspirations in addition to the physical gifts with which nature blessed them … But Corneliu Codreanu, his magnificient physique corresponds to an exceptional inner wholeness. Exclamations of admiration from men left him indifferent. Praise angered him. He had only a fighter's greatness and the ambition of great reformers... The characteristic of his soul was goodness. If you want to penetrate the initial motive which prompted Corneliu Codreanu to throw in a fight so hard and almost desperate, the best answer is that he did it out of compassion for suffering people. His heart bled with thousands of injuries to see the misery in which peasants and workers struggled. His love for the people - unlimited! He was sensitive to any suffering the working masses endured. He had a cult for the humble, and showed an infinite attention to their aspirations and their hopes. The smallest window, the most trivial complaint, were examined with the same seriousness with which he addressed grave political problems."

"The first human corpse I saw had housed my grandmother’s soul. I expected a serene mien. I expected to find her sleeping. I expected a transforming beauty, something painted by Millais. Instead, the old whore petticoats of skin."

"Pills are the great infantilizers of our time. Adulthood can be wearying, and so some grow nostalgic about childhood dependencies."

"Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is the ultimate question of moral entitlement, and relevant only if right is relevant in this context, and it is not. A suicidal man cannot be concerned - and nor should he be - with questions of moral entitlement."

"In wanting to kill himself, a man wants only to kill his consciousness of pain. I think therefore I am; therefore if I am not, I cannot think."

"It takes real sangfroid to stare death out. Planning your own murder is a delicate undertaking, requiring as much foresight and paperwork as that invested by some girls into their first weddings."

"Recollections fell from me in flakes, in scales. All that remained of me was all that remains of anyone: a kind of iridescence. There was a fear that I would never again feel substantial, a fear that I would be a kind of psychic amputee."

"Psychological autopsies are also necessary to identify errors or oversights and expunge guilt."

"Death is a process as straightforward as mowing a lawn."

"I think my parents were bewildered by my oddity."

"In the second or so it had taken that bullet to leave its muzzle and penetrate my father's heart, between the pressure of that finger on the trigger and my father's soundless roar, somewhere in that infernal compression of decision, action, and consequence, I was forever altered."

"Grief is a sphere in that it can be turned a quarter turn or turned a millionth, it can be spun on any axis and by any degree and still its aspect is the same."

"From the standpoint of the present, the future is always a derangement of ambitions."

"Ah, Caroline Brine - with your aversion to bohemians and homosexuals, students and foreigners, with your lacerated womb and scullery rat's brain, with your phosphorescent dildos and potted African violets, haunted by the ghost of your aborted baby and contaminated by envy, you freckled, you artificially tanned, you stupefyingly bland and vicious mediocrity - even after all these years, I still detest you."

"Had he pushed my thighs apart right then and there, his sunned skin dark against the tallow pallor of my own nocturnal flesh, and plunged two of his thick fingers thick within me, I would have felt it apt, so natural."

"The fragile teacups, the brittle relics, the frail upholstery and shattery glass: this was a world of little things and little ways, their delicacy presupposing their protection."

"It can be said that deeply traumatized children grow into adults who live in the minefield of their own extreme emotions. Plus ca change."

"The wrecked Allcock, who 15 minutes earlier had finished sodomizing Bock in the library, raised his eyebrows as if wonderfully surprised."

"The conversion of mass to energy and light is the prerogative of every star."

"Lieutenant Onoda, Sir, reporting for orders."

"Some dreams are best not to wake up from."

"People cannot live completely by themselves."

"One must always be civic-minded."

"Without a huge shock, the sleepy-head, ignorant Japanese will never wake up."

"Women should always do the dirty work"

"Never complain."

"Life is not fair and people are not equal."

"...[T]hat lunatic monster..."

"She was so open and frank... She made space around her, if we just behaved... Everybody seemed to trust this woman and gathered gladly around her."

"He was pretty. His eyes were kind and young. One had to wonder whether he was fourteen years old, or a thousand, being so smooth and untouched. A little boy peered out of the man's face. He was funny... I was bewildered... a man, responsible for the life and death of thousands, and yet there was no trace on him? One could be frightened of less, and yet so harmlessly innocent? Yes, innocent was the word... I knew I would remember this meeting the rest of my life, because I had never before met an emptyness like this."

"This face seemed full of suffering, despair, confusion, so that I became uneasy again... It seemed like tiredness and defeatism spread from him to everyone close by."

"[Capitalism]... is a great troll. It settles in a society, and then eats away silently. Eats more and more freedom, more humanity, more human rights, more ability to speak..."

"I began to rationalize marrying Will[iam Houston Price]. 'He comes from a good family. A girl could do worse.' (As it turned out, I couldn't, but I didn't know that yet)"

"There is nothing worse than having your personal problems become somebody else's entertainment."

"Bette Davis was right—bitches are fun to play."

"Errol Flynn was an excellent fencer. He also knew his lines, something I greatly respect in an actor. Of course there was one glaring inconsistency with his professionalism. Errol also drank on the set, something I greatly disliked. You couldn't stop him. If the director prohibited alcohol on the set, then Errol would inject oranges with booze and eat during breaks. Everything good that we got on film was shot early in the day. He started gulping his water early in the morning and by four P.M. was in no shape to continue filming."

"In February 1953, I was making a second picture with Jeff Chandler, one called War Arrow. Jeff was a real sweetheart, but acting with him was like acting with a broomstick."

"When we arrived in Havana on April 15, 1959 ( for Our Man in Havana), Cuba was a country experiencing revolutionary change. How could I not meet Che? Che Guevara was often at the Capri Hotel. I would see him at the restaurant and he'd come to my table to say hello. Che would talk about Ireland and all the guerilla warfare that had taken place there. He knew every battle in Ireland and all of its history. Che knew more about Ireland than John Ford did. I couldn't believe it and finally asked, 'Che, you know so much about Ireland and talk constantly about it. How do you know so much?' He said, 'Well, my grandmother's name was Lynch and I learned everything I know about Ireland at her knee.' He was Che Guevara Lynch! That famous cap he wore was an Irish rebel's cap. I spent a great deal of time with Che Guevara while I was in Havana. I believe he was far less a mercenary than he was a freedom fighter. Today he is a symbol for freedom fighters wherever they are in the world and I think he is a good one."

"John Ford once wrote to me, "You are the best fucking actress in Hollywood." Then, when later asked by a young film student at UCLA about me, in front of Merian C.Cooper, he replied to his audience, "Her? That bitch couldn't act her way out of a brick shithouse.""

"There's only one woman who has been my friend over the years, and by that I mean a real friend, like a man would be. That woman is Maureen O'Hara. She's big, lusty, absolutely marvelous—definitely my kind of woman. She's a great guy."

"By Thy power, let there be peace, O God!"

"I was a mere tourist with no part whatever in this great conflict; but it was my rare privilege, through an unusual train of circumstances, to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe. In these pages I give only my personal impressions; so my readers should not look here for specific details, nor for information on strategic matters; these things have their place in other writings."

"Why could not advantage be taken of a time of relative calm and quiet to investigate and try to solve a question of such immense and worldwide importance, both from the humane and Christian stand-point?"

"In one of the Cremona hospitals, an Italian doctor had said: "We keep the good things for our friends of the Allied Army, and give our enemies the bare necessities. If they die, so much the worse!" and he added, to excuse these barbarous words, that he had heard from some Italian soldiers who had returned from Verona and Mantua, that the Austrians allowed the wounded of the Franco-Sardinian army to die uncared for. A noble lady of Cremona, Countess..., who had heard the doctor's words and had been devoting herself to the hospitals with the utmost zeal, made haste to show her disapproval by declaring that she gave exactly the same attention to the Austrians as to the Allies, and made no difference between friends and enemies. "For, she said, "Our Lord Jesus Christ made no such distinctions between men in well doing.""

"It is only logical for the translator to become a part of the world of the author."

"However, there is one great temptation and that is that you can forget that the aim of the writer was to reject all other worlds and to construct one of his own and that the aim of the translator is to re-embody himself into the world of the various writers."

"The greatest pleasure in translating is precisely this feeling of spiritual closeness and spiritual merging with the translated author. Moreover this spiritual relation is different with every writer."

"The translator constantly learns new things about himself."

"If you asked her (Margaret Thatcher) about Sinai, she would probably think it was the plural for sinus."

"If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it."

"As far as the physical miseries go, I am sure I will cope. I lived at Eton in the 1950s and I know all about life in uncomfortable quarters."

"It's a fairly unique position; to have been in charge of prison funding and then to have been an inmate. I wish I'd been more generous."

"He lied and lied and lied."

"Human needs to go through the abyss of pains and loss, because the more we suffer-the better. Con người cần phải được đau khổ, bởi có đau khổ mới hiểu được giá trị của hạnh phúc."

"Forgiveness is the highest nobleminded revenge. Tha thứ là sự trả thù cao thượng nhất."

"The humiliation brings me more strength and passion for life. Sự sỉ nhục giúp tôi trưởng thành hơn."

"In persevering through my own darkness, I found, I call it my immortal soul, and sanctuary, who can survive whatever life throws at me. Life's so short. To get up every morning and take a good look around in a way that takes nothing for granted. Every day is a gift. Never treat life casually. Never let the bitterness and devilry steal your sweetness, happiness. DRA-2015. Chậm rãi đi qua những khoảng tối của đời mình, tôi nhận ra, tôi gọi nó bằng cái tên: linh hồn bất tử, kẻ mà có thể tồn tại trước bất kỳ điều gì mà cuộc sống ném vào. Cuộc sống ngắn ngủi. Để thức dậy mỗi sớm mai, nhìn quanh và thấy không có gì phải hối tiếc. Mỗi ngày là một món quà tặng. Đừng bao giờ hờ hững với cuộc đời mình. Đừng bao giờ để cho sự cay đắng và tàn nhẫn của đời lấy đi những dịu ngọt và hạnh phúc của bản thân. DRA-2015"

"I do not remember any other term when the force that had captured the political power in this country had become so vulgar as it is today, so corrupt, and so hypocritical; when the legal system had been so downtrodden, deteriorated, collapsed and turned into a means of cruelty."

"They were eyes, that while gazing on the world Rendered it brilliant with meaning They were eyes, that embraced me with glances They were eyes, for which I now hopelessly long"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience one thing with all your power Your beloved should be worn out from being kissed And you should drop exhausted from the smelling of a flower"

"A person can gaze at the sky for hours Can gaze for hours at a bird, a child, the sea To live on the earth is to become part of it To strike down roots that won't pull free"

"To your utmost, listen to every beautiful song As though filling all the self with sound and melody One should plunge head-first into life As one dives from a cliff into the emerald sea"

"Distant lands should draw you, people you don't know To read every book, know other's lives, you should be burning You shouldn't exchange for anything the pleasure of a glass of water No matter how much the joy, your life should be filled with yearning"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience largely, merge with rivers, heavens, cosmos For what we call living is a gift given to life And life is a gift bestowed upon us"

"Death, one experiences alone Love is a two-person thing"

"Gulls into the water, women proudly into the bazaars I was going to write a poem, I was stifling, fed up with old things Eat, my mother says, but they're all things I've grown accustomed to, in the end. Like Camus and — I don’t know — people like that, I'm cracking up Everything will begin when it untangles itself from your hair"

"Is the truth of tablecloths to be spread? How awful always to take refuge in known words A person should let himself go."

"Writing poems is perhaps the loveliest deception Later they'll make a picture or something, then go and drink wine"

"I'd make me into a brand new sailor if I were God Maybe there were new things over there It comes from within me to write as though rabid, I'm hungry, do you understand Let the doctors call it what they will Who can know anything best of all What does it mean to know anything best Which religion doesn't grow old"

"I want to write poetry, I'm bored, disgusted by my habits If I stop thinking and put my hands down perhaps I will have much to say I'm scurrying to the attic like a solitary bug Before you become old and ugly, I must kiss you on the nose"

"Once more in that hour of darkness In dark black waters they arise Dark songs pass before their eyes They lie awake gazing into darkness"

"In the most affirming places of their love Suddenly they grew tired, out of breath Little by little they felt the death Of some places left in darkness"

"The poet should be responsible to the poem."

"A poem is a living organism."

"Creativity is a hidden gem. Education is needed to uncover it."

"The beautiful cry of 'Death to America' unites our nation."

"Generally speaking, America is not keen on independent countries. America is not keen on people's freedom. America is keen on countries that completely surrender themselves and act according to America's demands."

"[Israel is] the great Zionist Satan."

"Saying 'Death to America' is easy. We need to express 'Death to America' with action. Saying it is easy."

"There is a human tragedy going on in Syria and all must do their utmost to put an end to this travesty. But facts cannot be overlooked. Syria has remained the only country in the region to resist Israeli expansionist policies and practices."

"We completed the [uranium enrichment] program."

"Syria has constantly been on the front line of fighting Zionism and this resistance must not be weakened."

"All should know that the next government will not budge from defending our inalienable rights... We have passed that period. We are now in a different situation."

"The Syrian crisis must be resolved by a vote by Syrians. We are concerned by the civil war and foreign interference. The government [of President Bashar al-Assad] must be respected by other countries until the next [2014 presidential] elections and then it is up to the people to decide."

"A strong government does not mean a government that interferes and intervenes in all affairs. It is not a government that limits the lives of people. This is not a strong government."

"The Islamic Republic of Iran aims to strengthen its relations with Syria and will stand by it in facing all challenges. The deep, strategic and historic relations between the people of Syria and Iran... will not be shaken by any force in the world."

"Close Iranian-Syrian ties will be able to confront] enemies in the region, especially the Zionist regime."

"After all, in our region there's been a wound for years on the body of the Muslim world under the shadow of the occupation of the holy land of Palestine and the beloved al-Quds (Jerusalem)."

"Today, this festering Zionist tumor has opened once again & has turned the land of olives into destruction and blood and littered the land with the body parts of Palestinian children"

"With this unnecessary crisis resolved, new horizons emerge with a focus on shared challenges."

"... the aggressive, occupying Zionist regime is not bound by the laws of society and of humanity. It takes no pity on men, children and women, and continues to kill and rape [them]."

"We only agreed to suspend activities in those areas where we did not have technical problems. This is what they are saying now in their negotiations. We completed the Isfahan project, which is the UCF where yellowcake is converted into UF4 and UF6 during suspension. While we were talking with the Europeans in Tehran, we were installing equipment in parts of the facility in Isfahan, but we still had a long way to go to complete the project. In fact, by creating a calm environment, we were able to complete the work in Isfahan. Today, we can convert yellowcake into UF4 and UF6, and this is a very important matter. In fact, UF6 is what the centrifuges feed on; it is the feed material for centrifuges. Therefore, it was important for us to conclude that process."

"If one day we are able to complete the fuel cycle and the world sees that it has no choice, that we do possess the technology, then the situation will be different. The world did not want Pakistan to have an atomic bomb or Brazil to have the fuel cycle, but Pakistan built its bomb and Brazil has its fuel cycle, and the world started to work with them. Our problem is that we have not achieved either one, but we are standing at the threshold."

"I think we should not be in a great rush to deal with this issue. We should be patient and find the most suitable time to do away with the suspension. If we decide to start enrichment in the face of opposition by the West, we must find the best time and the most favorable conditions, and if we decide to work with the West, we must utilize all our capabilities and everything that is in our power to achieve our objectives. We should not rush into this. We must move very carefully, in a very calculated manner."

"One of the members indicated here that all this should have been done in secret. This was the intention; this never was supposed to be in the open. But in any case, the spies exposed it. We did not want to declare all this."

"What I truly wish is for moderation to return to the country. This is my only wish. Extremism pains me greatly. We have suffered many blows as a result of extremism."

"Social woes have been on the rise over the past years. I do believe that the only way to resolve these problems is decentralisation. Our problems will not be resolved as long as only the government is in charge of our cultural affairs."

"You should know the nuclear issue and the sanctions will also be resolved, and economic prosperity will also be created."

"I said it is good for centrifuges to operate, but it is also important that the country operates as well and the wheels of industry are turning."

"Iran has nothing to hide. However, in order to proceed towards settling the Iranian nuclear file, we need to reach national consensus and rapprochement and understanding on an international level. This can only happen through dialogue."

"The relationship between Iran and the United States is a complicated and difficult question. There is a chronic wound, which is difficult to heal. However, it is not impossible provided there is goodwill and mutual respect between the two countries."

"It seems that extremists on both sides are determined to maintain the state of hostility and hatred between the two states, but logic says that there should be a change of direction in order to turn a new page in this unstable relationship and minimise the state of hostility and mistrust between the two countries."

"In my opinion, in order to reach a just solution [in Syria] that is accepted by all parties, Iran can play the role of mediator between the Syrian government and the opposition that is working hard to achieve democracy and good governance."

"In 2012, almost ten years after the US invasion of Iraq, two years into the Arab uprisings, Ahmadinejad’s second term as president was coming to an end and Iran was feeling secure about its regional gains. But Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards were increasingly worried about the sanctions that were squeezing Iran’s economy—not only because they feared popular protests but because there was less revenue for them to siphon off. Khamenei decided to test the promise Obama had made on his first day in office to offer an “unclenched fist” if Iran extended its hand. Secret, direct negotiations between Iranian and American officials began in 2012 in Oman to explore lifting the sanctions on Tehran in exchange for Iran freezing its nuclear program. To help seal that much-needed deal, the Supreme Leader was ready to present a gentler face of Iran to the world. He watched as Hassan Rouhani was elected president in June 2013—another cleric from deep within the system, a centrist with a reputation for running the clock in negotiations with the West, letting talks drag on to maintain the impression of moderation and engagement but without making concessions. Rouhani promised hope and diplomacy and Iran’s youth were ecstatic. They honked their horns as they drove around cities across the country. The pace of backchannel negotiations picked up and the talks soon became public."

"Now, therefore, I Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, in consideration of the premises, do hereby release the State of California, from any and all claims for relief or damages against said State, founded upon or growing out of anything connected with the location or removal of the Seat of Government at or from the city of Vallejo. hey world"

"I compare that old relic with myself... ruins and dilapidation. What a difference between then and now. Then, youth, strength and riches; now age, weakness and poverty."

"The running up of this queer flag caused much fear to the families of the Californians established in the neighborhood of Sonoma, Petaluma, and San Rafael, for they realized that the instigators of the uprising that had disturbed the tranquility of the frontier had made up their minds to rule, come what might, and, as the rumor had been spread far and wide that Ide and his associates had raised the bear flag in order to enjoy complete liberty and not be obliged to any civilized governments, the ranchers, who would have remained unperturbed should the American flag have been run up in Sonoma and who would have considered it as the harbinger of a period of progress and enlightenment, seized their machetes and guns and fled to the woods, determined to await a propitious moment for getting rid of the disturbers of the peace. Strange to relate, the first victim that the ranchers sacrificed was the painter of the "Bear Flag," young Thomas Cowie..."

"Some years ago (in 1868) when I was in Monterey, my friend, David Spence, showed me a book entitled “History of California,” written by an author of recognized merit by the name of Franklin Tuthill, and called my attention to that part of the gentlemans narrative where he expresses the assurance that the guerrilla men whom Captain Fremont sent in pursuit of the Californian, Joaquin de la Torre, took nine field pieces from the latter. I could not help but be surprised when I read such a story, for I know for a fact that Captain de la Torre had only thirty cavalrymen under his command who as their only weapons carried a lance, carbine, saber and pistol. I think that Mr. Tuthill would have done better if, instead of inventing the capture of nine cannon, he had devoted a few lines to describing the vandal-like manner in which the “Bear” soldiers sacked the Olompalí Rancho and maltreated the eighty year old Damaso Rodriguez... whom they beat so badly as to cause his death in the presence of his daughters and granddaughters. Filled with dismay, they gathered into their arms the body of the venerable old man who had fallen as a victim of the thirst for blood that was the prime mover of the guerrilla men headed by Mr. Ford."

"I have spared no effort to establish upon a solid and enduring basis those sentiments of union and concord which are so indispensible for the progress and advancement of all those who dwell in my native land, and, so long as I live, I propose to use all the means at my command to see to it that both races cast a stigma upon the disagreeable events that took place on the Sonoma frontier in 1846. If before I pass on to render an account of my acts to the Supreme Creator, I succeed in being a witness to a reconciliation between victor and vanquished, conquerors and conquered, I shall die with the conviction of not having striven in vain. In bringing this chapter to a close, I will remark that, if the men who hoisted the “Bear Flag” had raised the flag that Washington sanctified by his abnegation and patriotism, there would have been no war on the Sonoma frontier, for all our minds were prepared to give a brotherly embrace to the sons of the Great Republic, whose enterprising spirit had filled us with admiration. Ill-advisedly, however, as some say, or dominated by a desire to rule without let or hindrance, as others say, they placed themselves under the shelter of a flag that pictured a bear, an animal that we took as the emblem of rapine and force. This mistake was the cause of all the trouble, for when the Californians saw parties of men running over their plains and forests under the “Bear Flag,” they thought that they were dealing with robbers and took the steps they thought most effective for the protection of their lives and property."

"I cannot, gentlemen, coincide with the military and civil functionaries who have advocated the cession of our country to France or England. It is most true that to rely longer upon Mexico to govern and defend us would be idle and absurd. To this extent I fully agree with my colleagues. It is also true that we possess a noble country, every way calculated, from position and resources, to become great and powerful. For that very reason I would not have her a mere dependency on a foreign monarchy, naturally alien, or at least indifferent to our interests and our welfare. It is not to be denied that feeble nations have in former times thrown themselves upon the protection of their powerful neighbors. The Britons invoked the aid of the warlike Saxons and fell an easy prey to their protectors, who seized their lands and treated them like slaves. Long before that time, feeble and distracted provinces had appealed for aid to the all-conquering arms of imperial Rome, and they were at the time protected and subjugated by their grasping ally. Even could we tolerate the idea of dependence, ought we to go to distant Europe for a master? What possible sympathy could exist between us and a nation separated from us by two vast oceans? But waiving this insuperable objection, how could we endure to come under the dominion of a monarchy? For although others speak lightly of a form of government, as a freeman I cannot do so. We are republicans—badly governed and badly situated as we are—still we are all, in sentiment, republicans. So far as we are governed at all, we at least do profess to be self-governed. Who, then, that possesses true patriotism will consent to subject himself and his children to the caprices of a foreign king and his official minions? But, it is asked, if we do not throw ourselves upon the protection of France and England, what shall we do? I do not come here to support the existing order of things, but I come prepared to propose instant and effective action to extricate our country from her present forlorn condition. My opinion is made up that we must persevere in throwing off the galling yoke of Mexico, and proclaim our independence of her forever. We have endured her official cormorants and her villainous soldiery until we can endure no longer. All will probably agree with me that we ought at once to rid ourselves of what may remain of Mexican domination. But some profess to doubt our ability to maintain our position. To my mind there comes no doubt. Look at Texas and see how long she withstood the power of united Mexico. The resources of Texas were not to be compared with ours, and she was much nearer to her enemy than we are. Our position is so remote, either by land or sea, that we are in no danger from Mexican invasion. Why then should we hesitate to assert our independence? We have indeed taken the first step by electing our own governor, but another remains to be taken. I will mention it plainly and distinctly—it is annexation to the United States. In contemplating this consummation of our destiny, I feel nothing but pleasure, and I ask you to share it. Discard old prejudices, discard old customs, and prepare for the glorious change that awaits our country. Why should we shrink from incorporating ourselves with the happiest and freest nation in the world, destined soon to be the most wealthy and powerful? Why should we go abroad for protection when this great nation is our adjoining neighbor? When we join our fortunes to hers, we shall not become subjects, but fellow citizens possessing all the rights of the people of the United States, and choosing our own federal and local rulers. We shall have a stable government and just laws. California will grow strong and flourish, and her people will be prosperous, happy and free. Look not, therefore, with jealousy upon the hardy pioneers who scale our mountains and cultivate our unoccupied plains, but rather welcome them as brothers, who come to share with us a common destiny."

"[December, 1839:] We had now finished all our business at this port, and it being Sunday, we unmoored ship and got under way, firing a salute to the Russian brig, and another to the presidio, which were both answered. The commandante of the presidio, Don Guadalupe Vallejo, a young man, and the most popular, among the Americans and English, of any man in California, was on board when we got under way. He spoke English very well, and was suspected of being favorably inclined to foreigners."

"[December, 1859:] On board the steamer, found Mr. Edward Stanley, formerly member of Congress from North Carolina, who became my companion for the greater part of my trip. I also met—a revival on the spot of an acquaintance of twenty years ago—Don Guadalupe Vallejo; I may say acquaintance, for although I was then before the mast, he knew my story, and, as he spoke English well, used to hold many conversations with me, when in the boat or on shore. He received me with true earnestness, and would not hear of my passing his estate without visiting him. He reminded me of a remark I made to him once, when pulling him ashore in the boat, when he was commandante at the Presidio. I learned that the two Vallejos, Guadalupe and Salvador, owned, at an early time, nearly all Napa and Sonoma, having princely estates. But they have not much left. They were nearly ruined by their bargain with the State, that they would put up the public buildings if the Capital should be placed at Vallejo, then a town of some promise. They spent $l00,000, the Capital was moved there, and in two years removed to San José on another contract. The town fell to pieces, and the houses, chiefly wooden, were taken down and removed. I accepted the old gentleman's invitation so far as to stop at Vallejo to breakfast."

"By the mid-1840s... 3,000 American settlers had filed... into California's Sacramento Valley. The commander of all Mexican troops in northern California, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, begged Mexico City for the soldiers he knew would be necessary to keep the Americans out."

"No one had been more accommodating to the Americans than Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo."

"Even Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo was betrayed by his American friends: law suits and an invasion of squatters reduced his sprawling estate from a quarter of a million acres to fewer than 300."

"During his long life, Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo had fought California Indians on behalf of Spain, commanded Californio troops for Mexico, and welcomed the Americans to the Pacific Coast."

"During the 1830s. Vallejo was a leader in the movement to break from Mexico and make California a separate republic. ...Ironically, he was the first man arrested during the semi-staged Bear Flag Revolt. Vallejo's account of that escapade comes from a massive history he began to compose during the 1860s.... completing his Historical and Personal Memories Relating to Alta California in 1875."

"On June 14, 1846 when the California Republic was created, the Mexican military fort at Sonoma was taken by surprise. Among those secured as prisoners were three of the highest officers in the Mexican army,—General Guadalupe Mariano Vallejo, Colonel Victor Prudon (Prudhomme), and Captain Salvador Vallejo. Others taken prisoners were Jacob P. Leese, an American then acting private secretary to General Vallejo, all the lesser military officers, and a few soldiers. The military supplies captured included eight field pieces, two hundred stands of arms, a great quantity of grapeshot, and less than one hundred pounds of powder. General Vallejo requested to be taken into the presence of Colonel John C. Frémont, of the American Army, but the latter declined to receive the prisoners, there being no suitable accommodations, so they were taken to Sutter Fort at Sacramento. General Manuel Castro, of the Mexican army, who was a conspicuous character, was appreciably affected by the loss of General Vallejo, Colonel Prudon and Captain Vallejo, as well as the arms and ammunition taken at Sonoma."

"Mexico, rent with internal strife, with a navy worthy of the name, was impotent to defend its distant provinces from foreign seizure. Therefore, it became evident to clear-thinking Californians that it was wise to forestall a possible conquest to some formidable maritime power. For this purpose a meeting was held at Monterey just before the Mexican War, to consider the problem. Most Californians present favored an alliance with England, two or three advocated Russia, while General Vallejo spoke eloquently in favor of union with the United States."

"Whereas, the Legislature of the State of California, on the 4th of February, 1853, passed an Act to remove the Seat of Government from the city of Vallejo to the city of Benicia, by the second section whereof, the said Mariano G. Vallejo was released from the performance of his said bond, upon condition of his releasing, by good and sufficient release, to be approved by the Attorney General of said State, any and all claims for relief and damages against the State of California, founded upon or growing out of anything connected with the location or removal of the Seat of Government at or from Vallejo."

"In 1835, the party at whose head was Santa Anna determined to remodel the Mexican republic, and centralize the government, thereby destroying, in a great measure, the federal constitution of 1824. But no time was allowed him to make the necessary changes and their exact nature therefore was never known; for in the following year, 1836, by one of the usual coups d' état, and while he himself had been defeated and taken prisoner by the Texans, another party opposed to his general views of policy came into power. This party, however, agreed with the previous administration on the necessity or propriety of remodelling the federal system. The old constitution was therefore abolished, and a new one adopted. By this change, the separate states were deprived of many of their former prerogatives, and nearly the whole rights and duties of government were confined to the general Congress and executive. This sweeping alteration of the federal constitution was opposed in many parts of the republic, and in no quarter more vigorously than in California. The people of Monterey rose en masse, and at once declared themselves independent until the federal constitution was re-adopted... Those of the northern districts were determined henceforward, and for ever, to sever the connection with the other States and to stand alone free and independent of Mexican domination. ...California and Mexico—the local and general governments—each party appealed to the patriotism of the people in support of their cause. Señor Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo... was appointed commandante-general on the part of the Californians, and forthwith the whole train of congressional officials was forcibly expelled from office and the government troops disbanded, and before long transported to the Mexican territories. The Mexicans threatened an expedition to chastise the rebels, and recall them to repentance and duty; while the Californians defied their menaces, and resolved to abide the consequences of their first steps to freedom. ... the rebels were so far away, and the opposite factions in Mexico had so many more pressing matters to settle among themselves at home, somehow all about California appeared to be forgotten, and it was left, for a time, to any constitution, or none at all, and anarchy, just as its people pleased. About the end of July, 1837, the excitement among the Californians had subsided so far, that they then quietly accepted the new Mexican constitution without a murmur, and voluntarily swore allegiance to it."

"On the 6th of November, 1836, the Californians, assisted by foreigners under Captain Graham, an American, and Captain [John] Coppinger, an Englishman, revolted against Gutierrez; and the latter was forced to leave the country, with all his officers, except those who took part in favor of the natives, and wished to remain. Don Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo played an important rôle in this revolution, and became commander of the forces; while his nephew, Don Juan Bautista Alvarado, was made civil governor. These positions they held until the arrival of Micheltorena in 1842. Early in 1845, Micheltorena was sent away by the Californians, after forming a sort of treaty with them (he being desirous to proceed to Mexico), leaving José Castro with the military command. Pío Pico, who was again the senior member of the Junta department, then became governor. These two continued in power, as military and civil heads respectively, until the Americans took possession of the country."

"The undersigned, Constitutional Governor of the Department of the Californias, has the deep mortification to make known to Mr. Thomas 0. Larkin, Consul of the United States of North America, that he has been greatly surprised in being notified by official communications of the General Commandancia of this Department and the Prefecture of the Second District, that a multitude of foreigners of the United States of America have invaded that frontier, taken possession of the fortified town of Sonoma, treacherously making prisoners of the military Commandante, Don Mariano G. Vallejo. Lieut. Colonel Victor Pruden, Captain Salvador Vallejo, and Mr. Jacob P. Leese, and likewise have stolen the property of these individuals. ...So base management as observed on this occasion highly compromises the honor of the United States, and if it shall have such a stain upon itself, there is no doubt that it will be graven eternally in the remembrance of all nations, and will cause it to be despised."

"General M.G. Vallejo was born in Monterey upper California, July, 1808, being the eighth of thirteen children. He was educated at the college there, and entered the military service at the age of sixteen, as a cadet and private secretary to Governor Arguello. Being rapidly promoted, he reached the rank of Brigadier-General in 1840."

"In 1829, as Lieutenant commanding, he was placed in charge of the Northern Department, which included all the country to the north of Santa Cruz, having his headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco; in which capacity he remained until 1837, exercising until 1835, both civil and military functions for the section north of San José."

"In 1838, the supreme government of Mexico confirmed these revolutionary acts of the jealous, belligerant, and semi-independant Californians; and sent out as Governor, Micheltoreno, clothed with extraordinary prerogatives—being invested with the full powers of the central government. In the exercise of these, he appointed Vallejo military commander of all the territory lying north of the Santa Inez mountain, who now had fixed his headquarters at Sonoma, where he has ever since resided."

"Under the new regime, and especially after the beginning of the great influx of gold-seekers to the Pacific shore, in 1849, Vallejo... was appointed by Commodore Stockton, in January, 1847, a member of a civil body titled the Assembly, designed to frame a code of laws for the temporary governance of the territory. But the grand imbroglio between Commodores Stockton and Shubrick, General Kearney, and Colonels Mason and Fremont... prevented the meeting of such body."

"Vallejo received three communications dated upon the same day, from Stockton, Kearney, and Fremont, respectively, each signing himself Governor and Commander in Chief of California."

"Vallejo... acted for a time as Indian Agent north of the Bay, by appointment of General Kearney."

"Early in the year 1849 were inaugurated those "District Legislatures" for affording... temporary civil governments for the country. Ex-Governor Boggs from Missouri and General Vallejo took the leading part in organizing this movement for the Sonoma section, when... the Missouri statutes were adopted entire, so far as applicable... But Governor-General Riley's proclamation soon upset these independent movements, and called a general convention for the territory. Vallejo was elected a member of the body, which... resolved to form a State Constitution. The following year, he was elected a State Senator, and whilst a member, his magnificently liberal propositions with reference to locating the permanent seat of government upon his Suscol Rancho, at the site of the present city of Vallejo, were accepted by the Legislature and confirmed by a vote of the people. In compliance with the terms of the agreement, he erected a State House or Capitol and various other public buildings, as well as expending large sums otherwise in connection therewith... The Legislature twice met there, but... certain very strong influences being brought to bear to induce adjournment to Sacramento, the place was finally abandoned as a capital, and Vallejo induced to cancel... the contract made with the State, at a loss, as he alleges, of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. And to this heavy damage and the unexpected rejection by the Supreme Court of the United States of his title to that most valuable rancho, may be chiefly ascribed the downfall of his fortunes."

"The General possesses a handsome residence—"Lachrymœ Montis"—situated in the edge of the town of Sonoma, built after the plan of Bonaparte's villa at Bordentown N.J., but is unable to preserve it in proper repair for the lack of sufficient income."

"Sonoma being selected as the headquarters of the United States army in the fall of 1849, his commodious mansion upon the Plaza, fashioned in the old Hispano-Mexican style, was long the almost homelike resort of all its officers, and where many, besides, met with that open-hearted and frank entertainment characteristic of its hospitable proprietor. Being, during that period, a gentleman of ample fortune—possessing near thirty leagues of choice land lying immediately around the northern border of the bay of San Francisco, and many thousands of horses and horned cattle—he dispensed his hospitality, as well as rendered much assistance to the newcomers, with a prodigal and generous hand."

"In 1865, he made his first visit to the East, and was received with great consideration in Washington by his old army and navy acquaintances, whom he met there, as also by the leading officials of the government."

"As Mayor and also a Councilman of his home-town, he sought to have its public grounds properly ornamented and improved, proffering to bear the larger portion of the expense; but such not being responded to by the new citizens, his plan was only partially carried out. He expended, however, large sums in setting out vineyards and fruit-trees in the immediate vicinity, being the first to start vine-culture and wine-making on the north side of the bay. For several years, his wines and brandies took the first premium at the State Fairs, and at the Mechanics' Fairs in San Francisco."

"The General (now over sixty) preserves in a remarkable manner his youthful appearance and activity. This may be attributed, in part, to a well developed physique, and active, outdoor exercise all his days, and to the strictly temperate habits he has constantly adhered to, rarely partaking of wine or spirits, and being a moderate and fastidious eater."

"In character he is not alone a pure-blooded Spaniard of the Hidalgo class, but true to many of the leading traits and likenesses of that grandly historic race; being generous, hospitable, high-spirited, of courtly address and distinguished presence, and possessed with a happy admixture mixture of dignified pride and condescending affability. Like them, in general, his mind dwells much in the regions of romance; is somewhat addicted to idealistic fancies—air- castle building, or the concoction of magnificent schemes and projects, difficult of being, or never to be, realized. ...And to these amiable qualities, and the more materialistic natures of that throng of "practically minded," greedy, grabbing gold-seekers flocking to the Pacific shore, who have so greatly wronged the larger portion of the unsophisticated stock found here, by despoiling them of their heritage, may be attributed the passing away from his possession of that vast estate once held by him."

"Proud of the past glories by past glories and still prominent position of the Spanish race, the General—who is a fine scholar, especially as an historian—loves to dwell upon their close relationship with ancient Rome, and the undeniable fact that Spain, more than any nation of Europe, transmitted the wisdom and the virtues of that august civilization down to and connects herself with the modern."

"237, 423, N. D. Mayor and common of Sonoma, claimants for Pueblo of Sonoma, 4 square leagues, granted June 24th, 1835, by M. G. Vallejo to Pueblo of Sonoma; claim May 21st, 1852 and confirmed by the commission January 22d. 1856."

"249, 140, N. D. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, claimant for Yulupa, 3 square leagues, in Sonoma county, granted November 23d, 1844, by Manuel Micheltorena to Miguel Alvarado; claim filed May 31st, 1852, rejected by the commission May 10th, 1854, confirmed by the district court January 21st, 1857, decree reversed by the U. S. supreme court and cause remanded for further evidence, in 22 Howard [63 U. S.] 416."

"250, 321, N. D., 306. Mariano Vallejo, claimant for Petaluma, 10 square leagues, in Sonoma county, granted October 22d, 1843, by Manuel Micheltorena to M. G. Vallejo, (grant) and 5 square leagues, June 22d, 1844, Manuel Micheltorena to M. G. Vallejo (sale the government); claim filed May 31st, 1852, confirmed by the commission May 22d, 1855, by the district court March I6th, 1857, and dismissed July 3d, 1857; containing 66,622.17 acres."

"Though a Californian, and sharing with other Spanish-born natives a natural distrust of strangers, Vallejo possessed an admiration and sincere friendship for the Americans, and received them kindly, even when his superiors demanded the expulsion of the dangerous foreigners."

"Though his patriotism was never doubted, he counseled annexation to the United States when he saw that Mexico had no government nor protection for California."

"His appointment in 1835 as military comandante and civil commissionado of the northern district proved to be a selection so wise that it stands out in relief from among the official errors of early California history, and during his ten years of almost autocratic rule at Sonoma, it is seen that he governed with rare justice and practical common sense."

"During his youth he was a cadet in the territorial army and a friend and comrade of General Castro and Governor Arguello. He was an earnest student and early acquired a fund of knowledge that fitted him to take a prominent part in and to a considerable extent shape political affairs of the territory, especially during the critical times just prior to the American occupation."

"When the red, white and blue of America took the place of the red, white and green of Mexico, he was still of the best of the California citizenry. Tall and erect, with a distinguished military bearing, and with grace of gesture and manner inherent from birth and breeding, an easy and fluent speaker in English, though learned late in life, charming with the strength of purpose and the seriousness of diction, filled with the chivalry of the past day when Spanish knighthood was in flower was General Vallejo."

"While at Sonoma 1840 and 1845 large companies of American immigrants came through the country, and though he was constantly "nagged" by his government to drive the foreigners out of the country, the comandante disobeyed orders and humanely treated the strangers."

"There is no doubt that Vallejo's gentle methods in dealing with the... Indians surrounding him, his rare discretion in the management of his military affairs and his practical statesmanship making for the much-needed change of flags, proved him to be a greater man, a man more deserving of appreciation than any other within the limits of the territory, and it may be said in truth, deserving of more appreciation than he received."

"Three times he took part in revolution against Mexico, in 1832-36-45, and the revolutionists won each time, but the successive governors they recognized always managed to get themselves in turn recognized by the Mexican government, in consequence of which matters would drop back into the old rut.There is little wonder that Vallejo at Sonoma found his grandiloquent title of Military Comandante and Director of Colonization on the Northern Frontier burdensome, and occasionally asked to be relieved. And when the Bear Flag people did relieve him of further participancy in Mexican affairs, it was likely to him a relief indeed."

"Sutter and Vallejo were Mexican citizens—one native and the other naturalized—but they failed in their first duty to the southern republic when they failed to keep the gringos out of the territory."

"Sem-Yeto's capital city, seat of government, was a populous rancheria in what is now Suisun valley, though the tribes of his dominion were scattered over the great plain from Sonoma eastward to the Sacramento. The chief seems to have been an amiable aborigine and early fell in love with the mission fare and faith. After the padre had baptized him into the bosom of the church, Vallejo suggested for the convert the name of the Mission, so he was christened Francisco Solano. The comandante found the new churchman quite useful and quite faithful to the white settlers. "Solano was a king among the Indians," writes Vallejo in his annals. "All the tribes of Solano, Napa and Sonoma valleys were under tribute to him," and through this the comandante was enabled to keep peace in his great territory, covering much of what is now Napa, Solano and Yolo. As Solano fell into the ways of the palefaces—became more civilized—he lost much of the saintly character received at his mission christening, and frequently Vallejo would have to take his red friend in hand. But a night in the guard house away from the wine-cup would prepare the chief for the headache and repentance of the morrow."

"Three families and Vallejo early owned all of what is now Solano, but now, of those big ranchos, only the memories remain. Even the names have dwindled. Vallejo is used to designate a city; Vaca (the gringos called it Barker) marks the limits of a valley; Armijo is a schoolhouse, and Peña was changed to a creek, as enchanted persons in classic days were turned to fountains. Others of the early settlers have passed quite away, bag and baggage, date and name, leaving nothing for remembrance. But these improvident Españols lived well during their short residence in Las Californias, and in their big adobes a rugged splendor was maintained."

"Early Saturday morning I climbed the hills facing Kfar Gil'adi. Wonderful scenery. And in the brilliance of the beautiful morning I understood why Moses received the Torah on a mountain top. Only in the mountains is it possible to receive orders from above, when one sees how small is man yet feels secure in the nearness of God. From there one's horizons broaden in every respect, and the order of things becomes more understandable. In the mountains one can believe - and must believe. In the mountains one involuntarily hears the query: "Whom shall I send?" And the answer, "Send me to serve the beautiful and good!" Will I succeed? Will I be able to fulfil God's command?"

"Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame.Blessed is the flame that burns in the heart's secret places.Blessed is the heart that knows, for honors sake, to stop its beating.Blessed is the match, consumed in kindling flame."

"One – two – three… eight feet longTwo strides across, the rest is dark…Life is a fleeting question markOne – two – three… maybe another week.Or the next month may still find me here,But death, I feel is very near.I could have been 23 next JulyI gambled on what mattered most, the dice were cast. I lost."

"Dear mother, I don’t know what to tell you. I will only say this: A thousand thanks and more, and forgive me, if you can. After all, you will understand, better than anyone else, that words are not necessary now. With great love, your daughter."

"There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind."

"I’ve become a Zionist. This word stands for a tremendous number of things. To me it means, in short, that I now consciously and strongly feel I am a Jew, and am proud of it. My primary aim is to go to Palestine, to work for it."

"The immense noisy crowds that greeted the end of British rule in India with deafening shouts of joy on August 15, 1947, did not recall the old saying: they thought nothing of British rule would survive in their country after the departure of the White men who had carried it on. They never perceived that British rule in India had created an impersonal structure.... a system of government for which there was no substitute."

"I understood the life around me better, not from love, which everybody acknowledges to be a great teacher, but from estrangement, to which nobody has attributed the power of reinforcing insight."

"By the time the Muslims established their rule in the country (circa 1200 A.D.) the old inhabitants of the country, i.e. the Hindus, had lost their vitality to such an extent that they became incapable of dealing with or even facing a situation if it was difficult or unpleasant. So they surrendered to any situation that was created for them by history and tried to be at peace with their conscience by banishing it from their mind with soothing words."

"As soon as the English mind came in contact with the Hindu's, which was a very different kind of mind, it completely lost its temper, and so became incapable of dispassionate analysis. But the display of temper was at least spectacular, like fireworks."

"I say that the Muslims do not have the slightest right to complain about the desecration of one mosque. From 1000 A.D., every Hindu temple from Kathiawar to Bihar from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas, has been sacked and ruined. Not one temple was left standing all over northern India… Temples escaped destruction only where Muslim power did not gain access to them for reasons such as dense forests. Otherwise it was a continuous spell of vandalism. No nation, with any self-respect, will forgive this. They took over our women. And they imposed the Jaziya, the tax. Why should we forget and forgive all that? What happened in Ayodhya would not have happened, had the Muslims acknowledged this historical argument even once. Then we could have said : All right, let the past remain in the past and let us see how best we can solve this problem…"

"Indien de Lieve Heer ons helpen en zegenen wilde, en wij ons land terug zouden krygen, dat den het volk elk jaar daar zouden komen feestvieren, juist by dezelfde steenhoop, en den Heer onze geloften komen betalen. En deze steenhoop is de eeuwige getuie daarvan."

"If the Dear Lord would decide to help and bless us, and we would succeed in recovering our country, that the citizens would annually come to celebrate at this exact cairn, honouring our vow to the Lord. And this cairn serves as the eternal witness to it."

"Wy syn hier gekomen om feest te vieren en gy weet het. Ons en u doel is niets anders dan om meer en meer te doen verstaan den wil des Heeren en om ons te wyzen op zyne leiding, opdat de ouders aan hunne kinderen en kindskinderen tot in het verste nageslacht kunnen verhalen, wat God aan ons gedaan heeft."

"We have arrived here to celebrate as you are well aware. Our aim, as your aim, is no less than to acquire a deeper understanding of the will of the Lord, and to apprise ourselves of his guidance, in order that the parents may convey to their children and grandchildren, and thence to our most distant descendants, what God has bestowed on us."

"... I will bring a curse upon myself if our independence is violated by me, since God has guided us so visibly that the blindest heathen and most unbelieving creature had to admit that it was God's hand that gave us our independence."

"Through the World I thank the people of the United States most sincerely for their sympathy. Last Monday the Republic gave Great Britain forty-eight hours' notice within which to give the Republic an assurance that the present dispute would be settled by arbitration or other peaceful means, and that the troops would be removed from the borders. This expires at five to-day. The British Agent has been recalled. War is certain. The Republics are determined, if they must belong to Great Britain, that a price will have to be paid which will stagger humanity. They have, however, full faith. The sun of liberty will arise in South Africa as it arose in North America."

"… they were willing to their ability, I testify, yes, beyond their ability."

"Zoekt in het verledene al het goede en schoone, dat daarin te ontdekken valt. Vormt daarnaar uw ideaal en beproeft voor de toekomst dat ideaal te verwezenlijken."

"Seek in the past all that is good and beautiful that can be discovered there. Form your ideal accordingly and try to realize that ideal for the future."

"Or: Search in your past for what is good and beautiful. Build your future from there."

"…van de minste geleerden hunner."

"…of the least learned among them."

"I express to you my sincere congratulations that you and your people, without appealing to the help of friendly powers, have succeeded, by your own energetic action against the armed bands which invaded your country as disturbers of the peace, in restoring peace and in maintaining the independence of the country against attack from without."

"Kruger was the dour, stolid, canny, provincial trader. The only time that his interest ever left the confines of the Transvaal was when he sought an alliance with William Hohenzollern, and that person, I might add, failed him at the critical moment."

"[He epitomized the Boer character] both in its brighter and darker aspects and was […] the greatest man – both morally and intellectually – which the Boer race has so far produced."

"Kodra, dopo aver lasciato l'Albania in dissidio con il regime, tornò una volta a Tirana e venne a casa da mio padre, anch'egli artista. Alla parete c'era appeso un mio disegno astratto. Lo notò subito e disse "continua su questa strada". Portava un basco, un maglione, una sciarpa, si smarcava dall'uniformità che qui vigeva, la barba era proibita come pure i capelli lunghi."

"Turkey is a big and powerful country. We are a small and weak country. But whenever Turkey needs, we will be there. Albanian people will never forget Turkey's help,"

"First they came for Georgia I did not speak out Then they came for Crimea It was not my country So I did not speak out Then they came for the whole Ukraine But I was not Ukrainian And I did not speak out And then they came for me But there was no one left to help and defend me"

"If one speaks about torture, one must take care not to exaggerate."

"It would be totally senseless to try to describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. Was it 'like a red-hot iron in my shoulders,' and was another 'like a dull wooden stake that had been driven into the back of my head'? One comparison would only stand for the other, and in the end we would be hoaxed by turn on the hopeless merry-go-round of figurative speech. The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would have to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself."

"... nowhere else in the world did reality have as much effective power as in the camp, nowhere else was reality so real. In no other place did the attempt to transcend it prove so hopeless and so shoddy."

"Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced. as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules."

"Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me."

"He realized...that the loudest are the least sincere, that arrogance is a quality of the ignorant, and that flatterers tend to be vicious."

"Where does taste end and smell begin?"

"Silence before being born, silence after death: life is nothing but noise between two unfathomable silences."

"For women, the best aphrodisiacs are words. The G-spot is in the ears. He who looks for it below there is wasting his time."

"Photographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent."

"When Irina Bazili began working at Lark House in 2010, she was twenty-three years old but already had few illusions about life. (first line)"

""There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed..." (p103)"

""...you shouldn't stay trapped in the past or be frightened of the future. You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy? Every day counts, I can tell you!" (p193)"

""...We are all born happy. Life gets us dirty along the way, but we can clean it up. Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love..." (p194)"

"Write what should not be forgotten."

"our demons lose their power when we pull them out of the depths where they hide and look them in the face in broad daylight. (p249)"

"“It’s easy to judge others if you’ve never suffered an experience like that” (p250)"

"I am Inés Suárez, a townswoman of the loyal city of Santiago de Nueva Extremadura in the kingdom of Chile, writing in the year of Our Lord 1580. (first line)"

"How accommodating love is; it forgives everything. (p10)"

""They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail...Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us." (p264)"

"Alexander Cold awakened at dawn, startled by a nightmare. (first line)"

""With age, you acquire a certain humility...The longer I live, the more uninformed I feel. Only the young have an explanation for everything. At your age, you can afford to commit the sin of arrogance, and it doesn't matter much if you look ridiculous" (p50)"

"According 2025"

"Jealousy. The person who hasn't felt it cannot know how much it hurts, or imagine the madness committed in its name. (p368)"

"love is a free contract that begins with a spark and can end the same way. A thousand dangers threaten love, but if the couple defends it, it can be saved; it can grow like a tree and give shade and fruit, but that happens only when both partners participate. (p369)"

"Memory is fiction. We select the brightest and the darkest, ignoring what we are ashamed of, and so embroider the broad tapestry of our lives. (p433)"

"Most of my writing is an attempt to bring an illusory order to the natural chaos of life, to decode the mysteries of memory, to search for my own identity. I have been doing it for several years, and I have achieved none of the above. My life is as messy as it always has been; my memory still works in mysterious ways-plus I am losing it!-and I still don't have a clear idea of who I really am. Most people would come to the same conclusion. We evolve, change, age. Nobody is carved in stone, except the very pompous or self-righteous."

"When I wrote my first novel, The House of the Spirits, I had no idea that literature was studied in universities and that people who had never written a book determined the value of others' writing. I simply thought that if a story had the power to touch a few readers, if it planted the seed of new ideas in them, if it seemed true and made a difference in somebody's life, it was valuable. Like most normal human beings, I had never read a book review. Word of mouth was how I chose the books I read."

"I never expected that the weird craft of writing would be of any interest to the general public, nor that a writer could become a sort of celebrity and be expected to behave like one. Writing is a very private matter that happens in silence and solitude-an introverted temperament is an asset in this job. Writing takes up an incredible amount of energy and time; there is very little left for anything else. But more and more the publishing industry forces the authors to become public figures and go around talking, reading, signing, and even selling their books. How can one be in the limelight and still write? Books deserve compassion. They are delicate creatures born to be accepted or rejected as a whole; they can't endure dissection under the microscope of the pathologist. Most writers are as vulnerable as their work. If you pin them against the wall and force them to explain the unexplainable, you might break them. I am afraid it's happening to me."

"Why do I write? This is a question that I often ask myself, although it is like trying to explain why I breathe. Writing is a matter of survival: if I don't write I forget, and if I forget it is as if I had not lived. That is one of the main reasons for my writing: to prevent the erosion of time, so that memories will not be blown by the wind. I write to record events and name each thing. I write for those who want to share the obligation of building a world in which love for our fellowmen and love for this beautiful but vulnerable planet will prevail. I write for those who are not pessimists and believe in their own strength, for those who have the certainty that their struggle for life will defeat all bad omens and preserve hope on earth. But maybe this is too ambitious... When I was younger, I thought I wrote only for the sake of those I cared for: the poor, the repressed, the abused, for the growing majority of the afflicted and the distressed of this earth, for those who don't have a voice or those who have been silenced. But now I am more modest. I think of my writing as a humble offering that I put out there with an open heart and a sense of wonder. With some luck, maybe someone will accept the offering and give me a few hours of his or her time so that we can share a story. And that story doesn't have to always be about the most solemn and transcendent human experiences. I find myself often writing for the same reason I read: just for the fun of it! Storytelling is an organic experience, like motherhood or love with the perfect lover; it is a passion that determines my existence. I am a story junkie. I want to know what happened and to whom, why and where it happened. Writing has been very healing for me because it allows me to exorcise some of my demons and transform most of my pain and losses into strength. Certainly I write because I love it, because if I didn't my soul would dry up and die."

"You think in words, for you, language is an inexhaustible thread you weave as if life were created as you tell it. I think in the frozen images of a photograph. Not an image on a plate, but one traced by a fine pen, a small and perfect memory with the soft volumes and warm colors of a Renaissance painting, like an intention captured on grainy paper or cloth. It is a prophetic moment; it is our entire existence, all we have lived and have yet to live, all times in one time, without beginning or end. From an indefinite distance I am looking at that picture, which includes me. I am spectator and protagonist. I am in shadow, veiled by the fog of a translucent curtain. I know I am myself, but I am also this person observing from outside. (from Prologue)"

""Tell me a story," I say to you. "What about?" "Tell me a story you have never told anyone before. Make it up for me." (last lines of Prologue)"

"She went by the name of Belisa Crepusculario, not because she had been baptized with that name or given it by her mother, but because she herself had searched until she found the poetry of "beauty" and "twilight" and cloaked herself in it. She made her living selling words. (first lines of "Two Words")"

"There are all kinds of stories. Some are born with the telling, their substance is language, and before someone puts them into words they are but a hint of an emotion, a caprice of mind, an image, or an intangible recollection. Others are manifest whole, like an apple, and can be repeated infinitely without risk of altering their meaning. Some are taken from reality and processed through inspiration, while others rise up from an instant of inspiration and become real after being told. And then there are secret stories that remain hidden in the shadows of the mind, they are like living organisms, they grow roots and tentacles, they become covered with excrescences and parasites, and with time are transformed into the matter of nightmares. To exorcise the demons of memory, it is sometimes necessary to tell them as a story. (beginning of "Interminable Life")"

"Simple María believed in love. That was what made her a living legend. All her neighbors came to her funeral, even the police and the blind man from the kiosk who almost never abandoned his business. Calle República was vacated and, as a sign of mourning, black ribbons hung from balconies and the red lights turned off in the houses. Every person has his or her story, and in this barrio they were almost always sad, stories of poverty and accumulated injustice, of every form of violence, of children dead before term and lovers who had run away, but María's story was different; it had a glow of elegance that gave wing to the imagination. (beginning of "Simple María")"

"She sowed in my mind the idea that reality is not only what we see on the surface; it has a magical dimension as well and, if we so desire, it is legitimate to enhance it and color it to make our journey through life less trying. (p22)"

"That was a good time in my life, in spite of having the sensation of floating on a cloud, surrounded by both lies and things left unspoken. Occasionally I thought I glimpsed the truth, but soon found myself once again lost in a forest of ambiguities. (p125)"

"Barrabás came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy. She was already in the habit of writing down important matters, and afterward, when she was mute, she also recorded trivialities, never suspecting that fifty years later I would use her notebooks to reclaim the past and overcome terrors of my own. (first lines)"

"...Captain Longfellow—who, like most Englishmen, was kinder to animals than to people... (p31)"

"“This is to assuage our conscience, darling" she would explain to Blanca. "But it doesn't help the poor. They don't need charity; they need justice” (p162)"

""My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.” (p182)"

"He felt that Christianity, like almost all forms of superstition, made men weaker and more resigned, and that the point was not to await some reward in the sky but to fight for one’s rights on earth. (p255)"

"Blanca argued that her reading should be monitored because there were certain things that were inappropriate for her age, but her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it. (p311)"

"The man and the little girl looked at each other, recognizing themselves in the other’s eyes. (p319)"

""Public opinion wouldn’t stand for it,” Gómez replied. “This is a democracy. It’s not a dictatorship and it never will be.” “We always think things like that only happen elsewhere,” said Miguel, “until they happen to us too.” (p367)"

"...and on the date stipulated by law the left calmly came to power. And on that date the right began to stockpile hatred. (p392)"

"She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh... (p430)"

"The coup gave them a chance to put into practice what they had learned in their barracks: blind obedience, the use of arms, and other skills that soldiers can master once they silence the scruples of their hearts. (p436)"

"The Poet’s funeral had turned into the symbolic burial of freedom. (p441)"

"I told her she had run an enormous risk rescuing me, and she smiled. It was then I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women. (p487)"

"Because she lived under the big umbrella of my grandfather and she didn't have any education - she had three kids, had been abandoned by her husband, had no money - it was a horrible life. The only way she could get attention from her father or anybody else was by being sick. She didn't do it consciously. As a child I felt impotent and guilty because I felt that I couldn't help her in any way."

"Thank God – because what are you going to write about if you don’t struggle as a child? I don’t think that you become creative because you have struggled, no, but creative people are fuelled by anger and passion, and haunted by demons and memories."

"It would have been much better if I had started [writing novels] at 19. But I couldn't. I had to support a family, I wasn't ready. And I think I needed to lose my country to start writing, because The House of the Spirits is an attempt to recreate the country I had lost, the family I had lost."

"The theme of displacement is very natural for me. It always comes up in my books because I have been a foreigner all my life and I don’t feel I belong anywhere. I’m an immigrant."

"I imagined the structure of the novel like a braid. My job was to blend three strands evenly and neatly. Each piece of the braid represented one of the stories. The characters were very different but they had something in common: they were emotionally wounded by events of their past."

"I never try to give a message in my fiction. When I see that an author is trying to preach to me in a novel, I feel insulted. If I find a message, it should come between the lines; I will discover it if it resonates with me. The ideas, feelings and experiences of the author appear unavoidably in the writing."

"I can only write fiction in Spanish, because it is for me a very organic process that I can only do in my native language."

"The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses. As a writer, you select some part of a whole. You decide that those things are important and the rest is not. And you write about those things from your perspective. Life is not that way. Everything happens simultaneously, in a chaotic way, and you don't make choices. You are not the boss; life is the boss. So when you accept as a writer that fiction is lying, then you become free. You can do anything. Then you start walking in circles. The larger the circle, the more truth you can get. The wider the horizon—the more you walk, the more you linger over everything—the better chance you have of finding particles of truth."

"Everybody has a story and all stories are interesting if they are told in the right tone."

"I spend ten, twelve hours a day alone in a room writing. I don't talk to anybody. I don't answer the telephone. I'm just a medium or an instrument of something that is happening beyond me, voices that talk through me. I'm creating a world that is fiction but that doesn't belong to me. I'm not God; I'm just an instrument. And in that long, very patient daily exercise of writing I have discovered a lot about myself and about life. I have learned. I'm not conscious of what I'm writing. It’s a strange process—as if by this lying-in-fiction you discover little things that are true about yourself, about life, about people, about how the world works."

"People are complex and complicated—they seldom show all the aspects of their personalities. Characters should be that way too."

"To me a short story is like an arrow; it has to have the right direction from the beginning and you have to know exactly where you're aiming."

"a novel is patient and daily work, like embroidering a tapestry of many colors. You go slowly, you have a pattern in mind. But all of a sudden you turn it and realize that it’s something else."

"Happy endings usually don't work for me. I like open endings. I trust the reader’s imagination."

"I belong to the first generation of Latin American writers brought up reading other Latin American writers. Before my time the work of Latin American writers was not well distributed, even on our continent. In Chile it was very hard to read other writers from Latin America. My greatest influences have been all the great writers of the Latin American Boom in literature: García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, Paz, Rulfo, Amado, etc. Many Russian novelists influenced me as well: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Gogol, and Bulgarov. The English writers who had a big influence on me during my adolescence were Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. I loved mysteries and read all of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle. Also some American authors who were very popular in Spanish, like Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. I remember the lasting impression that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird had on me. I read that book again every decade or so. From these books I got a sense of plot and strong characters. I discovered fantasy and eroticism in One Thousand and One Nights, which I read in Lebanon at age fourteen. At that time and in that place, girls didn't have much social life aside from school and family; we didn't even go to the movies. My only escape from a troublesome family life was reading. My stepfather had four mysterious leather volumes in his locked closet, forbidden books that I was not supposed to see because they were “erotic.” Of course I found a way to copy the key and get in the closet when he was not around. I used a flashlight, could not mark the pages, and read quickly, skipping pages and looking for the dirty parts. My hormones were raging and my imagination went wild with those fantastic tales. When critics call me a Latin America Sheherazade I feel very flattered! The American and European feminists that I read in my twenties gave me an articulate language to express the anger I felt against the patriarchy in which we all live. I started working at Paula, a Chilean feminist magazine, sharpening my ideas and my pen to defy the male establishment. It was the best time of my life. I have always liked movies, and sometimes an image or a scene or a character stays with me for years and inspires me when I write. For example: the magic in Fanny and Alexander or the story within a story of Shakespeare in Love."

"Pain is universal. We all experience pain, loss, and death the same way."

"The death of a child is the oldest sorrow of women. Mothers have lost children for millennia. It is only a privileged few who can expect all of their children to live."

"I work with emotions; language is the tool, the instrument."

"This sounds very corny but my life has been determined by two things that have been extremely important: love and violence. There is sorrow, pain, and death, but there’s another parallel dimension, and that is love. There are many forms of love, but the kind I am talking about is unconditional. For instance, the way we love a tree. We don't expect the tree to move or to do anything or to be beautiful. The tree is just a tree, and we love the tree because it’s a tree. You love an animal that way. We love children that way."

"The soul has no age."

"It’s strange that my work has been classified as magic realism because I see my novels as just being realistic literature. They say that if Kafka had been born in Mexico he would have been a realistic writer. So much depends on where you were born."

"the awareness of how powerful the written word can be: how you can tap into that world that we are talking about and discover things that would have been impossible to know if you didn't have that connection to a collective knowledge that comes through the writing."

"Short stories come to you whole. A novel is work—work, work, work—and then one day it’s over; it’s finished. But a short story is something that happens to you—it’s like catching the flu."

"Who wants to be in the mainstream?...Being marginal is like being a new immigrant. If you can transform marginality into something positive, instead of dwelling on it as something negative, it’s a wonderful source of strength."

"there are more similarities than differences when it comes to gender. Essentially, human beings are very similar, but we are stuck in the differences instead of highlighting the similarities."

"I have been a feminist all my life, fighting for feminist issues. When I was young, I fought aggressively. I was a warrior then. And now I am becoming more aware of those essential things we men and women have to explore and that could really bring us together. But don't get me wrong: I am a feminist and a very proud one!"

"you will find elements of magic realism in literature from all over the world—not just in Latin America. You will find it in Scandinavian sagas, in African poetry, in Indian literature written in English, in American literature written by ethnic minorities. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alice Hoffman all use this style."

"For a while, in the U.S. and Europe, a logical and practical approach to literature prevailed, but it didn't last very long. That’s because life is full of mystery. And the goal of literature is to explore those mysteries. It actually enlarges your horizons. When you allow dreams, visions, and premonitions to enter into your everyday life and your work as a writer, reality seems to expand."

"I do believe in destiny. I believe that we are dealt a hand of cards and we have to play the game of life as best we can. And often the cards are marked."

"I try to write the first sentence in a state of trance, as if somebody else was writing it through me. That first sentence usually determines the whole book. It’s a door that opens to an unknown territory that I have to explore with my characters. And slowly, as I write, the story seems to unfold itself, in spite of me. It just happens."

"Writing is like training to be an athlete. There is a lot of training and work that nobody sees in order to compete. The writer needs to write every day, just as the athlete needs to train. Much of the writing will never be used, but it is essential to do it. I always tell my young students to write at least one good page a day. At the end of the year they will have at least 360 good pages. That is a book."

"The role of the United States, not only in Latin America, but in many other places in the world, is unknown by many people in the United States. People here don’t know what the CIA and the American government has done abroad. And we know, because we are the ones who suffered it."

"We see stuff on TV that doesn’t look real. It looks like a video game. We don’t see the collateral damage."

"When I came to this country, I was willing to embrace everything that was good, fight against everything I thought was awful, and not lose what I brought with me, which is my language, my traditions, my way of living, hospitality, and many things that we Latins have."

"What shocks me about the issue of immigration is that globally, capital has no borders. Money goes wherever money wants to go. There are no borders, no laws, nothing, for the capitalists. And yet, for labor, for the workers, there are fences, electrified fences and bullets."

"I think that the reason to live is to learn. We come here to experience through the body things that the spirit could not experience otherwise. So we need this body, and we have to transform this body into a temple of learning. (1997)"

"I was influenced by all of them-by García Márquez, by Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, so many of them-some of my own generation, like Eduardo Galeano. It's easy for me to write because I don't have to invent anything. They already found a voice, a way of telling us to ourselves, so it's easy. (1994)"

"when you look for the motivations you always go to the basic instincts, to the basic emotions, the basic things that have moved humankind always. That's what all writers write about, ultimately. What did Shakespeare write about? Jealousy, love, sex, power, greed, the same stuff that soap operas and the Bible are made of. It's always the same. (1994)"

"Right now I am reading a group of women writers that belong to ethnic minorities in this country. They are great writers, Chicanas, Japanese, Latinas. They are writing extraordinary works, and they are taking over the world of literature that the white men in New York monopolized. Minimalist literature is dying. And it was about time. We are seeing a return to great narrations, to the baroque narrative. We are seeing a return to artistry in words, in sentences, in the extravagance of the story itself. I am very attracted by that...Toni Morrison heads that movement. (1993, translated from Spanish by Virginia Invernizzi)"

"silence can also enrich you very much. Maya Angelou talks about a long period in her childhood when she was silent, and during those years she turned evil into action. All the evil that had happened to her she was raped-was turned into a positive strength, into energy, because of those years of silence. She reinterpreted the world, recreated reality. In a way, I think, that happened to me, too. Not as dramatically as it happened to her, but those years of silence were very necessary. Now that I've been talking and talking and talking in these lectures and in these seminars and courses and teaching, I have the feeling that all my energy is gone out, so I've decided that I will stop all interviews, all lectures. I will only do those I've already agreed to do. I will finish these obligations on October 1. And then it's my time of silence, because I need silence. Without silence I can't write. (1991)"

"There is a wonderful sentence, a statement, by one of Bertolt Brecht's characters, he says: "I am that man that goes around with a brick in his hand, to show the world how his house was." And that's the way I feel about my books in a way, that they are my bricks. I can show people what I believe my world was, so I've not lost it. (1990)"

"The best literature in this country now is being written by minorities, black women first, Chinese Americans, Chicanos, Japanese-Americans. These people are writing wonderful literature that totally defies the standards of WASP literature that is always in the New York Times, and I love it. (1990)"

"The first person to name that movement "Magical Realism," to give a label to that, was Alejo Carpentier...he abandoned the surrealists and searched in our roots, in our history, in our legends, in our folklore. He was the first one to label it. And it was wonderful because it was like giving permission to other writers to finally use their own voices. Because before that our writers were always trying to imitate Europeans, or North Americans, and were denying all our Indian background, our African influence, our own languages, and legends, and myths. This was just an open door for all that. I think that was the beginning of the Boom. That really gave a lot of people permission to do anything. But it's not a literary device, it's part of our life. The magic is still there. Because magic, in my case, stands for emotions...Maybe we deal with them in different forms, but we all feel them in the same way (1990)"

"I acknowledge that One Hundred Years, like the works of Borges, Cortázar, Donoso, Neruda, Amado, among others, opened the road for me."

"The written word is an act of human solidarity. I write so that people will love each other more."

"The political future of Chile is a democracy, without a doubt."

"For me, feminism is a fight that men and women must wage for a more educated world, one in which the basic inequality between the sexes will be eliminated. We have to change the patriarchal, hierarchical, authoritarian, repressive societies that have been marked by the religions and the laws that we have had to live with for thousands of years. This goes a lot deeper than not wearing a bra, or the sexual and cultural revolutions. It is a revolution that must go to the heart of the world, and that all of us must fight, women and men alike. Both sexes are on a ship without a course, and we must give it a new direction."

"I don't pretend to be anyone's voice. I have been very lucky to be published in Europe, and I say lucky because there are women who have been writing in Latin America since the seventeenth century, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. The problem is that few people ever talk about them. Their work is rarely taught at the universities, there is no literary criticism on them, and they are not published, translated or distributed."

"When I write, I fly to another dimension. Like Eva Luna, I try to live life as I would like it to be, as in a novel. I am always half flying, like Marc Chagall's violinists."

"Daily life is brimful of fantasy and at the same time books are saturated with reality. I feel that all things float within the realm of the possible. As a reader I let myself be carried away by the enchantment of a story, without worrying too much about its authenticity. As a writer I abandon myself in the same way to the necessity of telling, convinced that if something is not exactly true at this moment, it may be so tomorrow. That's the way I have found it to be in my work."

"I visualized the book as a string of beads. Each anecdote, each character, was a separate bead strung on one string. That is why I wanted to close the book where it began, as if one had fastened the clasp of a necklace. I also wanted to show that life goes in a circle, that events are intertwined, and that history repeats itself. There is no beginning and no end."

"(About The House of Spirits) All the women in my book are feminists in their fashion; that is, they ask to be free and complete human beings, to be able to fulfill themselves, not to be dependent on men."

"I do realize that human beings are the same everywhere; the differences are not so great. This story of the Trueba family could have happened anywhere."

"When I left Chile, after the military coup, I lost in one instant my family, my past, my home. I felt like a tree without roots, destined to dry up and die. For many years I was paralyzed by a kind of stupor and by nostalgia, but one day in January of 1981, I decided to recover what I had lost. I sat down to write the story of a family similar to mine, the story of a country that could be mine, a continent resembling Latin America... It was almost the act of a conjurer."

"Democratic values have never disappeared from Chile. We must not confuse the Chilean nation with the dictatorship that is ruling it now. Chile is its people, its land, its past, its present, and its future. Pinochet and the evil ones who are with him are an accident in the long life of my country. They will go into history as a misfortune that darkened the sky, but they will go."

"My work as a journalist has been fundamental in my literary creations. Journalism taught me to know and love words, the tools of my trade, the material of my craft. Journalism taught me to search for truth and to try to be objective, how to capture the reader and to hold him firmly and not let him escape. It taught me to synthesize ideas and to be precise about events. And above all, it rid me of any fear of the blank page."

"Already many critics accuse Allende of imitating Garcia Márquez' novel, especially because she writes about a Latin American family, the Truebas, who, just like the Buendia family of the Colombian author, inhabit a world of magic and eccentric spirits. But Isabel Allende differs from García Márquez: she writes a feminocentric saga of free-spirited women who not only play the piano with the cover closed or make objects levitate, but also participate openly in the fight against tyranny and repression...With this book Isabel Allende joins the many spirited women who have chosen to speak for the voiceless and have had the courage to denounce the wrongdoings of their countries. She has written this novel so that all of us can remember the story of a country like Chile which had a freely elected government that was never given a chance to rule. (And there are parallels between the experience of Chile and that of other Latin American nations such as Nicaragua and El Salvador.) The House of the Spirits reclaims Chile's right to exist on its own terms. Allende writes this story because she does not want the humane and generous Chile to be forgotten. The House of the Spirits, then, is not only Chile but a metaphor for a besieged Latin America."

"I liked House of the Spirits a lot, but I wouldn't say it influenced me. A sort of brotherly - or should I say sisterly - relationship can certainly be found between House of the Spirits and Tree of Life. This year I experimented with a course entitled "Do women of the Americas have a common literature?" I selected Allende, Marita Golden... and of course Tree of Life. However, I cannot say that I consider Isabel Allende a major writer. It seems to me that as a writer, she is less comprehensive, less accomplished than Garcia Marquez."

"I come from the so-called Third World," wrote the Chilean novelist and memoirist Isabel Allende after September 11, 2001, a day that also marked the twenty-eighth anniversary of a U.S.-sponsored coup d'état against her uncle, Salvador Allende. Still, she writes, "Until only a short time ago, if someone had asked me where I'm from, I would have answered, without much thought, Nowhere; or, Latin America; or, maybe, In my heart I'm Chilean. Today, however, I say I'm an American, not simply because that's what my passport verifies, or because that word includes all of America from north to south, or because my husband, my son, my grandchildren, most of my friends, my books, and my home are in northern California; but because a terrorist attack destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and starting with that instant, many things have changed. We can't be neutral in moments of crisis...I no longer feel that I am an alien in the United States."

"The New York Times Book Review said of Isabel Allende that she is "the first woman to join what has heretofore been an exclusive male club of Latin American novelists." Her voice stands out as a spectacular outcry of the "magically real." Like the Argentine novelist Luisa Valenzuela, she has inherited the spellbound qualities of the "Boom," the literary explosion of the 1960s, when a group of young Latin American writers brought new dimensions and vitality to the Spanish language. Her characters, mostly women, move between the supernatural and the everyday life with extraordinary ease…Meeting Isabel Allende and listening to her is a rewarding experience. She tells her story in an unpretentious way, insisting on the fact that she knows nothing about literature. We fall under her charm and we can see why her characters talk the way they do: with persuasion and magic, and in a natural and straightforward manner."

"I really liked Isabelle Allende's House of the Spirits...But I also think that their [her and Garcia Márquez's] sense of indigenous people and the land is very limited. It has been pointed out that Allende uses this sort of mythos, the Indian people, as part of the novel, but they don't really appear in her work as people, as full beings."

"All Iranians with little knowledge are concerned about the country's backwardness - especially the decline of Iran from a large and powerful empire to a weak and small state. Where is the root of degeneration? At the turn of the century, intellectuals could claim that the main culprits were tyrants who had a hidden interest in the illiteracy and ignorance of the people of the country. But in fact, twenty years after the constitutional government, we can not give the same answer. We now know that the main fault lies not with the rulers but with the obedient. Yes, the main cause of underdevelopment in Iran, and perhaps in most Eastern countries, is division and discord among the masses."

"Today, one of the problems of Iran, in fact, its worst problem, is the dispersal of Iranians. People who share a common land and live within the territory of one country should not be divided into rival sects. Today's Iran is in this misery, and if this continues, God knows what a hard hand the Iranians will suffer."

"Regarding Reza Shah, it should be said: Many of the benevolent ideals of Iran were fulfilled by Reza Shah, from founding the National Bank, overthrowing the capitulation, unifying the clothes, railways, etc., to liberating women and removing the veil and chador."

"Our words have deep strong roots, and will never be eradicated with a pistol. There will be no better result from using a pistol than bloodshed. Say and write whatever you like, we will never be offended, but your support for thugs has a different meaning."

"The basis of Shiism is that the caliph should be chosen by God and not by the people. We ask: What was the reason for this? The book of Islam was the Qur'an, where is the Qur'an in such a statement? How could there be such a thing and it is not mentioned in the Qur'an?"

"If the Prophet wanted to appoint a "caliph", he must first speak on the fact that the selection and appointment of a caliph should be from God and not from the people, and he must said openly: "Now is my first caliph It is Ali who has been chosen by God.""

"Curses and insults about the companions of the Prophet, which they called "Tabarra", is another basis of Shiism, and this is a disgraceful ugliness. Shiite books are full of curses and insults."

"They have said that the Qur'an, which was a book for reading, understanding and salvation, should not know its meaning except for the Imams, and thus they have despised that book. Shiite scholars considered the Qur'an incomprehensible to the general public and preferred "hadiths" to it."

"The Europeans have been trying for years to keep the Orientals in the well of ignorance, and they have come to one conclusion from this behavior: the Orientals become powerless and helpless in the shadow of this ignorance."

"We know that when Nader Shah was killed, the greatness he had created for Iran disappeared. But Iran was still considered one of the so-called countries, and Karim Khan and his successors, if they did not add anything to the country, did not reduce it. But during the Qajar dynasty, Iran became very powerless, and its greatness, position and reputation were greatly diminished, and the reason for this was more than one thing, and that was that the world was modernized and countries changed, but Iran was backward."

"As we have seen, they created a small group of constitutionalists in Iran, and many people did not know the meaning of constitutionalism, and it is clear that they did not want it either. At the beginning of its rise, the constitutional movement, above all, had the character of "Shiism" in order to gradually acquire the character of "patriotism". This duplicity also appeared in the newspapers, and the newspaper Sur-e Esrafil followed this new practice from the very beginning, and its writers showed a good knowledge of the history of Europe and the countries there, and over this innovation, animosities arose with them."

"If we want the truth, these scholars of Najaf and Sayyids and other scholars who insisted on constitutionalism did not know the true meaning of the constitution and the result of the prevalence of European laws, and did not know the very obvious incompatibility between the constitution and the Shiites. The brave men, on the one hand, saw the distress of Iran and the inability of the government, and saw no other way out of it than the constitution and the parliament, and tried to support it with great insistence, and on the other hand, were bound by religion and could not ignore it."

"If you have heard that Dr. Zamenhof has created a language called Esperanto from the rules of knowledge, the ease of which is amazing, we should follow the same rules in adorning the Persian language and make this language very easy."

"There is no doubt that our alphabet must be changed. It has been talked about for fifty years, and now it must be used, and it is the most worthy group to use. If we do not use it today, it will either remain unfulfilled or fall into the wrong hands of those who have created something flawed and called it the alphabet."

"It is the responsibility of literate writers to try to cut down on Arabic words, and for others to follow them. The involvement of inexperienced youth in this work will bring no other benefit than loss and will create a series of other destructions in Persian."

"The work of the word should not be despised, whoever turns to goodness, his word should also be trimmed and adorned. Language is the mirror of thoughts, language is the example of temperament"

"I never wanted to be known and my name to be mentioned. But whether or not this happened, it was very appropriate for me to write my own life history so that there would be no need for others to make incomplete inquiries and get a combination of right and wrong."

"Our family in Tabriz was a mullah family. Aqa Mir Ahmad, my grandfather, was one of the famous scholars who was followed by all the people. He built a mosque in Hakmavar, which is now standing and is called Mirahmad Mosque. As I have heard, he was a very humble man and he was kind and sympathetic to people. When I was a child, even though thirty years had passed since his death, his memory was still alive among the people. Mir Ahmad's youngest son, my father, chooses to stay away from the mullah. My father wanted to have a child to succeed his father, so he named me Mir Ahmad."

"From childhood to the age of six, I do not remember anything but shaving my head and suffering from it."

"In Hokmavar, because many people were illiterate, they did not value literacy and there was no Maktab there. Only one mullah named Mullah Bakhshali taught us to read the Qur'an. He himself was not very literate and did not know Persian well, and because his teeth were missing, his words were difficult to understand. His art was to beat the hands and feet of children. People did not want anything more than this and saw education in beating children. However, from the day I went to Maktab, I did not give up because I wanted knowledge until I understood the lesson. I learned the alphabet in a week. Then I learned some lessons in Quranic chapters from mullah Bakhshali and learned the rest myself."

"My father, like his father, had studied Sharia, but had become a businessman. He was a Shiite but avoided many superstitions. There were many differences between Sunnis and Shiites at that time. Especially in Azerbaijan, where hearts were full of resentment against Sunnis and this caused ugly behavior. For example, on the ninth of Rabi al-Awal, they celebrated the day of Omar's death, thinking that it was the day of his death, and engaged in a series of light-hearted work. Clear such ignorance from Iran, the constitutional movement, and that is why Iranians should be happy that that movement is happend."

"Cholera broke out and people hung the Quran in the streets at that time, so that anyone who passed under it would take refuge from the disease, and they set up Rawda Khwani in the gates and alleys. One day, one of the grandchildren of an ayatollah was put on a donkey and brought to our alley, and the men and women kissed his hand."

"I had to become a mullah after studying, and apart to my father's will, I hated the mullah myself."

"Haji Mir Abolhassan Angji - The cowardly mullah who once threw himself in front of the constitutionalists and spread his false ideas in support of them, and then in the occupation of Tabriz by the Russians, he fell in front of the mob and looted the city.- excommunicated me because he had heard my attachments to constitutionalism."

"When I was in Tehran, on the one hand, I became acquainted with the Esperantist group, and on the other hand, I became acquainted with the Baha'is. When I went to Mashhad, I wished to go to Nader Shah's grave. When I left, I was very sorry to see that they had turned it into a sleeping place for camels. When I arrived, a man with an Aftabeh came out. This upset me a lot. In Mashhad, I wrote a speech and sent it to a newspaper that I do not know whether it was published or not. A year later, in Tabriz, I wrote another speech in the newspaper Tajaddad. Bahman Mirza Sheydani, who represented the Great Association of Esperanto, had read it. Therefore, when there was a conversation in the National Assembly about Nader Shah's grave and a law was passed to clean it up, the prince wrote me a letter in which he gave good news. We got acquainted from there and sometimes we sent letters. In Tehran, he told me one day: I want you to learn Esperanto and become Esperantist. I said: I know Esperanto. He said: From whom did you read? I said I learned it myself. He was very pleased and invited me to the assemblies of the great association of Esperanto. One day he arranged a magnificent party for me."

"Kasravi has the spirit of an honest historian. He is meticulous in detail and in presentation"

"Kasravi wore a black turban at the time, wore a long robe and cloak, and wore a black cloak. His small compact turban was the best representative of Tabrizi students. His skinny face showed prominent bones, a look of suffering and anger, and at the same time a tyrant to the vote and Egypt in belief. He was not wearing glasses yet. He spoke Persian with a special Azerbaijani accent, but very well. In the first conversation I had with him, it was proved to me that the man is very fearless and even expresses his own opinions with a certain recklessness. He was not afraid to say anything against the custom and against the opinion of others."

"a true anti-cleric."

"I'm very pro-democracy, and I would definitely encourage the people of Egypt. But at the same time I would warn them to look at and learn from Iran, Mubarak has destroyed the opposition in Egypt; the only opposition left is the Muslim Brotherhood. And while I certainly can't say that the [democracy movement] will lead to another dictatorship, I am saying there's a possibility - a real danger - that it will go the wrong way. So I'd ask them to please learn from history. Iranians are still suffering from a revolution that turned into much more of a dictatorship than the Shah's. So please don't dismiss the possibility that things can go wrong."

"The biggest and saddest impact of colonialism was the Irish language, but funnily enough, the way the Irish speak English has a load of phrases taken straight from the Irish language, some of them in ways we don’t realise. Colonialism was devastating and the effects are still going on, but in the true Irish spirit, in spite of people living in boháns and hovels, and people dying with the hunger, we’ve survived, and it’s only in the last thirty or forty years that we’ve begun to recover from the Famine, and Irish people got a bit of pride back into themselves. There’s a bit more about us now, than there was when we were always looking back."

"A teller forgets they’re performing. You have to learn the trade, do it and make mistakes. You make mistakes and remember them, but you do good things and remember them. The very most basic thing of all, is when you have a story you enjoy so much telling, you remember it, and you hardly have to think about it."

"During the twenty past centuries our Christians from the Holy Land were like condemned and privileged to share oppression, persecution and suffering with Christ. He is risen but his cross is still high in our sky. Our Christianity is still hanging on that terrible cross. They still live under daily threats from officials who dream continuing the transfer of our minority, away from their lands, their homes, away from their ancestral homeland. If it was not for Him, the cross would have been damned and hated."

"Russia's widespread aggression (against Ukraine) is a threat to the entire world and to all NATO countries, and NATO consultations on strengthening the security of the Allies must be initiated to implement additional measures for ensuring the defense of NATO Allies. The most effective response to Russia's aggression is unity. I assure all the people of Estonia that there is no direct military threat to Estonia and that the situation in Estonia and at our external border is calm."

"If people admire dictators, there is no moral obstacle to becoming one or submitting to one. If people’s minds and eyes are shut before past atrocities, there are no limits to committing new ones in the future."

"When we look at Russia we see darkness – fear is keeping its society together. And we see thousands fleeing the country. We know this fear. Fear of secret police who seize people in the middle of the night or arrest them only for holding up placards in public squares, fear of the constant distrust, fear to express your opinion, fear of the atrocities that might follow. Tens of thousands of Estonians fled this same tyranny after World War Two."

"Gas might be expensive, but freedom is priceless."

"What is our neighbor’s problem today will be our problem tomorrow. We are in danger, when our neighbor’s house is on fire."

"If we do everything to help Ukraine, there will be no 11-year-olds for whom the air of freedom is something they only experience from a distance."

"Neutrality is not a worldview, neutrality is indifference."

"If someone talks about Russia and Ukraine agreeing on a peace settlement and giving away some territory, I explain that after World War II, your side of the Iron Curtain had peace, which meant that you built up your countries and the prosperity of your peoples. On our side of the Iron Curtain, we had mass deportations, killings, and our culture and language were suppressed. So even if there is some kind of an agreement, without accountability it doesn’t mean that the human suffering will stop."

"It is very difficult to innovate by command. Suppressive fear and the need to fulfill artificial plans drown out sustainability and competitiveness. Freedom is worth fighting for because it generates prosperity and security."

"When they annexed Crimea, it was the “little green men.” They were embarrassed that it's Russian soldiers. They tried to hide it, they were afraid of the Western reaction. Because the Western reaction was weak at the time, they made a mental note that they can do this because nothing happens. So if they can attack Ukraine, get away with no punishment, no accountability, then the next step could be NATO."

"Russia may believe that issuing a fictitious arrest warrant will silence Estonia. I refuse to be silenced — I will continue to vocally support Ukraine and advocate for the strengthening of European defenses."

"I see this war ending with Russia going back to Russia."

"When one aggression pays off, it's an incentive to commit others."

"Defense is not escalation."

"Russia wants to see the US and Europe divided. Let’s not give them that."

"There is no table where Russia and Ukraine are sitting right now. It’s a shuttle diplomacy."

"Of course for any deal to work you need Europeans around the table to agree to the deal. Because the implementation of the deal needs to be in the hands of Europe."

"It’s really good to see how these things are going. Trump was clear that aid to Ukraine was not discussed. Putin said it was discussed. I’d rather trust Trump on this than President Putin."

"In order for the ceasefire to work there has to be deterrence. And if all guards are down, I mean Putin has shown this before, hes not keeping to the ceasefires. And if he wants the guards to be down on the Ukrainian side, then he actually achieves what he wants, and I am absolutely certain he will continue."

"We need to do more for our defence. We also need to do more for Ukraine so that the stronger they are on the battlefield, the stronger they are on the negotiation table."

"The stronger we are the less likely war is."

"Mark Rutte is speaking Trump, I think he’s speaking the language that President Trump definitely understands and he needs to get this across,I think it very important that everyone is doing this 5% and agreeing to this."

"when member states agreed to spend more on defence, that also means that they have more means to help Ukraine."

"When it comes to Europe we have agreed that we will support Ukraine militarily, and we will also put more pressure on Russia so that they would also want peace in order end this war so it is very clear for us."

"so if we don’t push back aggression in one place, it just is a call to use aggression elsewhere."

"I don’t see into Putin’s mind but looking back how he has been working, he understands strength, If we invest more into defence, we are stronger so it doesn’t provoke him."

"Weakness provokes him: if he thinks that he’s stronger, he can take up this war, then he will take up war, but if he sees that we are strong, then he doesn’t look our way, and that’s what we are doing."

"Of course, Israel has the right to self-defense – that is very clear"

"But the recent actions go beyond self-defense. There is too much human suffering."

"I hear what the Israeli government is saying: that humanitarian aid has also been weaponized, But if Gaza were truly flooded with humanitarian aid, there would be no shortage, which means no one could weaponize it."

"It is clear that we want good relations with Israel, At the same time, we see steps the Israeli government is taking that really raise questions. That’s why I think it’s important to have this open and frank dialogue, so we can address these issues with our Israeli counterparts, which we are constantly doing."

"What everybody wants to signal is that we are, of course, supporting Israel’s security. But at the same time, these countries – and everyone, really – are not endorsing all the measures being carried out by the Israeli government."

"If the review says that the international humanitarian law has been breached, then of course we have different options, different options from the full suspension of the association agreement to, you know, different elements that could be done."

"If people have opportunities – if they can earn a livelihood – then there’s a chance they won’t be radicalized, and chaos in Syria can be avoided."

"Of course, we have concerns about the new leadership in Syria, That is very clear. We have chosen this path of easing sanctions with the understanding that we can always reinstate them if we do not see progress in the right direction."

"We see no role for Hamas in the future governance of Gaza – that is very, very clear. And we also hope that the suffering of the people in Gaza will end, that humanitarian aid will reach them, and that both parties will be able to foster prosperity for the people moving forward."

"The EU accession process must not be held hostage by such a conflict, We aim to avoid such tensions, but the EU will continue to enlarge whether or not this conflict is resolved."

"I don't think we're alone. Actually what I've seen is a lot of countries from around the world at our door, wanting to co-operate, finding new ways to do that. Why is this so? Because, you know, something that has been maybe a weakness because we are so predictable and so boring, has become actually our strength. There is a lot of unpredictability in the world, so we can build on that strength. Of course, we need to co-operate around the world with the countries which are not perfect democracies; if we only choose the countries that are perfect democracies we can't also work with some countries that are within the European Union, but that's another topic. It's clear that we need to find a way to actually promote the values that we also stand for, because people really see that it brings benefits. It brings prosperity and the well-being of people."

"I can tell you that one of those countries wanted to send the military to march there [in Moscow]. Can you imagine? This is the biggest threat that Europe has: Russia. You want to join the EU, and then you send your military to march together with the forces that are actually attacking European security? How can you then really defend this and say that we want to take this military enemy within? It would be a complete no-go for many European countries, and it is hard. Show me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are. We have 27 Member States in Europe, and I can already tell you 10 [Member States] for whom this is highly problematic."

"It is clear that in order to have peace, you need at least two to want peace. It only takes one to want war. We see Putin has shown very clearly that he still wants war. They [Russia] wanted to make countries in the Global South to believe the narrative that Europeans or Ukrainians are just warmongers, they want war but Putin is a peaceful person just attacking and killing some civilians. They [countries in the Global South] bought this narrative, but now everybody can see that this is not the case. It has been 60 days since Ukraine agreed to a full and unconditional ceasefire, whereas we haven't seen that from Russia's side. We have seen that Russia is playing games. We, the European Union, have been united, calling for a ceasefire so that they [Russia and Ukraine] can sit down at the table and discuss peace, but we need to see some goodwill on the Russian side. What we can do is of course to put more pressure on Russia to also want peace on their side. The tools that we have in our hands our economic tools, so sanctions. I also welcome the Lindsay Graham package that they are now discussing in [the US] Senate, which are very strong sanctions to really put the pressure on Russia. I think this sending a very good signal that also the Americans understand that in order to end this war, in order to end the killing, we should the pressure on the one who is doing the killing."

"There haven't been any bilateral talks between Ukraine and Russia. There has been shuttle diplomacy, really. There have been envoys from the US going there. It's important to keep in mind that [there should be] nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. We can see them agreeing to things and coming back to ideas that are completely unacceptable for Ukraine, or for Europe for that matter. Then it can't really fly. I understand what the Americans are trying to do, which is to really keep their door open so that Russia would come to the table. That's why they maybe haven't put that much pressure on Russia, but now it has been over 60 days. We need to some other steps so that we see Putin at the negotiating table."

"I think Zelenskyy did well to say, "OK, I'm willing to meet Putin and let him come." I don't know if we are off the camera or on the camera here, but I'd like to express my opinion here. It's hard. I think it's a good move. It's a sit down. It should be between Zelenskyy and Putin. I don't think Putin dares."

"When they are saying that it is weaponised by Hamas, and only given to people that are close to Hamas, then the response would be [to] flood Gaza with humanitarian aid so that there would be no deficit and it can't be used. Like you say, it can, so we are also offering our help. We have the EUBAM Rafah border crossing mission. We are also ready to increase this, to help with the distribution of humanitarian aid, but we are not allowed to. So for me, it is an immense frustration that we can't really do anything. Of course, we will have a discussion about this agreement. I know what the end result is going to be, because I know the positions of the Member States. Even if we suspended this agreement, it wouldn't stop the killing, and that is the problem. That's really where the frustration comes, because we all see that this is untenable, the loss of life, the human suffering, and we really need to help them. We are, together with Arab countries, discussing what more we can do, but again we need our American friends on board and to understand that the situation is completely untenable."

"Europe is a peace project. You know, it was created so that we wouldn't have wars between the members of European Union, and we haven't had. And, of course, also to do things together, cooperate more. You know, coming from a country that joined the European Union 20, 20 years ago. Then, we were actually, you know, pushed by the Americans, you know, you will not get into NATO, but, but Europe, the European Union, is something that you should join because it's, it's a good project also for the transatlantic relations. So I was quite surprised to hear a comment like that."

"We have always been good allies. I mean, we have been working together and we have been friends and allies, what comes to the world in different parts of the world, what is happening. We have been cooperating, whether it comes to Ukraine, whether it comes to, also, Middle East. And we see- in the world, we see powers like Russia, North Korea, Iran, more covertly China, working together. And I think this is the moment where we have to work together as transatlantic partners."

"We are coordinating. And of course, the message is there are several layers. One is that the fight that Ukraine is having is not only about Ukraine sovereignty, but it's much, much broader. It's about freedom of the free world, really. It is about the world where international law applies and the world where might does not make right. It is clear that Russia attacked Ukraine. There is one aggressor and one victim. And we need to really make sure that Russia doesn't attack again. And for that, we need to concentrate our efforts. I mean putting politically and economically pressure on Russia to stop this war, but at the same time also help Ukraine to defend itself."

"I don't think that anybody wants the killing to stop more than the Ukrainians. And in order to achieve that, we should all put the pressure on Putin, because he can stop the killing by not bombing Ukraine and the Ukrainians so that they don't have to defend themselves. And that's why our plan, our policies, to really put the pressure on Russia. We shouldn't overestimate the power of Russia and underestimate our own power. We know that their economy is not doing well. I mean, their inflation is over 20%, their National Fund is almost completely depleted. They don't have the same revenues from gas and oil that they used to to fund the war machine. So actually, if we concentrate our efforts, we can put the pressure so that they would stop the war, not to offer them anything, you know, on a plate, in addition what they have already done."

"it does matter who is responsible, so who is accountable for this as well. And why it also matters is that we have the United Nations Charter where we have agreed how countries are, you know, interacting with each other. And it says very clearly that you can't attack sovereignty, territorial integrity of another country, and if you do, there are consequences. And why is it important? It is important for small countries in the world for whom this is the only thing that protects them. If we don't really defend this principle, then we're going to see all these developments that we don't want to see. Because all the countries who are afraid of their neighbors will want to go for nuclear weapons, because this is the only thing that protects them. It's not the international law anymore. And all the countries who have appetite for the neighbors' territory will want to have a nuclear weapon, because it is the only thing by- you know, threatening to use this weapon, you can have what you- what you want, because this is what Russia is doing."

"Well, yes, not so directly. It doesn't have a practical impact, but it- clearly, I mean, it is saying what kind of principles in the world we are supporting. And of course, we were co-sponsoring, together with the United States, the resolution to support Ukraine. And it was a surprise to us that U.S. suddenly changed the position. I must, you know, really point out that we had the resolution drafted together with the new administration, regarding the support for Ukraine. But when they met the Russians, something happened after that, because the behavior changed. So- so the question is, where do we go from here? Our will and- and wish is to work together with our transatlantic partners for the principles that United States has always stood for. I mean, I'm coming from the country that regained our independence in 1991. It was the time when, you know, Ronald Reagan was really pushing hard for, you know, fight for freedom, and- and we are so grateful for America for doing this. Because we got our independence and freedom back, and therefore also the prosperity and the well being of our people. So we are very grateful. And I'm not- and I don't want to- I don't want to see this- I don't want to let this go. I mean, that, America, you know, is- is not fighting for- for freedom and independence, and, you know, the principles, the basic principles, of the international law."

"Russia has been investing more than 9% of its GDP on military. In comparison, European countries are spending 2%. I think my own country is spending over 3%, but- but I think America is spending something around 3 or 4% of its GDP. So if you're investing so much on the military, you will want to use it again. And that's why it is very important how we- how we act here. In 2008, they attacked Georgia. Nothing happened. There was not the strong reaction from the West. In 2014, they annexed Crimea and attacked Ukraine. There was not the strong reaction. So, you know, there was a ceasefire, but ceasefire only gave them possibility to regroup and rearm. That's why it is extremely important that we don't make the same mistake again. If there is a pause, so they are able to get their forces to gather again, we will just see more wars. Everybody wants peace, but the peace has to be a lasting peace. And for lasting peace, it has to put- the pressure has to be put on Russia so that they don't do this again."

"I mean, NATO is a defense alliance, and- and it is comprised of 32 different armies of, of the NATO member states. So, NATO structure is the military structure, and in terms of war, very important is, who gives orders to whom? So if you have, you know, those through- 32 armies that cooperate together, and you have one structure, then it's clear who gives orders to whom."

"So if we say that we create a parallel structure, then, you know, when, in terms of crisis, then who gives orders to whom? Because the armies are just the 32. So that's why I haven't supported a special European army. I'm just saying that all the armies that are there in Europe, but also in NATO, need to work together."

"We have managed so far and- and, of course, it's getting harder all the time, but we have managed to keep this unity."

"There are several arguments, and some- some countries are not in favor because of the different risks. But I think, you know, in the end, everybody will come to the same conclusion. It shouldn't be our taxpayers that pay for the damages caused by Russia in Ukraine. It should be Russia who pays."

"We don't want the trade war with United States. I think there are no winners in trade wars. And I mean, yesterday, I was here and watching the news as well, and you hear the news that consumer confidence in United States is dropping. And you know, if you have trade wars, it increases the prices, and in the end, the consumers will pay for this. So- so it is- it is not- I mean, there are no winners in trade wars, and we don't want to start one. But of course, we will also protect our interest if a trade war is started against us."

"There are strong supporters of Ukraine in, I mean, both sides of the aisle and have been very, very much understanding what is going on. I don't know their relationship with President Trump, but I have seen the strong will that there is. Maybe this critical raw materials deal that President Trump is doing with President Zelenskyy will increase the economic interest of United States in Ukraine. That will, in turn, also give, I mean, the interest- security interest, to protect those economic interests that you have in Ukraine. So, so maybe that is one of the tools."

"We are going to have next Foreign Affairs meeting, Foreign Affairs ministers meeting, and we're going to discuss Iran. Our common position, how we approach Iran. It is clear the way Iran operates, I mean helping Russia in the war against Ukraine, but also their activities in the Middle East, that we have to have a much stronger stance when it comes to Iran. Because developing a nuclear weapon, it's extremely dangerous. And there is one of the points where we need to cooperate with the United States as well."

"It was soon after my first acquaintance with Mr. Gladstone that he told me how impossible it was for a Minister and his secretary adequately to perform their respective duties unless there was established between them such an absolute confidence as in a happy domestic life should exist between a man and his wife."

"Society, which, at the beginning of the Queen's reign, was strict, formal, and circumscribed, has followed the trend of other things, and taken a hint from commercial legislation. It has entered into an enormous syndicate, under the rules of strictly limited liability. Individualism is stamped out; Collectivism has come in. The rush and rapidity of thought and action, supplemented by all the appliances of modern science, have largely increased."

"Lecky, in his delightful "Map of Life," lays great stress on the advantages of Tact. No doubt it is a splendid asset in a man's character, smoothing his passage through life and leading to success, but I still maintain that work and the love of it is the noblest gift that can be granted and that best repays itself."

"Sir Algernon West ... is a good, genial gossip, whose recollections cover the whole period of English history that began with the . He was private secretary to Mr. Gladstone during his first Prime Ministership. ... He is a fervent Gladstonian, whose idolatry of his chief is quite refreshing in these days, in which the memory of this great man is the mark for so many cynical sneers."

"We believe that every word of adoration on the exploits of the departed heroine is well earned. Indeed, every lover of education should be thoroughly grateful to Mrs. Ogundipe for her contributions to education."

"Ogundipe’s life was defined by her passion for education and uncommon dedication to serve others, stressing that her legacy would live on."

"Mrs Ogundipe through her books imparted generations of Nigerians of my age. In my personal interactions with her, she was passionate about Nigeria and hoping that things would get better."

"All Nigerians, who drank from the fountain of knowledge of the endowed English teacher."

"In my personal interactions with her, she was passionate about Nigeria and hoping that things would get better. Unfortunately, like many compatriots of her time, the Nigeria of their dream remains a mirage."

"As a recipient of the National Honour of Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) and other numerous awards for her works on education."

"Her autobiography, the Up-country Girl, should be a must-read for every aspiring young girl."

"There are so many dissimilarities, so many unique points of difference between this one country in Africa and the rest of the world."

"Parents have a lot of professing power over their children. Praise and admonishments are crafting tools like names."

"When CNN does not reciprocate with simple engagement with our hills and valleys, our romantic ideals, often only with our traumas. And everyone in the world has trauma. If you know where Naples is or Mount Vesuvius, then you are clever."

"The more handling of a wide variety of food that one can manage the more open one’s mind and palate."

"Investing one’s own disadvantage in words: Opening an artery onto the page, that kind of thing, apart from a love for the theme being written on."

"There are many things that happen in the human being that bypass the brain."

"We don’t have a Nigerian culture of cooking and monologuing. It is coming along now with social media and Nigerian food celebrities."

"If one wants to be a good essayist, one needs to connect and do it at the level of the gut, infiltrate the blood–brain barrier and lose prestige or the footing of pride. Or shall I say, you have to give something of value away to gain the investment of the reader’s time and attention."

"One of the greatest ironies of writing is that you can write for a hundred years, write reams, but until you have something that resembles a book, you are never allowed to call yourself an author."

"I come from a society where the default is conformity. I don’t know how to conform and I find myself putting question marks against everything"

"There is a need to speak on something and I don’t agree with the status quo. The self-deprecation probably comes from not fitting in no matter how hard I try."

"What better way to spend one’s time in the country of fringe dwellers than capitalising on one’s failures? Why wallow in failure? If you can’t beat them, or join them, then you write about them. Yes, it does end up as a kind of power and advantageous positioning in standing out from the crowd because most people don’t want fringe-dweller strength"

"There is nothing any of us can do about the fact that the world is shrinking so we need to learn how to speak more languages, not fewer."

"In Nigeria, we have given ourselves no other option than the institutional use of the English language. We haven’t, in addition, provided the necessity and the resources of mastering the use of multiple languages. And that opportunity is so pertinent."

"I am writing all the time on being Nigerian and living in Nigeria but I have been accused of being stylistically un-Nigerian. My direct address of taboo objects, subjects and descriptions of people are supposedly un-Nigerian."

"Attitude hardly counts at all when we are attempting to determine what foods nourish the body. A lot of intolerances and allergies as they concern individual bodies are life and death issues and toxicology issues."

"The pandemic has forced a balance in the nation’s perspective where food writing is concerned."

"The truth is you have to get on top of the reading as soon as possible and you have to keep in mind that this is the sum of people’s YEARS of hard labour, sweat and pain that you hold in your hands. Without being able to meet all the people who make that thing in your hand possible, you have to conjure up their presence, interact with every single book with great reverence."

"I thought everything was fine in our country, because I thought everything was fine for me. But on my visits to the United States, I began to understand the oppression of women. And as I became more aware, I realized that feminism is a way of life. Feminism isn’t only about support for women; it’s about support for everyone who is victimized or marginalized. I accepted that way of life."

"...for me, doing means contributing, doing for others."

"In her 2014 memoir, Dayan wrote that during her lifetime, she witnessed Israel transform from “a beloved, admired, victorious and just homeland, via an unbearable regression, to the dangerous sphere of ethno-theocratic messianic existence, which is so far removed from a peace- and justice-seeking society."

"For all the progress that has been made, the same old hypocritical notions are still used to fight gender equality."

"Cases of corruption come and go; the public anger they generate is inevitably diluted by the slow pace at which the legal system delivers justice. All the while, the country stays wrapped in a near-permanent bulletproof vest, preparing for the next war even as we recover from the last one."

"For years, we have believed Israel to be a country whose vast military power is tempered by moral strength, supported by social solidarity and guided by well-balanced leadership. The recent war with Hezbollah shattered, at great cost, what was left of this belief. However, to my perhaps overly optimistic eyes, the war may have finally taught us — for the better — the limits of power. Just as a president and a Cabinet minister cannot resort to coercive persuasion when the charms they allegedly exercise fail to convince, so too the government and the military cannot continuously insist that where power has already failed more power will win."

"It is inconceivable that we should still have to discuss the Palestinian right to self-determination,” she told The Star. “We are still doubting that they are people. This is so stupid, it is like an ostrich burying its head."

"We have not yet produced a universal literature in Israel, which doesn't detract from its quality...We are still in a localized phase, reflecting what is happening to us now, a mirror of reality."

"The patriotism, idealism, the caring for others, the sense of involvement are still there, but on top of this is a layer called normalcy...One of the bases of Zionism was called 'normalization of the Jewish people.' This has become a matter of individual preference: videotapes, cars, gadgets. It gives the impression of a change in priorities. It will not last, if only because of the economics that will not allow it...Now that we have normalization and have built a country where my children can wear a Walkman and listen to Michael Jackson, we are complaining: Where is the spirit of Zionism? With the flood of American culture, we, like others, are losing something special of our own culture...With all that, I think we will also retain much."

"Nothing will be the same now. I have looked at cessation of life, destruction of matter, sorrow of destroyers, agony of the victorious, and it had to leave a mark."

"Though the predominant ethos of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel has been enlightened — in both the liberal and socialist senses — large sections of the Israeli society, whether Jewish or Arab, are still strongly patriarchal in their social structure and traditional in their attitudes, with strong religious influences."

"Given the level of education, professional talents and human qualities of Israeli women, it is difficult to understand why their presence is so sparse in the vital crossroads of Israel’s political life without taking into account the heterogeneity and complexity of Israeli society — a society, we shouldn’t forget, that is also struggling to attain peace and security. This social complexity forces those of us struggling to attain full gender equality in Israel to adopt a policy of compromise, bridging of gaps and patient educational work — rather than one of radical feminism, for which many of us may wish. The reality is that today in Israel, human and women’s rights are not yet fully accepted as normative, and are thus not adequately protected."

"Our goal is clear — to attain full equality for women, to prevent discrimination, abuse and violence against them, and to empower and advance the female segment of the population. We believe that in so doing we are not only serving women, but are also strengthening Israeli democracy."

"I have no doubt that once peace is attained in the Middle East, the struggle for the advancement of women and their equality will assume a high priority in our society, and become a subject of cooperation among women in the whole region."

"As I have become involved with the rights of all groups living in Israel, I’ve become more involved with women’s rights, too. Still, I think that women who are involved only in women’s rights are missing the point."

"we have a macho, male society which is not only engaged militarily but is dominated by male tradition religiously and sociologically...Women need to be represented in politics, in lobbying, need to try to achieve legislation. We need to get more women into politics and into the Knesset."

"Women lead the peace movement. They’ve definitely got positions of leadership there."

"If we really can advance towards peace, I see this as a springboard for other changes. Peace and war are irreversible, but other things are less absolute. Since we don’t have a constitution, if there is a change in the law it can be undone later. So it wouldn’t bother me to go along on some concessions and then in better times, say, try and change them. If there is peace, a lot of wrongs will be corrected."

"We started as a society of immigrants; the Palestinians started as people on their land. They’ve expected their state to be delivered to them by outside forces; we had to do it ourselves, and so on down the line. There is no comparison, neither in the time element nor in the content. The point is that they are not going to wait for 2,000 years to have a homeland. Where they are now is where we were before, and the way we demanded and got our rights, they deserve just as much."

"(Do you think that, in general, the large portion of the occupied territories will be returned?) YD: Oh sure, excluding the territory around Jerusalem."

"(How do you advise women who want to be part of the system making changes in present-day Israel? What can you say to women who want to enter politics?) YD: They have to work within the party system — every party — and on the national level with other parties. It cannot be only an effort within the party. The power of women has to be expressed by sheer numbers. It must be mobilization — whether it’s academic or grassroots."

"I finished working, satisfied with my new role as a victim, feeling slightly sorry for myself, somehow heroic. I wasn't just anybody, I was a betrayed woman. (chapter 4)"

"The country woke up on October 24, 1973, a Wednesday, as if it were a wedding day. Cease-fire was expected at any moment, and the words, "The war is over," though not yet uttered by anybody, were ringing in every heart. (beginning of chapter 7)"

"I sat and looked at the familiar living room. A low coffee table, four armchairs and a sofa, embroidered cushions and a whitewashed wall with two original paintings and a few lithographs. Yet, as my eyes examined the objects, I felt strangely out of place. As if the past few weeks had been spent in limbo, as if I were waking up from anesthesia, coming back to life from a shelter. I realized the paradox. I had escaped the war by plunging into the horrors of it. The burnt limbs and faces, the amputees, the invalids, the dead, they became abstract in the nightly duty, and the sound of guns and shells, the diving of aircraft and the roar of tanks advancing-this reality was so far away-sounds overcome and numbed by the silence of hospital corridors. I knew a terrible event had taken place, but I didn't feel it. People died, but I didn't know them. We claimed a victory, but I didn't rejoice in it, and when we were defeated at the beginning, I wasn't frightened. As if I weren't really there. (chapter 8)"

"All the intimacy in the world can't remove a slight sense of guilt when watching someone who isn't aware of being watched. (chapter 14)"

"Yael Dayan was an activist who rejected her father’s fate and life’s choice and sought peace. She spent her life making the country a better place for women, queer folks, refugees, Palestinians, everyone. Yael Dayan’s life describes a country growing more alive, with the passing of decades and generations, to human rights."

"A new woman’s voice in the darkness belongs to Yael Dayan who seems recently to have undergone a feminist metamorphosis."

"We have Yael Dayan and Shani Boianjiu to thank for bringing the Israeli woman soldier’s experiences to life for English readers."

"America has no north, no south, no east, no west; the sun rises over the hills and sets over the mountains, the compass just points up and down, and we can laugh now at the absurd notion of there being a north and a south. ... We are one and undivided."

"I always shot at privates. It was they that did the shooting and killing, and if I could kill or wound a private, why, my chances were so much the better. I always looked upon officers as harmless personages."

"He would have a man shot at the drop of a hat, and drop it himself."

"War had become a reality; they were tired of it. A law had been passed... called the conscript act. ... From this time on till the end of the war, a soldier was simply a machine, a conscript. ... All our pride and valor had gone, and we were sick of war and the Southern Confederacy."

"A law was made... allowing every person who owned twenty negroes to go home. It gave us the blues; we wanted twenty negroes. Negro property suddenly became very valuable, and there was raised the howl of "rich man's war, poor man's fight." The glory of the war, the glory of the South, the glory and the pride of our volunteers had no charms for the conscript."

"He was loved, respected, admired; yea, almost worshipped, by his troops. I do not believe there was a soldier in his army but would gladly have died for him. With him everything was his soldiers, and the newspapers, criticizing him at the time, said, "He would feed his soldiers if the country starved.""

"Well, on the fatal morning... the sun rose clear and cloudless, the heavens seemed made of brass, and the earth of iron, and as the sun began to mount towards the zenith, everything became quiet, and no sound was heard save a peckerwood on a neighboring tree, tapping on its old trunk, trying to find a worm for his dinner. We all knew it was but the dead calm that precedes the storm."

"Farewell, old fellow! We privates loved you because you made us love ourselves."

"We were willing to go anywhere, or to follow anyone who would lead us. We were anxious to flee, fight, or fortify. I have never seen an army so confused and demoralized. The whole thing seemed to be tottering and trembling."

"The baby was plump and pretty as a ripe ox-heart tomato. Her mother, Margaret Wilson Harvey, gently squeezed the soft cheeks to open the tiny mouth and rubbed her little finger, which had been dipped in sugar, back and forth, over and under the small tongue to anoint the child with the gift of sweet speech. "Her name is Doris," she said to her husband, David."

"my own memoir is a history of Jamaica; it’s my attempt to show that history happens to real people; how history affects ordinary people. (2013)"

"My particular role, as I see it, is to accurately represent my people. I have this real concern about how sometimes Jamaicans, and Caribbean people, are represented. And in my own writing, I want to tell their stories, but I want to do it in such a way that I think accurately portrays them. That’s the only ambition I really have. And if I do that, then I’ve fulfilled my job as a writer. (2013)"

"once I started reading, I was taken with the idea of what could happen to you once you read something. I don’t actually remember thinking that I wanted to be a writer, but I remember thinking I wanted to be a part of this world where people put down thoughts on paper, and when you read it back you could feel all of the emotions: you could be sad, you could be happy, you could be repulsed—all of those things. And I knew I wanted to be a part of that world. (2013)"

"Jamaicans are very comical people, and laughter is a way of coping with life’s displeasures. Also, when you make something of it [a hard situation], it says that you are in control. There are incidences when we have no control; all we can do is make some sort of a gesture. Sometimes, the world can throw things at you that are so cruel and so devastating that you are in no position to have any kind of real response but to make a gesture. And I think that sometimes laughter is a gesture saying that you have not completely annihilated me; you have not robbed me of my ability to respond as a human being. (2013)"

"I think a lot of my poems have been trying to make these gestures, you know, to say 'I'm a human being, and I have some control ... very limited, but some control over myself as a human being.' (2007)"

"When all of this is over, I want to have done something that I really think means something to people: something that feeds them in some way, and I'm trying to feed the work in the hope that it can nourish people. (2007)"

"You know, the Emily Dickinson litmus test: if I read a poem and I feel so cold as if no fire will ever warm me, or if I feel physically as if I'm losing the top of my head? Most poems can't pass that test, but you read something like 'Ode to a Nightingale', and you do lose the top of your head! Nowadays people seem to want this absolute control over poetry, a kind of domination. I'm not interested in that kind of poetry. I appreciate artistry and virtuosity, but I love it when you just back away from a poem, and think, 'Jesus! Where did that come from?' When you have to admit you have no idea how it got in there. (2007)"

"I see myself in a tradition of praise singers. (2004, in Writing across worlds)"

"I love words, I really love the pleasure and consolation you get from words. Words can be nourishing or medicinal or at their worst, poisonous."

"It's terrific that there are these women writers, Caribbean writers, emerging. They're emerging the same way that the men emerged. It's just their time, nobody can stop it. They are the ones that have to tell the half that has never been told, and they will tell it."

"I believe I started to write because I wanted to read what I was writing. When I was growing up there were no images of me in the literature I read. I didn't see myself or people like me in any of the literature of my youth."

"People should realize that there is not a finite amount of opportunities for writers or for artists, you know. I think if you're good, you're good. I myself have always had the attitude that I just do my work, and I do what I'm doing, and if I am recognized, good. But I'm perfectly willing to just go about my life and if some big things happen, that's wonderful, and if they don't, I am still going to be Lorna Goodison. I will continue to just be myself."

"I just love what's happening now; it's like there's a big tapestry and everybody has a corner because everybody has a story to tell."

"...I never anywhere saw my own point of view. Although it wasn't a conscious effort, I think in the end I needed to read those poems; that's why I wrote them. So, Tamarind Season was just a need to cry out about a lot of things about myself, about other women, about Jamaica, about the world in my own small way."

"...I didn't think you should approach what your vocation is in any faint-hearted way... or as Rasta would say 'with a weak heart'. So, I wanted to write strong poems as good as the men, but about women's business."

"I think that's what real poetry is...there are all these levels...you can write about what you really feel...You get borrowed and it doesn't have very much to do with you. That's why I think real poetry or the inspiration to write real poetry is a divine thing; it is completely out of your hands. You just happen to be standing there and it passes through you."

"She is solidly located in the trinity of Caribbean writing. It is now, officially, Walcott, Braithwaite and Goodison."

"Lorna Goodison is an artist as well as a poet. The keeps of her observation, her certain demarcation of shapes, her canny sense of physical and sociological textures are undoubtedly related to that.... The sensibility in Tamarind Season is a woman's...this is the important other half, the perspicacity missing from the current record of the Caribbean."

"Few writers are as attuned as Goodison to the heartache and triumphs of Jamaicans, especially Jamaican women. . . . Fewer writers still tell us so much about what it means to be human."

"Lorna Goodison's new collection is a triumph of fusions: of the naive wide-eyed delight of her younger poems with their claiming pride of naming everything that is melodiously Jamaican, to a tougher nostalgia that now looks at those things with a benign, unboastful authority. This is what the young Goodison fought for - the confidence of claiming the familiar, of trans-figuring it by the fury of her humility. And what is the rare quality that has gone out of poetry that these marvelous poems restore? Joy."

"A fat, fair and fifty card-playing resident of the Crescent."

"I...was very different from the raw Irish lads who composed the greater part of the subalterns. One of them, of the name of George Eld Derby, a youth of about my own age, thus very gravely addressed the mess one evening after dinner: "By Jasus, gentlemen, I am conscious you must have the meanest opinion of my courage. Here have I been no less than six weeks with the regiment, and the divil of a duel have I fought yet. Now, Captain Craigie, you are the senior Captain of the regiment, and if you plase I will begin with you first; so name your time and place." Now, very many of these subaltern officers were of the stamp of my friend Mr. Derby. So a man could not be too guarded in his conduct with such heroes."

"... I liked teaching math best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either. And I greatly respected the ones who did possess that aptitude. My skill in art and English made me impatient, and I found those subjects rather dreary to teach as a result. “Why are the art room walls covered with pictures of such ugly women?” a headmaster asked me once. “And why have some of them got those horrible cigarette butts hanging out of their nostrils?” I explained that I had asked the children to paint the ugliest woman they could think of. Unfortunately, almost all of them had looked no further than the headmaster’s wife. I like that devilish thing in children."

"You have to walk to get to know a city; it was then — in the Dublin of the 1940s — that I first discovered that. was a staid row of unlicensed hotels, politely elbowing one another for attention; was famous for its sausage shop. The set the tone for , and Charlemont Street offered a display of s, extracted from the footsore: The Walker's Friend, a notice said. and Lad Lane and Lady Lane, Ebenezer Terrace and Morning Star Road: all of them had an echo of a lost significance."

"... The way I think I write is by creating the actual raw material of fiction first of all, rather rapidly, very quickly, and then this has to be turned into a story or novel. I get quite a lot of manuscripts that people send me, young people asking me what I think of them. And almost all of them are still raw material which hasn’t been pushed or stretched or chopped up in order to give it form. What they’ve done is just to start the job but they haven’t completed it. You have to start with a mess, which is rather like the mess we all live in in the world, you know. You start with that mess and you really have got to create for yourself in your fiction. And then, the next thing you do is to make that palatable for the reader. The reader is terribly, terribly important because without the reader, as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing. It’s a kind of relationship, sometimes almost a friendship."

"Trevor won many honors, including the of the for “Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories”; the Prize for literature and the for fiction in 1976; and the three times: in 1978 for “,” in 1983 for “Fools of Fortune” and in 1994 for “.” The latter was made into a 1999 film starring ."

"Trevor is not a benign . There has always been a frightening, uncomfortable, cruel side to his work, particularly in his sensationalist appetite (which he shares with one of his great predecessors, Elizabeth Bowen, who gets a mention here) for seedy criminals, s, and s. In this volume, some tame s have their necks wrung, a girl pushes her mother's lover down two flights of stairs, a maniac pursues his estranged wife with a fantasy of revenge, and a con man replies to a series of s to get himself a driver and a free meal."

"... He drew us into the lives of English and Irish s and s, priests and parishioners, and even those who, by dint of circumstance or carefully curated effort, ascended a rung or two on the hierarchy. And although his work very much reflected the prevailing political and religious mores of its settings, it did not focus on the large sweep of history. Instead, Trevor settled his gaze on private yearnings and small, wayward impulses: stories about siblings scuffling over small-bore inheritances, about lost love, about minor duplicities, and, always, about the press and passage of time."

"From the very first possessed a correct and vigorous style, and a nice sense of language, which were hereditary rather than implanted, and to these qualities was added a delightful strain of humour, shedding a current or original thought all through her writings. That her unusual gifts should have been so early developed is hardly surprising with one of her sympathetic temperament when we remember the throng of remarkable men and women who frequented the Austins' house. The Mills, the s, the s, the Carlyles, the s, Sydney Smith, , , Jeremy Bentham, and Lord Jeffrey, were among the most intimate friends of her parents, and 'Toodie,' as they called her, was a universal favourite with them. Once, staying at a friend's house, and hearing their little girl rebuked for asking questions, she said: ' My mamma never says "I don't know" of "Don't ask questions." '"

"Of 's seven children, was perhaps the handsomest and most gifted; the extraordinary vigour of her mind and body was almost overpowering, but it stood her in good stead during a long and not over-prosperous life, and was tempered by an excellent judgment and a very kind heart. No one ever appealed to her in vain; and in her old age children flocked round her with delight to hear "" or one of , so well and graphically told."

"Cabbage (Red) ' alla Fiamminga.' Remove the outer leaves of a and cut it in pieces. Put it into boiling water for fifteen minutes, then dry, and place it in a sauce-pan with four ounces of , a chopped-up onion, a , two s, and a little salt and pepper. Boil slowly for about half an hour, stirring it often. When cooked, take out the bay leaf, add a little butter and serve quickly."

"How many of the travelers who visit now remember that she is one of the most ancient cities of Italy, and was famous when Rome was but a hamlet? They can see the ancient walls, but can they conceive that in the long history of the community settled between the rivers and the grey lines of buildings are but of yesterday? They may perhaps remember that a palace of Hadrian, one of the greatest or Roman Emperors, stood where the now stands; that temples to Apollo and to covered the sites of the churches of and in Borgo; that at the foot of the Via S. Maria grave priestesses of sang hymns in honour their goddess, who ripened the golden corn which covered the plains from the Monte Pisano to the coast; and that in a temple which stood in the Piazza S. Andrea love-sick young men and maidens presented their offerings at the shrine of Venus and made their vows to the goddess they evoked. But can they realize that in those far-off days, before our Christian era began, Pisa was a city so old that its beginnings were even then half-concealed, half-concealed, half-disclosed, in legends of her origin?"

"The great event of my life was my birthday, when I was allowed to dine downstairs, and to invite my particular friends. My fifth I well remember, for Thackeray played a trick on the "young revolutionist," as he afterwards called me, because I was born on the . My guests were , , , Bayley, and Thackeray, who gave me an oyster, declaring that it was like cabinet pudding. But I turned the tables on him, for I liked it, and insisted, as queen of the day, on having two more of his. I still possess a sketch he made for the of ' while I was sitting on his knee."

"... ... made the move, relocating to ... the . He formally entered the city in February 1865 ... Two years after this Janet arrived from Alexandria, Egypt, where she had been living with her husband Henry Ross, for the previous five years. Her trip to was planned as a short holiday. She booked a berth on a run-down steamer that took a route out from Alexandria across the Mediterranean to the southern Italian port of . From there she went by carriage northwards up the peninsula, through beautiful countryside with hills of old knotted olive trees and swathes of perfumed lavender, beneath a brilliant blue sky. Her plan was to arrive in Florence and stay for a fortnight as the guest of an old family friend and relative by marriage, , the British Ambassador to Italy. She had read about Florence, its treasures and its history. She was familiar with its great writers, Dante and Boccaccio, the unsurpassed beauty created by its painters, and the understated order achieved by its architects. She had heard stories of the proud patrician families with their age-old feuds and allegiances — names like , and — and she knew something of the story of Savonarola and how he was burnt at the stake in the . This was her opportunity to witness for herself the history that till now she had only read about in books."

"Janet Ross was one of those -like dragons for whom the word “formidable” was practically invented. Born in London in 1842, she spent the last six decades of her life — from 1867 until her death in 1927 — as an increasingly commanding personage in the Anglo-Tuscan colony around , where she was known (and feared) as Aunt Janet. freely acknowledges near the beginning of “Queen Bee of Tuscany” that Ross “had her limitations. Though intelligent and learned, especially for an autodidact, she was by no means brilliant. She had little imagination or inner life, and she made no towering contribution to humanity.” Thus the biographer throws down his own gauntlet: Why, then, are we reading about her? Downing, a co-editor of , and a walking Who’s Who of the , provides an answer in the form of It’s Who She Knew. And Aunt Granite (as the younger generation called her) knew everybody — or at least everybody who passed through Florence, which in Downing’s telling comes to the same thing. An endless procession of now forgotten artists and writers and social somebodies made their way to her door. Major figures do show up. In 1887, Henry James pays her a three-day visit, although “nowhere in her writings,” Downing acknowledges, somewhat sheepishly, “does she so much as mention James.”"

"Mrs. Ross laid in our wood, wine and servants for us, and they are excellent. She had the house scoured from Cellar to rook the curtains washed and put up, all beds pulled to pieces, beaten, washed, and put together again, and beguiled the Marchese into putting a big porcelain stove in the vast central hall. She is a wonderful woman, and we don't quite see how or when we should have gotten under way without her."