Short stories

"I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air — or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought"

"You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive"

"Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him; but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night."

"His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth traveled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it."

"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that this little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it, there comes a time when for any addition of knowledge, you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones."

"But the Solar System!" I protested. "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

"Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems."

"The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical, are really extremely practical — so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese."

"It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact."

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment."

"They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains," he remarked with a smile. "It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work."

"You know a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all."

"One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature."

"When a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation."

"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence," returned my companion, bitterly. "The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done?"

"I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically."

"There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps."

"I had no idea that such individuals exist outside of stories."

"Which is it to-day," I asked, "morphine or cocaine?" He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. "It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?"

"My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world"

"He possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge."

"I have been guilty of several monographs. They are all upon technical subjects. Here, for example, is one 'Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos'. In it I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar, cigarette, and pipe tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash."

"Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth."

"I never guess. It is a shocking habit — destructive to the logical faculty."

"Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth."

"He smiled gently. "It is of the first importance," he cried, "not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.""

"I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule."

"Holmes," I said in a whisper, "a child has done this horrid thing!"

"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?"

"You know my methods. Apply them."

"What do you think of this, Holmes? Sholto was, on his own confession, with his brother last night. The brother died in a fit, on which Sholto walked off with the treasure? How's that?" "On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door on the inside."

"It is the unofficial force — the Baker Street irregulars."

"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician."

"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear."

"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

"To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer — excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory."

"...but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you, until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right."

"I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life."

"As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be."

"It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes."

"I hardly looked at his face. His knees were what I wished to see."

"Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable."

"There is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace."

"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important."

"Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details."

"[Sherlock Holmes quoting:] "There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.""

"Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home."

"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes thoughtfully. "It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different."

"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact."

"You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles."

"As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after."

"It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this, I have endeavoured in my case to do."

"A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it."

"It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles."

"It was difficult to refuse any of Sherlock Holmes’ requests, for they were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such a quiet air of mastery."

"On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences."

"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know."

""You are Holmes, the meddler." My friend smiled. "Holmes, the busybody!" His smile broadened. "Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!" Holmes chuckled heartily."

"When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals. He has the nerve and he has the knowledge."

"Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another."

"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay."

"The lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

"I am glad of all details," remarked my friend, "whether they seem to you to be relevant or not."

"Do you know, Watson," said he, "that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there."

"Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person."

"It is more than possible; it is probable."

"That is the case as it appears to the police, and improbable as it is, all other explanations are more improbable still."

""Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time." "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes."

"Any truth is better than indefinite doubt."

"I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain. Results without causes are much more impressive."

"It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated."

""I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson," said he. "When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom." "Excellent!" I cried. "Elementary," said he."

"Watson here will tell you that I never can resist a touch of the dramatic."

"Out of my last 53 cases 49 have been given full credit to the police and the rest to me."

"If I were assured of your eventual destruction I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept my own."

"He is the Napoleon of crime."

"Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill."

"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"

"We balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination."

"There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you."

"Bear in mind, Sir Henry, one of the phrases in that queer old legend which Dr. Mortimer has read to us, and avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted."

"You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious."

"I had little doubt that I had come to the end of my career when I perceived the somewhat sinister figure of the late Professor Moriarty standing upon the narrow pathway which led to safety. I read an inexorable purpose in his gray eyes. I exchanged some remarks with him, therefore, and obtained his courteous permission to write the short note which you afterwards received. I left it with my cigarette-box and my stick, and I walked along the pathway, Moriarty still at my heels. When I reached the end I stood at bay. He drew no weapon, but he rushed at me and threw his long arms around me. He knew that his own game was up, and was only anxious to revenge himself upon me. We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds, and clawed the air with both his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went. With my face over the brink, I saw him fall for a long way. Then he struck a rock, bounded off, and splashed into the water."

"Work is the best antidote to sorrow."

"There is no prospect of danger, or I should not dream of stirring out without you."

"What one man can invent another can discover."

"It was vain to urge that his time was already fully occupied, for the young lady had come with the determination to tell her story, and it was evident that nothing short of force could get her out of the room until she had done so. With a resigned air and a somewhat weary smile, Holmes begged the beautiful intruder to take a seat and to inform us what it was that was troubling her."

"We had got as far as this, when who should walk in but the gentleman himself, who had been drinking his beer in the tap-room and had heard the whole conversation. Who was I? What did I want? What did I mean by asking questions? He had a fine flow of language, and his adjectives were very vigorous. He ended a string of abuse by a vicious back-hander, which I failed to entirely avoid. The next few minutes were delicious. It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian. I emerged as you see me. Mr. Woodley went home in a cart. So ended my country trip, and it must be confessed that, however enjoyable, my day on the Surrey border has not been much more profitable than your own."

"I have never been in Africa in my life, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Busybody Holmes!"

"It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong."

"We're not jealous of you down at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow there's not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn't be glad to shake you by the hand."

"There can be no question, my dear Watson, of the value of exercise before breakfast."

"One should always look for a possible alternative, and provide against it. It is the first rule of criminal investigation."

"Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs."

"For once you have fallen low. Let us see, in the future, how high you can rise."

"There is so much red tape in these matters."

"Dr Leslie Armstrong "I have heard your name, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and I am aware of your profession — one of which I by no means approve."Holmes "In that, Doctor, you will find yourself in agreement with every criminal in the country.""

"A draghound will follow aniseed from here to John o' Groat's, and our friend, Armstrong, would have to drive through the Cam before he would shake Pompey off his trail."

"Come, Watson, come!" he cried. "The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!"

"Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand."

"What I know is unofficial; what he knows is official."

"Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department."

"Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened."

"It is a capital mistake to theorise in advance of the facts."

""I am inclined to think -- " said I."

"What do you make of it, Holmes?" "It is obviously an attempt to convey secret information." "But what is the use of a cipher message without the cipher?"

"The vocabulary of Bradshaw is nervous and terse, but limited."

"Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius."

"Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her."

"There should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation."

"Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards!"

"There is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible."

"There is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear."

"Education never ends Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last."

""Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S. H." It was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets."

"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"Think of Mycroft's note, of the Admiralty, the Cabinet, the exalted person who waits for news. We are bound to go." My answer was to rise from the table. "You are right, Holmes. We are bound to go."

"Holmes, you are not yourself. A sick man is but a child."

"You fidget me beyond endurance. You, a doctor — you are enough to drive a patient into an asylum."

"Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem."

"You and I, Watson, we have done our part. Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? No, no; horrible!"

"But I have reasons to suppose that this opinion would be very much more frank and valuable if he imagines that we are alone."

"I give you my word that for three days I have tasted neither food nor drink until you were good enough to pour me out that glass of water. But it is the tobacco which I find most irksome."

"Three days of absolute fast does not improve one's beauty, Watson."

"Malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph."

"I fear that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back upon such a theory as this."

"I think, Watson, that I shall resume that course of tobacco-poisoning which you have so often and so justly condemned."

"To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces."

"We are devil-ridden, Mr. Holmes! My poor parish is devil-ridden! Satan himself is loose in it! We are given over into his hands!"

"It is not for me, my dear Watson, to stand in the way of the official police force."

"I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one's self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry."

"Surely the clearest proof of it is that, knowing what I know, I have sent for you and not for the police."

"I have heard your reasons and regard them as unconvincing and inadequate. We will pass that."

"I followed you.""I saw no one.""That is what you may expect to see when I follow you."

"Some fumes which are not poisonous would be a welcome change."

"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."

"It may be some fussy, self-important fool; it may be a matter of life or death."

"I should say that there is no more dangerous man in Europe." "I have had several opponents to whom that flattering term has been applied."

"I am sorry. I am accustomed to have mystery at one end of my cases, but to have it at both ends is too confusing. I fear, Sir James, that I must decline to act."

"A complex mind. All great criminals have that."

"I have my plans. The first thing is to exaggerate my injuries. They'll come to you for news. Put it on thick, Watson. Lucky if I live the week out — concussion — delirium — what you like! You can't overdo it."

"I have found out who our client is," I cried, bursting with my great news. "Why, Holmes, it is —""It is a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman," said Holmes, holding up a restraining hand. "Let that now and forever be enough for us."

"When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."

"I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go."

"Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson," said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. "It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared."

"This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."

"Of course I remembered him," said I as I laid down the letter. "Big Bob Ferguson, the finest three-quarter Richmond ever had. He was always a good-natured chap. It's like him to be so concerned over a friend's case." Holmes looked at me thoughtfully and shook his head. "I never get your limits, Watson," said he. "There are unexplored possibilities about you. Take a wire down, like a good fellow. 'Will examine your case with pleasure.'" --"Your case!" --"We must not let him think that this agency is a home for the weak-minded."

"It is simpler to deal direct."

"In my profession all sorts of odd knowledge comes useful, and this room of yours is a storehouse of it."

"Well, Watson, we can but possess our souls in patience and see what the hour may bring."

"It was worth a wound; it was worth many wounds; to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation."

"We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception."

"We can but try."

"Come at once if convenient — if inconvenient come all the same."

"When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny."

"That the dog should die was after the beautiful, faithful nature of dogs."

"I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles."

"Dogs don't make mistakes."

"Cut out the poetry, Watson."

"Things must be done decently and in order."

"Elementary, my dear Watson."

"Quick Watson, the needle."

"Scheherazade...possessed courage, wit, and penetration, infinitely above her sex. She had read much, and had so admirable a memory, that she never forgot any thing she had read. She had successfully applied herself to philosophy, medicine, history, and the liberal arts; and her poetry excelled the compositions of the best writers of her time. Besides this, she was a perfect beauty, and all her accomplishments were crowned by solid virtue."

"Who'll change old lamps for new ones?"

"Open Sesame!"

"When I was alive I was dust which was, But now I am dust in dust I am dust which never was."

"On the black road of life think not to find Either a friend or lover to your mind; If you must love, oh then, love solitude, For solitude alone is true and kind."

"Maslamah ibn Dinar said: "Each pleasure that does not forward the soul to God is not so much as a pleasure as a calamity.""

"I hope that Allah will not make me immortal, for death is His greatest gift to any true believer."

"The proverb says: "Each man envies, the strong openly, the weak in secret.""

"A library of books is the fairest garden in the world, and to walk there is an ecstasy."

"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!"

"[M]y auntie, Tití, who was the reader in the family, gave me a picture book version of “The Arabian Nights,” and I was smitten. Scheherazade, the young heroine, was a girl who looked Dominican, dark eyed, dark hair, olive skin. Then, the whole idea of a girl saving her life and that of all women in the kingdom and transforming a cruel sultan by telling stories. That book put a luminous bit of information in my head: that stories have power, that they can transform you and save you."

"It is a book so vast that it is not necessary to have read it, for it is a part of our memory."

"I'd like every single Arab to read One Thousand and One Nights. They [would] learn a lot from them, especially [because] these stories were written away from the influence of religion. It's interesting to see how we were open, how we had a dialogue with each other, how we wanted to understand, how we respected each other. There was a great dignity, and I'd like this to be restored again."

"Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about fear. The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It's night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it's blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it's on, and so let's talk very honestly about fear. Let's talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madness...and perhaps over the edge."

"Still...let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices and we won't scream; we'll talk rationally, you and I. We'll talk about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness."

"I'm not a child any more but. . .I don't like to sleep with one leg sticking out. Because if a cool hand ever reached out from under the bed and grasped my ankle, I might scream. Yes, I might scream to wake the dead. That sort of thing doesn't happen, of course, and we all know that. In the stories that follow you will encounter all manner of night creatures; vampires, demon lovers, a thing that lives in the closet, all sorts of other terrors. None of them are real. The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle."

"I didn't write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not so lucky."

"The arts are obsessional, and obsession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the mind...Art is a localized illness, usually benign - creative people tend to live a long time - sometimes terribly malignant. You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn't care who it cuts. And if you are wise you sift the sludge carefully...because some of that stuff may not be dead."

"Fear is an emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We're afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We're afraid to stick a knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unplugging it first. We're afraid of what the doctor may tell us when the physical exam is over; when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in midair. We're afraid that the oil may run out, that the good air will run out, the good water, the good life. When the daughter promised to be in by eleven and it's now quarter past twelve and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand, we sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson and look occasionally at the mute telephone and we feel the emotion that makes us blind, the emotion that makes a stealthy ruin of the thinking process."

"Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiosity of self-interest, trying to make a whole out of a hundred parts, like the blind men with their elephant. We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn it as adults. The shape is there, and most of us come to realize what it is sooner or later: it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear - an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths."

"Where I am, it's still dark and raining. We've got a fine night for it. There's something I want to show you, something I want you to touch. It's in a room not far from here -- in fact it's almost as close as the next page. Shall we go?"

"There were eyes peering up at me through splits in the flesh of my fingers. And even as I watched the flesh was dilating, retreating, as they pushed their mindless way up to the surface. But that was not what made me scream. I had looked into my own face and seen a monster."

"I didn't like that machine. It seemed...almost to be mocking us."

"It was very funny how George Stanner lost his arm in the mangler."

"The room was empty. But the closet door was open. Just a crack. "So nice," the voice from the closet said. "So nice." The words sounded as if they might have come through a mouthful of rotted seaweed. Billings stood rooted to the spot as the closet door swung open. He dimly felt warmth at his crotch as he wet himself. "So nice," the boogeyman said as it shambled out. It still held its Dr. Harper mask in one rotted, spade-claw hand."

"So much of the world is paved now. Even the playgrounds are paved. And for the fields and marshes and deep woods there are tanks, half-trucks, flatbeds equipped with lasers, masers, heat-seeking radar. And little by little, they can make it into the world they want. I can see great convoys of trucks filling the Okefenokee Swamp with sand, the bulldozers ripping through the national parks and wildlands, grading the earth flat, stamping it into one great flat plain. And then the hot-top trucks arriving. But they're machines. No matter what's happening to them, what mass consciousness we've given them, they can't reproduce. In fifty or sixty years they'll be rusting hulks with all menace gone out of them, moveless carcasses for free men to stone and spit at. And if I close my eyes I can see the production lines in Detroit and Dearborn and Youngstown and Mackinac, new trucks being put together by blue-collars who no longer even punch a clock but only drop and are replaced."

"Jim remembered the warning in Raising Demons - the danger involved. You could perhaps summon them, perhaps cause them to do your work. You could even get rid of them. But sometimes they come back. He walked slowly down the stairs again, wondering if the nightmare was over after all."

"I've been thinking about that foggy night when I had a headache and walked for air and passed all the lovely shadows without shape or substance. And I've been thinking about the trunk of my car - such an ugly word, trunk - and wondering why in the world I should be afraid to open it. I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night. And of dear God, I think so too."

"What I propose is this: that you walk around my building on the ledge that juts out just below the penthouse level. If you circumnavigate the building successfully, the jackpot is yours."

"The ledge is five inches wide," he said dreamily. "I've measured it myself. In fact, I've stood on it, holding on to the balcony of course. All you have to do is lower yourself over the wrought-iron railing. You'll be chest-high. But, of course, beyond the railing there are no handgrips. You'll have to inch your way along, being very careful not to overbalance."

"The building sloped away like a smooth chalk cliff to the street far below. The cars parked there looked like those matchbox models you can buy in the five-and-dime. The ones driving by the building were just tiny pinpoints of light. If you fell that far, you would have plenty of time to realize just what was happening, to see the wind blowing your clothes as the earth pulled you back faster and faster. You'd have time to scream a long, long scream. And the sound you made when you hit the pavement would be like the sound of an overripe watermelon."

"Cressner said that he's never welched on a bet. But I've been known to."

"God bless the grass."

"I hope you rot in hell," he told Donatti. Donatti sighed. "If I had a nickel for every time someone expressed a similar sentiment, I could retire. Let it be a lesson to you, Mr. Morrison. When a romantic tries to do a good thing and fails, they give him a medal. When a pragmatist succeeds, they wish him in hell."

"And what happens if I go over one-eighty-two?" Donatti smiled. "We'll send someone out to your house to cut of your wife's little finger," he said. "You can leave through this door, Mr. Morrison. Have a nice day."

"In a queer, twisted way she felt sorry for him - a little boy with a huge power crammed inside a dwarfed spirit. A little boy who tried to make humans behave like toy soldiers and then stamped on them in a fit of temper when they wouldn't or when they found out."

"The children of the corn stood in the clearing at midday, looking at the two crucified skeletons and the two bodies...the bodies were not skeletons yet, but they would be. In time. And here, in the heartland of Nebraska, in the corn, there was nothing but time."

"Behold a dream came to me in the night, and the Lord did shew all this to me."... "And in my dream the Lord was a shadow that walked behind the rows, and he spoke to me in the words he used to our older brothers years ago. He is much displeased with this sacrifice."... "And the Lord did say: Have I not given you a place of killing, that you might make sacrifice there? And have I not shewn you favor? But this man has made a blasphemy within me, and I have completed the sacrifice myself."... "So now is the Age of Favor lowered from nineteen plantings and harvests to eighteen. Yet be fruitful and multiply as the corn multiplies, that my favor may be shewn you, and be upon you."

"Dusk deepened into night. Around Gatlin the corn rustled and whispered secretly. It was well pleased."

"She looked up at us and grinned. And when she did, I felt my longing, my yearning turn to horror as cold as the grave, as white and silent as bones in a shroud. Even from the rise we could see the sullen red glare in those eyes. They were less human than a wolf's eyes. And when she grinned you could see how long her teeth had become. She wasn't human anymore. She was a dead thing somehow come back to life in this black howling storm."

"Lumley had reached her. He looked like a ghost himself, coated in snow like he was. He reached for her...and then he began to scream. I'll hear that sound in my dreams, that man screaming like a child in a nightmare. He tried to back away from her, but her arms, long and bare and as white as the snow, snaked out and pulled him to her. I could see her cock her head and then thrust it forward."

"And so we ran. Ran like rats, I suppose some would say, but those who would weren't there that night. We fled back down along our own backtrail, falling down, getting up again, slipping and sliding. I kept looking back over my shoulder to see if that woman was coming after us, grinning that grin and watching us with those red eyes."

"You may have an occasion to be traveling in southern Maine yourself one of these days. Pretty part of the countryside. You may even stop by Tookey's Bar for a drink. Nice place. They kept the name just the same. So have your drink, and then my advice to you is to keep right on moving north. Whatever you do, don't go up that road to Jerusalem's Lot. Especially not after dark. There's a little girl somewhere out there. And I think she's still waiting for her good-night kiss."

"A person could piss against a tree, he could piss on his mother, he could piss on his own breeches, and get off, but he must not piss against the wall -- that would be going quite too far. The origin of the divine prejudice against this humble crime is not stated; but we know that the prejudice was very strong -- so strong that nothing but a wholesale massacre of the people inhabiting the region where the wall was defiled could satisfy the Deity."

"The Creator sat upon the throne, thinking. Behind him stretched the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in a glory of light and color; before him rose the black night of Space, like a wall. His mighty bulk towered rugged and mountain-like into the zenith, and His divine head blazed there like a distant sun. At His feet stood three colossal figures, diminished to extinction, almost, by contrast -- archangels -- their heads level with His ankle-bone."

"Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."

"[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race -- and of ours -- sexual intercourse! It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water! His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists -- utterly and entirely -- of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the earth, yet is quite sure he will like them in heaven. Isn't it curious? Isn't it interesting?"

"It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of the fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily."

"Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain, a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs — the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free."

"The official list of questions which the priest is required to ask will overmasteringly excite any woman who is not a paralytic."

"We are strangely made. We think we are wonderful creatures. Part of the time we think that, at any rate. And during that interval we consider with pride our mental equipment, with its penetration, its power of analysis, its ability to reason out clear conclusions from confused facts, and all the lordly rest of it; and then comes a rational interval and disenchants us. Disenchants us and lays us bare to ourselves, and we see that intellectually we are no great things; that we seldom really know the things we think we know; that our best-built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows."

"Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of a thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market."

"Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out, as the Hessians did in our Revolution, and as the boyish Prince Napoleon did in the Zulu war, and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel."

"Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" — with his mouth."

"Consciousness collected around him. He returned with reluctant; the weight of centuries, an un bearable fatigue, lay over him. The ascent was painful. HE would have shriekedd if there were anything to shriek with. And anyhow, he was beginning to feel glad."

"The little man with beard and glasses leaped up. "There's nobody here has anything to do with governments! We're all good people!""

"What do we need money for?" Toby laughed good naturally, "I haven't paid for anything in my life. Neither have you.""

"You have to know," Tolby said, "how the League was formed you have to know how we pulled down the governments that day. Pulled them down and destroyed them. Burned all the buildings. And all records. Billions of microfilms and papers. Great bonfires that burned for weeks. And the warms of little white things that poured out when we knocked the buildings down."

"You know I'm the only one who can keep all this together. I'm the only one who knows how to maintain a planned society, not a disorderly chaos!"

"Maybe," McLean said softly, "you and I can then get off this rat race. You and I and all the rest of us. And live like human beings." "Rat race," Fowler murmured. "Rats in a maze. Doing tricks. Performing chores thought up by somebody else."

"As you say, they're actually a voluntary club of totally unorganized individuals. Without law or central authority. They maintain no society — they can't govern. All they can do is interfere with anyone else who tries. Troublemakers. But—" "But what?" "It was this way before. Two centuries ago. They were unorganized. Unarmed. Vast mobs, without discipline or authority. Yet they pulled down all the governments. All over the world."

"My God," she said softly. "You have no understanding of us. You run all this, and you're incapable of empathy. You're nothing but a mechanical computer."

"Though he recognizes the dangers of relying on an elite or a government, Dick was more than aware of the problems at the other extreme … Though the anarchists triumph, Dick does not vindicate them, keeping it clear that the robot had certainly accomplished something in that valley, though it had eventually gone too far."

"It is made clear at the end of the story that, while there are disadvantages to global anarchism, they are more than outweighed by the effective abolition of war that has followed from its adoption."

"Now I show trust of a robot as leader, a robot who is the suffering servant, which is to say a form of Christ. Leader as servant of man; leader who should be dispensed with — perhaps. An ambiguity hangs over the morality of this story. Should we have a leader or should we think for ourselves? Obviously the latter, in principle. But — sometimes there lies a gulf between what is theoretically right and that which is practical. It's interesting that I would trust a robot and not an android. Perhaps it's because a robot does not try to deceive you as to what it is."

"A lot of fowl in this book [The Golden Man (1980)] are turkeys. … An instance of this, from "The Last of the Masters" (1954), a hyperkinetic foray into hairy-chested-style huger-mugger. … If this isn't bogus machismo, John Wayne never had a career. But I suppose we all looked silly, we pulp writers of long, long ago, so I shouldn't cast the first stone."

"A strange remnant of the world that was hid out in a mountain valley, ruled by a mind out of the past."

"The focus is on the sterility of a robot with a male name, Bors. [...] It is not clear why he does not replicate himself, or educate his human servants: it is simply a given that he is sterile. The old, technologically advanced, highly organized civilization is a civilization of production, but now under Bors it can do no more than maintain itself."

"In "The Last Of The Masters" Dick continues to make us aware of the paradoxical cast of human existence. … The small anachronistic society is gradually breaking down of its own entropy. Complete with a disciplined economic organization (but no market to supply) and a well-trained military (but no enemy to fight), the group exists at the will of a deteriorating pre-war robot master. Even as the Anarchists break the robot up beyond all salvage, one of the service men pockets a memory chip "just in case the times change.""

"Dick's attitude to highly-developed clever machinery is... far more complex than blanket suspicion hostility. Intelligent machines sometimes feature in his early work in much more benign roles, as in "The Last of the Masters" (1954), which features an altrustic robot."

"There's a Christ-like robot in need of repair parts in Phil's 1954 SF story "The Last of the Masters"."

"Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs."

"Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere — buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world."

"By her side, on the little reading-desk, was a survival from the ages of litter - one book. This was the Book of the Machine. In it were instructions against every possible contingency. If she was hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word, she went to the book, and it told her which button to press."

"Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul."

"'Beware of first- hand ideas!' exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. 'First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine - the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution."

"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die."

"Those who had long worshipped silently, now began to talk. They described the strange feeling of peace that came over them when they handled the Book of the Machine, the pleasure that it was to repeat certain numerals out of it, however little meaning those numerals conveyed to the outward ear, the ecstasy of touching a button, however unimportant, or of ringing an electric bell, however superfluously. 'The Machine,' they exclaimed, 'feeds us and clothes us and houses us; through it we speak to one another, through it we see one another, in it we have our being. The Machine is the friend of ideas and the enemy of superstition: the Machine is omnipotent, eternal; blessed is the Machine.'"

"There came a day when over the whole world - in Sumatra, in Wessex, in the innumerable cities of Courland and Brazil - the beds, when summoned by their tired owners, failed to appear. It may seem a ludicrous matter, but from it we may date the collapse of humanity. The Committee responsible for the failure was assailed by complainants, whom it referred, as usual, to the Committee of the Mending Apparatus, who in its turn assured them that their complaints would be forwarded to the Central Committee. But the discontent grew, for mankind was not yet sufficiently adaptable to do without sleeping."

"But there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended."

"The equivocal opening phrase, 'imagine, if you can', suggests that the capacity for imagination is already dwindling and that the disappearance of orality in the short story is, in part, symptomatic of this decline. To that extent, 'The Machine Stops' is not a tale of the future but an allegory of the present where formal inconsistencies describe tensions in contemporary cultural thought."

""The Machine Stops" basically expresses the same ethical and social preoccupations that inform all the other works of Forster, who repeatedly denounces the dangers of a materialistic ethos and of a general conformism imposed by rigid social conventions, exposing the spiritual barrenness and the emotional impoverishment generated by the repression of diversity, spontaneity and creativity."

"The rationality of the many generations of scientists who spent their energy in perfecting the Machine and making it more and more powerful and autonomous, triumphed in extending its control over what is, by nature, irrational, until, little by little, mechanical muscles and "electronic" cells replaced almost completely the physical and mental functions of human beings, expropriating them of their human prerogatives. So, at the time of the story, not only have they become so weakened as not to be able to pick up what they drop unless the floor raises it back to them, but they are also incapable of original thought. Music, literature, even poetry are produced exclusively by "electronic" devices. In their blind enthusiasm for scientific discoveries human beings have exceeded the limits allowed to them by nature and provoked the trespassing of the mechanical into the human; so the Machine, that stupendous and tangible testimony to human intellect, almost perfect in its capacity for autoregulation and autoregeneration, has gradually and inadvertently deprived human existence of all significance, negating it almost completely in the pale and inept beings that are entirely dependent now on its obscure and omnipresent power."

"[The] very first description of the internet in any detail was probably E M Forster's The Machine Stops from 1909, decades before computers existed: "People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine." It might still be the most accurate description. How Forster did it remains a mystery."

"I think that in most cases, technological nature is probably better than no nature, but not as good as the real thing. That's the take-away message from my research so far. The analogy I use is from E. M. Forster's 1909 short story The Machine Stops, in which, in a future world, people live underground. A mother talks to her son by videoconference. She thinks it is "good enough" to be able to communicate with him at all, whereas the son yearns to see her in person, recognising all the nuances that have been lost in the digitally mediated form of communication...Eventually, humans will be able to design technology offering substantive nature-like experiences. But my research tells me that, just as in Forster's story, these will always be diminished compared with real nature. If this is true, then we should think of technological nature as a bonus, not as a substitute. Otherwise we might come to believe, as we have already to some degree, that "good enough" is "good"."

"I decided I knew nothing. Friends put me in touch with a Miss R., a teacher, unorthodox they said, excellent they said, successful with difficult cases, steel shutters on the windows made the house safe. I had just learned via International Distress Coupon that Jane had been beaten up by a dwarf in a bar on Tenerife but Miss R. did not allow me to speak of it. “You know nothing,” she said, “you feel nothing, you are locked in a most savage and terrible ignorance, I despise you, my boy, mon cher, my heart. You must attend but you must not attend now, you must attend later, a day or a week or an hour, you are making me ill....” I nonevaluated these remarks as Korzybski instructed. But it was difficult."

"“... Some people,” Miss R. said, “run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.”"

"The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward until it reached the Park. There, I stopped it; at dawn the northernmost edges lay over the Plaza; the free-hanging motion was frivolous and gentle. But experiencing a faint irritation at stopping, even to protect the trees, and seeing no reason the balloon should not be allowed to expand upward, over the parts of the city it was already covering, into the “air space” to be found there, I asked the engineers to see to it. This expansion took place throughout the morning, soft imperceptible sighing of gas through the valves. The balloon then covered forty-five blocks north-south and an irregular area east-west, as many as six crosstown blocks on the Avenue in some places. That was the situation, then."

"I met you under the balloon, on the occasion of your return from Norway; you asked if it was mine; I said it was. The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence, and with sexual deprivation, but now that your visit to Bergen has been terminated, it is no longer necessary or appropriate. Removal of the balloon was easy; trailer trucks carried away the depleted fabric, which is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, sometime, perhaps, when we are angry with one another."

"I went to the plain girl fair out Route 22 figuring I could get one if I just put on a kind face. This newspaper here had advertising the aspidistra store not far away by car where I went then and bought one to carry along. At the plain girl fair they were standing in sudden-death décolletage and brown arms everywhere. As you passed along into the tent after paying your dollar fifty carrying your aspidistra a blinding flash of some hundred contact lenses came. And a quality of dental work to shame the VA Hospital it was so fine. One fell in love temporarily with all this hard work and money spent just to please to improve. I was sad my dolphin friend was not there to see. I took one by the hand and said “come with me I will buy you a lobster.” My real face behind my kind face smiling. And the other girls on their pedestals waved and said “goodbye Marie.” And they also said “have a nice lobster,” and Marie waved back and said “bonne chance!” We motored to the lobster place over to Barwick, then danced by the light of the moon for a bit. And then to my hay where I tickled the naked soles of feet with a piece of it and admired her gestures of marvelous gaucherie. In my mind."

"K. at His Desk He is neither abrupt with nor excessively kind to associates. Or he is both abrupt and kind. The telephone is, for him, a whip, a lash, but also a conduit for soothing words, a sink into which he can hurl gallons of syrup if it comes to that. He reads quickly, scratching brief comments (“Yes”, “No”) in corners of the paper. He slouches in the leather chair, looking about him with a slightly irritated air for new visitors, new difficulties. He spends his time sending and receiving messengers. “I spend my time sending and receiving messengers” he says. “Some of these messages are important. Others are not.”"

"Gallery-going K. enters a large gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, in the Fuller Building. His entourage includes several ladies and gentlemen. Works by a geometrist are on show. K. looks at the immense, rather theoretical paintings. “Well, at least we know he has a ruler.” The group dissolves in laughter. People repeat the remark to one another, laughing. The artist, who has been standing behind a dealer, regards K. with hatred."

"K. Puzzled by His Children The children are crying. There are several children, one about four, a boy, then another boy, slightly older, and a little girl, very beautiful, wearing blue jeans, crying. There are various objects on the grass, an electric train, a picture book, a red ball, a plastic basket, a plastic shovel. K. frowns at the children whose distress issues from no source immediately available to the eye, which seems uncaused, vacant, a general anguish. K. turns to the mother of these children who is standing nearby wearing hip-huggers which appear to be made of linked marshmallows studded with diamonds but then I am a notoriously poor observer. “Play with them”, he says. The mother of ten quietly suggests that K. himself “play with them”. K. picks up the picture book and begins to read to the children. But the book has a German text. It has been left behind, perhaps, by some foreign visitor. Nevertheless K. perseveres. “A ist der Affe, er isst mit der Pfote.” (“A is the Ape, he eats with his Paw.”) The crying of the children continues."

"I spoke to him then about the war. I said the same things people always say when they speak against the war. I said that the war was wrong. I said that large countries should not burn down small countries. I said that the government had made a series of errors. I said that these errors once small and forgivable were now immense and unforgivable. I said that the government was attempting to conceal its original errors under layers of new errors. I said that the government was sick with error, giddy with it. I said that tens of thousands of the enemy’s soldiers and civilians had been killed because of various errors, ours and theirs. I said that we are responsible for errors made in our name. I said that the government should not be allowed to make additional errors."

"At that moment the son manqué entered the room. The son manqué was eight feet tall and wore a serape woven out of two hundred transistor radios, all turned on and tuned to different stations. Just by looking at him you could hear Portland and Nogales, Mexico. “No grass in the house?” Barbara got the grass which was kept in one of those little yellow and red metal canisters made for sending film back to Eastman Kodak. Edgar tried to think of a way to badmouth this immense son leaning over him like a large blaring building. But he couldn’t think of anything. Thinking of anything was beyond him. I sympathize. I myself have these problems. Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin."

"The old Commissioner’s idea was essentially that if there was a disturbance on the city’s streets—some ethnic group cutting up some other ethnic group on a warm August evening—the Police Band would be sent in. The handsome dark-green band bus arriving with sirens singing, red lights whirling. Hard-pressed men on the beat in their white hats raising a grateful cheer. We stream out of the vehicle holding our instruments at high port. A skirmish line fronting the angry crowd. And play “Perdido”. The crowd washed with new and true emotion. Startled, they listen. Our emotion stronger than their emotion. A triumph of art over good sense."

"When my falling event was postponed, were you disappointed? Did you experience a disillusionment-event?"

"the hinder portion scalding-house good eating curve B in addition to the usual baths and ablutions military police sumptuousness of the washhouse risking misstatements kept distances iris to iris queen of holes damp, hairy legs note of anger chanting and shouting konk sense of “mold” on the “muff” sense of “talk” on the “surface” konk2 all sorts of chemical girl who delivered the letter give it a bone plummy bare legs saturated in every belief and ignorance rational living private client bad bosom uncertain workmen mutton-tugger obedience to the rules of the logical system Lord Muck hot tears harmonica rascal"

"that’s chaos can you produce chaos? Alice asked certainly I can produce chaos I said I produced chaos she regarded the chaos chaos is handsome and attractive she said and more durable than regret I said and more nourishing than regret she said"

"chaos is tasty AND USEFUL TOO"

"Kellerman falls to his knees in front of the bench. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I committed endoarchy two times, melanicity four times, encropatomy seven times, and preprocity with igneous intent, pretolemicity, and overt cranialism once each.”"

"See the moon? It hates us."

"I wanted be be one, when I was young, a painter. But I couldn’t stand stretching the canvas. Does things to the fingernails. And that’s the first place people look. Fragments are the only forms I trust. Light-minded or no, I’m...riotous with mental health."

"Gregory, you didn’t listen to my advice. I said try the Vernacular Isles. Where fish are two for a penny and women two for a fish. But you wanted M.I.T. and electron-spin-resonance spectroscopy."

"Too, maybe I was trying on the role. Not for myself. When a child is born, the locus of one’s hopes...shifts, slightly. Not altogether, not all at once. But you feel it, this displacement. You speak up, strike attitudes, like the mother of a tiny Lollabrigida. Drunk with possibility once more."

"Why!...there’s my father!...sitting in the bed there!...and he’s weeping!...as though his heart would burst!...Father!...how is this?...who has wounded you?...name the man!...why I’ll...I’ll...here, Father, take this handkerchief!...and this handkerchief!...and this handkerchief!...I’ll run for a towel...for a doctor...for a priest...for a good fairy...is there...can you...can I...a cup of hot tea?...bowl of steaming soup?...shot of Calvados?...a joint?...a red jacket?...a blue jacket?...Father, please!...look at me, Father...who has insulted you?...are you, then, compromised?...ruined?...a slander is going around?...an obloquy?...a traducement?...’sdeath!...I won’t permit it!...I won’t abide it!...I’ll...move every mountain...climb...every river...etc."

"Rationalization The problems of art. New artists have been obtained. These do not object to, and indeed argue enthusiastically for, the rationalization process. Production is up. Quality-control devices have been installed at those points where the interests of artists and audiences intersect. Shipping and distribution have been improved out of all recognition. (It is in this area, they say in Paraguay, that traditional practices were most blameworthy.) The rationalized art is dispatched from central art dumps to regional art dumps, and from there into the lifestreams of cities. Each citizen is given as much art as his system can tolerate. Marketing considerations have not been allowed to dictate product mix; rather, each artist is encouraged to maintain, in his software, highly personal, even idiosyncratic, standards (the so-called “hand of the artist” concept). Rationalization produces simpler circuits and therefore a saving in hardware. Each artist’s product is translated into a statement in symbolic logic. The statement is then “minimized” by various clever methods. The simpler statement is translated back into the design of a simpler circuit. Foamed by a number of techniques, the art is then run through heavy steel rollers. Flip-flop switches control its further development. Sheet art is generally dried in smoke and is dark brown in color. Bulk art is air-dried, and changes color in particular historical epochs."

"I think the government is very often in ironic relation to itself. And that’s helpful. For example: we’re spending a great deal of money for this army we have, a very large army, beautifully equipped. We’re spending something on the order of twenty billions a year for it. Now, the whole point of an army is—what’s the word?—deterrence. And the nut of deterrence is credibility. So what does the government do? It goes and sells off its surplus uniforms. And the kids start wearing them, because they’re cheap and have some sort of style. And immediately you get this vast clown army in the streets parodying the real army. And they mix periods, you know, you get parody British grenadiers and parody World War I types and parody Sierra Maestra types. So you have all these kids walking around wearing these filthy uniforms with wound stripes, hash marks, Silver Stars, but also ostrich feathers, Day-Glo vests, amulets containing powdered rhinoceros horn... You have this splendid clown army in the streets standing over against the real one. And of course the clown army constitutes a very serious attack on all the ideas which support the real army including the basic notion of having an army at all. The government has opened itself to all this, this undermining of its own credibility, just because it wants to make a few dollars peddling old uniforms...."

"But when I call for the Phantom of the Opera on Thursday, at the appointed hour, he is not there. What vexation! Am I not slightly relieved? Can it be that he doesn’t like me? I sit down on the kerb, outside the Opera. People passing look at me. I will wait here for a hundred years. Or until the hot meat of romance is cooled by the dull gravy of common sense once more."

"Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom—if not the bottom of this page then of some other page—where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think about the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured) by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and didn’t see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and [...]"

"bins black and green seventh eighth rehearsal pings a bit fussy at times fair scattering grand and exciting world of his fabrication topple out against surface irregularities fragilization of the gut constitutive misrecognitions of the ego most mature artist then in Regina loops of chain into a box several feet away Hiltons and Ritzes fault-tracing forty whacks active enthusiasm old cell is darker and they use the “Don’t Know” category less often than younger people I am glad to be here and intend to do what I can to remain mangle stools tables bases and pedestals without my tree, which gives me rest hot pipe stacked-up cellos spend the semi-private parts of their lives wailing before 1908 had himself photographed with a number of very attractive young girls breasts like ballrooms and orchestras (as in English factories) social eminence Dutch sailors’ eyes subsequently destroyed many of these works"

"love tap the glass is one and three-sixteenths inches thick laminated with plastic top stop a bullet from almost any sidearm indifferent office cleaners smudge views of the acrobat ordered the girl to get up and dress herself dream of the dandy leaves and their veins modern soft skin a car drives up a policeman jumps out tinkling sackcloth provocative back controlled nausea whimpering forms pardonable in that they trump irresistible to any faithful mind hybrid tissues zut powerful story of a half-naked girl caught between two emotions two wavy sheets of steel food towers in Turin a collection of dirks who is that very sick man? age-old eating habits crowd celebrating the matter with him is that he is crazy Paul and Barnabas preaching a bunch of extras going by sketch and final version automatic pump salad holder taking the French shoe tired lines to be taken literally no sexual relations with them"

"The death of God left the angels in a strange position. They were overtaken suddenly by a fundamental question. One can attempt to imagine the moment. How did they look at the instant the question invaded them, flooding the angelic consciousness, taking hold with terrifying force? The question was, “What are angels?” New to questioning, unaccustomed to terror, unskilled in aloneness, the angels (we assume) fell into despair."

"A great waiter died, and all of the other waiters were saddened. At the restaurant, sadness was expressed. Black napkins were draped over black arms. Black tableclothes were distributed. Several nearby streets were painted black—those leading to the establishment in which Guignol had placed his plates with legendary tact. Guignol’s medals (for like a great beer he had been decorated many times, at international exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro) were turned over to his mistress, La Lupe. The body was poached in white wine, stock, olive oil, vinegar, aromatic vegetables, herbs, garlic, and slices of lemon for twenty-four hours and displayed en Aspic on a bed of lettuce leaves. Hundreds of famous triflers appeared to pay their last respects. Guignol’s colleagues recalled with pleasure the master’s most notable eccentricity. Having coolly persuaded some innocent to select a thirty-dollar bottle of wine, he never failed to lean forward conspiratorially and whisper in his victim’s ear, “Cuts the grease.”"

"I worked for newspapers. I worked for newspapers at a time when I was not competent to do so. I reported inaccurately. I failed to get all the facts. I misspelled names. I garbled figures. I wasted copy paper. I pretended to know things I did not know. I pretended to understand things beyond my understanding. I oversimplified. I was superior to things I was inferior to. I misinterpreted things that took place before me. I over- and underinterpreted what took place before me. I suppressed news the management wanted suppressed. I invented news the management wanted invented. I faked stories. I failed to discover the truth. I colored the truth with fancy. I had no respect for the truth. I failed to heed the adage, you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. I put lies in the paper. I put private jokes in the paper. I wrote headlines containing double entendres. I wrote stories while drunk. I abused copy boys. I curried favor with advertisers. I accepted gifts from interested parties. I was servile with superiors. I was harsh with people who called on the telephone seeking information. I gloated over police photographs of sex crimes. I touched type when the makeups weren’t looking. I took copy pencils home. I voted with management in Guild elections."

"The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree. They have a kinship system which is very similar to our kinship system. They address each other as “Mister”, “Mistress”, and “Miss”. They wear clothes which look very much like our clothes. They have a Fifth Avenue which divides their territory into east and west. They have a Chock Full o’ Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each. They have a Museum of Modern Art and a telephone and a Martini, one of each. The Martini and the telephone are kept in the Museum of Modern Art. In fact they have everything that we have, but only one of each thing. We found that they lose interest very quickly. For instance they are fully industrialized, but they don’t seem interested in taking advantage of it. After the steel mill produced the ingot, it was shut down. They can conceptualize but they don’t follow through. For instance, their week has seven days—Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, and Monday. They have one disease, mononucleosis. The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time."

"I went out into the garage and told Bill an interesting story which wasn’t true. Some people feel you should tell the truth, but those people are impious and wrong, and if you listen to what they say, you will be tragically unhappy all your life."

"Elsa and Ramona watched the Motorola television set in their pajamas. —What else is on? Elsa asked. Ramona looked in the newspaper. —On 7 there’s Johnny Allegro with George Raft and Nina Foch. On 9 Johnny Angel with George Raft and Claire Trevor. On 11 there’s Johnny Apollo with Tyrone Power and Dorothy Lamour. On 13 is Johnny Concho with Frank Sinatra and Phyllis Kirk. On 2 is Johnny Dark with Tony Curtis and Piper Laurie. On 4 is Johnny Eager with Robert Taylor and Lana Turner. On 5 is Johnny O’Clock with Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes. On 31 is Johnny Trouble with Stuart Whitman and Ethel Barrymore. —What’s this one we’re watching? —What time is it? —Eleven-thirty-five. Johnny Guitar with Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden."

"At night I drank and my hostility came roaring out if its cave like a jet-assisted banshee."

"I looked at her then to see if I could discern traces of what I had seen in the beginning. There were traces but only traces. Vestiges. Hints of a formerly intact mystery never to be returned to its original wholeness. “I know what you’re doing,” she said, “you are touring the ruins.”"

"His assistants cluster about him. He is severe with them, demanding, punctilious, but this is for their own ultimate benefit. He devises hideously difficult problems, or complicates their work with sudden oblique comments that open whole new areas of investigation—yawning chasms under their feet. It is as if he wishes to place them in situations where only failure is possible. But failure, too, is a part of mental life. "I will make you failure-proof," he says jokingly. His assistants pale."

"But now a green Railway Express truck arrives at his door. It contains a field of stainless-steel tulips, courtesy of the Mayor and City Council of Houston, Texas. The genius signs the receipt, smiling..."

"Perpetua sat on the couch in her new apartment smoking dope with a handsome bassoon player. A few cats walked around. “Our art contributes nothing to the the revolution,” the bassoon player said. “We cosmetize reality.” “We are trustees of Form,” Perpetua said. “It is hard to make the revolution with a bassoon,” the bassoon player said. “Sabotage?” Perpetua suggested. “Sabotage would get me fired,” her companion replied. “The sabotage would be confused with ineptness any way.” I am tired of talking about the revolution, Perpetua thought. “Go away,” she said. The bassoon player put on his black raincoat and left. It is wonderful to be able to tell them to go away, she reflected. Then she said aloud, “Go away. Go away. Go away.”"

"Perpetua went to her mother’s house for Christmas. Her mother was cooking the eighty-seventh turkey of her life. “God damn this turkey!” Perpetua’s mother shouted. “If anyone knew how I hate, loathe, and despise turkeys. If I had known that I would cook eighty-seven separate and distinct turkeys in my life, I would have split forty-four years ago. I would have been long gone for the tall timber.” Perpetua’s mother showed her a handsome new leather coat. “Tanned in the bile of matricides,” her mother said, with a meaningful look."

"I went to a party and corrected a pronunciation. The man whose voice I had adjusted fell back into the kitchen. I praised a Bonnard. It was not a Bonnard. My new glasses, I explained, and I’m terribly sorry, but significant variations elude me, vodka exhausts me, I was young once, essential services are being maintained."

"...what an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature... (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something “out there” which cannot be brought “here”. This is standard. I don’t mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a “successful artist” (except, of course, in worldly terms)."

"(Parenthetically, the problem of analysts sleeping with their patients is well known and I understand that Susan has been routinely seducing you—a reflex, she can’t help it—throughout the analysis. I understand that there is a new splinter group of therapists, behaviorists of some kind, who take this to be some kind of ethic? Is this true? Does this mean that they do it only when they want to, or whether they want to or not? At a dinner party the other evening a lady analyst was saying that three cases of this kind had recently come to her attention and she seemed to think that this was rather a lot. The problem of maintaining mentorship is, as we know, not easy. I think you have done very well in this regard, and God knows it must have been difficult, given those skirts Susan wears that unbutton up to the crotch and which she routinely leaves unbuttoned to the third button.) Am I wandering too much for you? Bear with me. The world is waiting for the sunrise."

"He says: “Sunday the day of rest and worship is hated by all classes of men in every country to which the Word has been carried. Hatred of Sunday in London approaches one hundred percent. Hatred of Sunday in Rio produces suicides. Hatred of Sunday in Madrid is only appeased by the ritual slaughter of large black animals, in rings. Hatred of Sunday in Munich is the stuff of legend. Hatred of Sunday in Sydney in considered by the knowledgeable to be hatred of Sunday at its most exquisite.”"

"”Would you say, originally, that you had a vocation? Heard a call?” “I heard many things. Screams. Suites for unaccompanied cello. I did not hear a call.” “Nevertheless—” “Nevertheless I went to the clerical-equipment store and purchased a summer cassock and a winter cassock. The summer cassock has short sleeves. I purchased a black hat.”"

"We recruited fools for the show. We had spots for a number of fools (and in the big all-fool number that occurs immediately after the second act, some specialties). But fools are hard to find. Usually they don’t like to admit it. We settled for gowks, gulls, mooncalfs. A few babies, boobies, sillies, simps. A barmie was engaged, along with certain dumdums and beefheads. A noodle. When you see them all wandering around, under the colored lights, gibbering and performing miracles, you are surprised."

"In the summer of the show, grave robbers appeared in the show. Famous graves were robbed, before your eyes. Winding-sheets were unwound and things best forgotten were remembered. Sad themes were played by the band, bereft of its mind by the death of its tradition. In the soft evening of the show, a troupe of agoutis performed tax evasion atop tall, swaying yellow poles. Before your eyes."

"I am not rich again this morning! I put my head between Marta’s breasts, to hide my shame."

"Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas."

"As a flower moves toward the florist, women move toward men who are not good for them. Self-actualization is not to be achieved in terms of another person, but you don’t know that, when you begin."

"The imminent heat-death of the universe is not a bad thing, because it is a long way off."

"Then Daumier looked at Celeste and saw that the legs on her were as strong and sweet-shaped as ampersands and the buttocks on her were as pretty as two pictures and the waist on her was as neat and incurved as the waist of a fiddle and the shoulders on her were as tempting as sex crimes and the hair on her was as long and black as Lent and the movement of the whole was honey, and he sank into a swoon."

"It is good to be a member of the bourgeoisie,” he said. “A boy likes being a member of the bourgeoisie. Being a member of the bourgeoisie is good for a boy. It makes him feel warm and happy. He can worry about his plants. His green plants. His plants and his quiches. His property taxes. The productivity of his workers. His plants/quiches/property taxes/workers/Land Rover. His sword hilt. His”"

"Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him awhile to decide. I pointed out that we’d have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn’t begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he’d always been fond of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a “delaying tactic” and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. “Be reasonable”, he said to Colby. Colby said he’d try to think of something a little less exacting."

"I went to the grocery store to buy some soap. I stood for a long time before the soaps in their attractive boxes, RUB and FAB and TUB and suchlike, I couldn’t decide so I closed my eyes and reached out blindly and when I opened my eyes I found her hand in mine. Her name was Mrs. Davis, she said, and TUB was best for importat cleaning experiences, in her opinion. So we went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant which as it happened she owned, she took me into the kitchen and showed me her stacks of handsome beige tortillas and the steam tables which were shiny-brite. I told her I wasn’t very good with women and she said it didn’t matter, few men were, and that nothing mattered, now that Jake was gone, but I would do as an interim project and sit down and have a Carta Blanca. So I sat down and had a cool Carta Blanca, God was standing in the basement reading the meters to see how much grace had been used up in the month of June. Grace is electricity, science has found, it is not like electricity, it is electricity and God was down in the basement reading the meters in His blue jump suit with the flashlight stuck in the back pocket."

"The Balloon Man won’t sell to kids. Kids will come up to the Balloon Man and say, “Give us a blue balloon, Balloon Man,” and the Balloon Man will say, “Get outa here kids, these balloons are adults-only.” And the kids will say, “C’mon, Balloon Man, give us a red balloon and a green balloon and a white balloon, we got the money.” "Don’t want any kid-money,” the Balloon Man will say, “kid-money is wet and nasty and makes your hands wet and nasty and then you wipe ’em on your pants and your pants get all wet and nasty and you sit down to eat and the chair gets all wet and nasty, let that man in the brown hat draw near, he wants a balloon.” And the kids will say, “Oh please Balloon Man, we want the yellow balloons that never pop, we want to make us a smithereen.” “Ain’t gonna make no smithereen outa my fine yellow balloons,” says the Balloon Man, “your red balloon will pop sooner and your green balloon will pop later but your yellow balloon will never pop no matter how you stomp on it or stick it and beside the Balloon Man don’t sell to kids, it’s against his principles.”"

"So. The situation is, I agree, desperate. But fortunately I know the proper way to proceed. That is why I am giving you these instructions. They will save your life. First, persuade yourself that the situation is not desperate (my instructions will save your life only if you have not already hopelessly compromised it by listening to the instructions of others, or to the whispers of your heart, which is in itself suspect, in that it has been taught how to behave—how to whisper, even—by the very culture that has produced the desperate situation). Persuade yourself, I say, that your original perception of the situation was damaged by not having taken into account all of the variables (for example, my instructions) and that the imminent disaster that hangs in the sky above you can be, with justice, downgraded to the rank of severe inconvenience by the application of corrected thinking. Do not let what happened to the dog weaken your resolve."

"This morning, at the breakfast table, a fierce attack from the captured woman. I am a shit, a vain preener, a watcher of television, a blatherer, a creephead, a monstrous coward who preys upon etc. etc. etc. and is not man enough to etc. etc. etc. Also I drink too much. This is all absolutely true. I have often thought the same things myself, especially, for some reason, upon awakening. I have a little more Canadian bacon. “And a skulker,” she says with relish. “One who—” I fix her in the viewfinder of my Pentax and shoot a whole new series, Fierce. The trouble with capturing one is that the original gesture is almost impossible to equal or improve upon."

"...it is true that I was at the wedding, but only to raise my voice and object when the minister came to that part of the ceremony where he routinely asks for objections, “Yes!” I shouted, “she’s my mother. And although she is a widow, and legally free, she belongs to me in my dreams!” but I was quickly hushed up by a quartet of plainclothesmen, and the ceremony proceeded. But what is the good of a mother if she is another man’s wife, as they mostly are, and not around in the morning to fix your buckwheat cakes or Rice Krispies, as the case may be, and in the evening to argue with you about your vegetables, and in the middle of the day to iron your shirts and clean up your rooms, and at all times to provide intimations of ease and bliss (however misleading and ill-founded)..."

"Music from somewhere. It is Vivaldi’s great work, The Semesters. The students wandered among the exhibits. The Fisher King was there. We walked among the industrial achievements. A good-looking gas turbine, behind a velvet rope. The manufacturers described themselves in their literature as “patient and optimistic”. The students gazed, and gaped. Hitting them with ax handles is no longer permitted, hugging and kissing them is no longer permitted, speaking to them is permitted but only under extraordinary circumstances."

"“I’m depressed,” Kate said. Boots became worried. “Did I say something wrong?” “You don’t know how to say anything wrong.” “What?” “The thing about you is, you’re dull.” “I’m dull?” There was a silence. Then Fog said: “Anybody want to go over to Springs to the rodeo?” “Me?” Boots said. “Dull?” The Judge got up and went over and sat down next to Kate. “Now Kate, you oughtn’t to be goin’ ’round callin’ Boots dull to his face. That’s probably goin’ to make him feel bad. I know you didn’t mean it, really, and Boots knows it too, but he’s gonna feel bad anyhow—” “How ’bout the rodeo, over at Springs?” Fog asked again. The Judge gazed sternly at his friend, Fog. “—he’s gonna feel bad, anyhow,” the Judge continued, “just thinkin’ you mighta meant it. So why don’t you just tell him you didn’t mean it.” “I did mean it.” “Aw come on, Katie. I know you mean what you say, but why make trouble? You can mean what you say, but why not say something else? On a nice day like this?” The dry and lifeless air continued parching the concrete-like ground."

"Very often one “pushes away” the very thing that one most wants to grab, like a lover. This is a common, although distressing, psychological mechanism, having to do (in my opinion) with the fact that what is presented is not presented “purely”, that there is a little canker or grim place in it somewhere. However, worse things can happen."

"“Warp.” “In the character?” “He warp ever’ which way.” “You don’t think we should consider him, then.” “My friend Shel McPartland whom I have known deeply and intimately and too well for more than twenty years, is, sir, a brilliant O.K. engineer-master builder cum-city and state planner. He’ll plan your whole cottonpickin’ state for you, if you don’t watch him. Right down to the flowers on the sideboard in the the governor’s mansion. He’ll choose marginalia.” “I sir am not familiar sir with that particular bloom sir.” “Didn’t think you would be, you bein’ from Arkansas and therefore likely less than literate. You are the Arkansas State Planning Commission, are you not?” “I am one of it. Mr. McPartland gave you as a reference.” “Well sir let me tell you sir that my friend Shel McPartland who has incautiously put me down as a reference has a wide-ranging knowledge of all modern techniques, theories, dodges, orthodoxies, heresies, new and old innovations, and scams of all kinds. The only thing about him is, he warp.”"

"You eavesdrop in three languages. Has no one ever told you not to pet a leashed dog? We wash your bloody hand with Scotch from the restaurant. Children. I want one, you say, pointing to the mother pushing a pram. And there’s not much time. But the immense road-mending machine (yellow) cannot have children, even though it is a member of the family, it has siblings—the sheep’s-foot roller, the air hammer. You ask: Will there be fireworks? I would never pour lye in your eyes, you say. Where would you draw the line? I ask. Top Job? Shall we take a walk? Is there a trout stream? Can one rent a car? Is there dancing? Sailing? Dope? Do you know Saint-Exupéry? Wind? Sand? Stars? Night flight? You don’t offer to cook dinner for me again today."

"They called for more structure, then, so we brought in some big hairy four-by-fours from the back shed and nailed them into place with railroad spikes. This new city, they said, was going to be just jim-dandy, would make architects stutter, would make Chambers of Commerce burst into flame. We would have our own witch doctors, and strange gods aplenty, and site-specific sins, and humuhumunukunukuapuaa in the public fish bowls. We workers listened with our mouths agape. We had never heard anything like it. But we trusted our instincts and our paychecks, so we pressed on, bringing in color-coated steel from the back shed and anodized aluminum from the shed behind that. Oh radiant city! we said to ourselves, how we want you to be built! Workplace democracy was practiced on the job, and the clerk-of-the-works (who had known Wiwi Lönn in Finland) wore a little cap with a little feather, very jaunty. There was never any question of hanging back (although we noticed that our ID cards were of a color different from their ID cards); the exercise of our skills, and the promise of the city, were enough. By the light of the moon we counted our chisels and told stories of other building feats we had been involved in: Babel, Chandigarh, Brasília, Taliesin."

"Walking down West Broadway on a Saturday afternoon. Barking art caged in the high white galleries, don’t go inside or it’ll get you, leap into your lap and cover your face with kisses. Some goes to the other extreme, snarls and shows its brilliant teeth. O art I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me. Citizens parading, plump-faced and bone-faced, lightly clad. A young black boy toting a Board of Education trombone case. A fellow with oddly-cut hair the color of marigolds and a roll of roofing felt over his shoulder. Bishop in the crowd, thirty dollars in his pocket in case he has to buy a pal a drink. Into a gallery because it must be done. The artist’s hung twenty EVERLAST heavy bags in rows of four, you’re invited to have a bash. People are giving the bags every kind of trouble. Bishop, unable to resist, bangs one with his fabled left, and hurts his hand. Bloody artists."

"“Actually I can’t stand artists,” she says. “Like who in particular?” “Like that woman who puts chewing gum on her stomach—” “She doesn’t do that anymore. And the chewing gum was not poorly placed.” “And that other one who cuts off parts of himself, whittles on himself, that fries my ass.” “It’s supposed to.” “Yeah,” she says, shaking the ice in her glass. “I’m reacting like a bozo.”"

"Connors decided that “Shall we get married?” was an inappropriate second remark to make to one newly met, but it was a very tough decision."

"November 13, 1823 I was walking home from the theatre with Goethe this evening when we saw a small boy in a plum-colored waistcoat. Youth, Goethe said, is the silky apple butter on the good brown bread of possibility."

"Food, said Goethe, is the topmost taper on the golden candelabrum of existence."

"Music, said Goethe, is the frozen tapioca in the ice sheet of History."

"The English, Goethe said in parting, are the shining brown varnish on the sad chiffonier of civilization."

"Art, Goethe said, is the four percent interest on the municipal bond of life. He was very pleased with this remark and repeated it several times."

"Goethe had been having great difficulties with a particular actress at the theatre, a person who conceived that her own notion of how her role was to be played was superior to Goethe’s. “It is not enough,” he said, sighing, “that I have mimed every gesture for the poor creature, that nothing has been left unexplored in this character I myself have created, willed into being. She persists in what she terms her ‘interpretation’, which is ruining the play.” He went on to discuss the sorrows of managing a theatre, even the finest, and the exhausting detail that must be attended to, every jot and tittle, if the performances are to be fit for a discriminating public. Actors, he said, are the Scotch weevils in the salt pork of honest effort. I loved him more than ever, and we parted with an affectionate handshake."

"September 1, 1824 Today Goethe inveighed against certain critics who had, he said, completely misunderstood Lessing. He spoke movingly about how such obtuseness had partially embittered Lessing’s last years, and speculated that it was because Lessing was both critic and dramatist that the attacks had been of more than usual ferocity. Critics, Goethe said, are the cracked mirror in the grand ballroom of the creative spirit. No, I said, they were rather, the extra baggage on the great cabriolet of conceptual progress. “Eckermann,” said Goethe, “shut up.”"

"Alexandra was reading Henrietta’s manuscript. “This”, she said, pointing with her finger, “is inane.” Henrietta got up and looked over Alexandra’s shoulder at the sentence. “Yes”, she said, “I prefer the inane, sometimes. The ane is often inutile to the artist.” There was a moment of contemplation. “I have been offered a thousand florins for it,” Henrietta said. “The Dutch rights.” “How much is that in our money?” “Two hundred sixty-six dollars.” “Bless Babel,” Alexandra said, and took her friend in her arms."

"Henrietta stood up and, with a heaving motion, threw the manuscript of her novel into the fire. The manuscript of the novel she had been working on ceaselessly, night and day, for the last ten years. “Alexandra! Aren’t you going to rush to the fire and pull the manuscript of my novel out of it?” “No.” Henrietta rushed to the fire and pulled the manuscript out of it. Only the first and last pages were fully burned, and luckily, she remembered what was written there. Henrietta decided that Alexandra did not love her enough. And how could nuances of despair be expressed if you couldn’t throw your novel into the fire safely?"

"Speaking of the human body, Klee said: One bone alone achieves nothing. Pondering this, the people placed lamps on all of the street corners, and sofas next to the lamps. People sat on the sofas and read Spinoza there, an interesting glare cast on the pages by the dithering inconstant traffic lights. At other points, on the street, four-poster beds were planted, and loving couples slept or watched television together, the sets connected to the empty houses behind them by long black cables. Elsewhere, on the street, conversation pits were chipped out of the concrete, floored with Adams rugs, and lengthy discussions were held. Do we really need a War College? was a popular subject. Favorite paintings were lashed to the iron railings bordering the sidewalks, a Gainsborough, a van Dongen, a perfervid evocation of Umbrian mental states, an important dark-brown bruising of Arches paper by a printer of modern life."

"Inside the abandoned houses subway trains rushed in both directions and genuine nameless animals ate each other with ghastly fervor—"

"This morning in the mail I received an abusive letter from a woman in Prague Dear Greasy Thomas: You cannot understand what a pig you are. You are a pig, you idiot. You think you understand things but there is nothing you understand, nothing, idiot pig-swine. You have not wisdom and you have not discretion and nothing can be done without wisdom and discretion. How did a pig-cretin like yourself ever wriggle into life? Why do you still exist, vulgar swine? If you don’t think I am going to inform the government of your inappropriate continued existence, a stain on the country’s face... You can expect Federal Marshals in clouds very soon, cretin-hideous-swine, and I will laugh as they haul you away in their green vans, ugly toad. You know nothing about anything, garbage-face, and the idea that you would dare “think” for others (I know you are not capable of “feeling”) is so wildly outrageous that I would laugh out loud if I were not sick of your importunate posturing, egregious fraud-pig. You are not even an honest pig which is at least of some use in the world, you are rather an ocean of pig-dip poisoning everything you touch. I do not like you at all. Love, Jinka"

"I left Francesca and walked in the park, where I am afraid to walk, after dark. One must let people do what they want to do, but what if they want to slap you upside the head with a Stillson wrench and take the credit cards out of your pockets? A problem. The poor are getting poorer. I saw a poor man and asked him if he had any money. “Money?” he said. “Money thinks I died a long time ago.” We have moved from the Age of Anxiety to the Age of Fear. This is of course progress, psychologically speaking. I intend no irony."

"Wittgenstein was I think wrong when he said that about that which we do not know, we should not speak. He closed by fiat a great amusement park, there. Nothing gives me more pleasure than speaking about that which I do not know. I am not sure whether my ideas about various matters are correct or incorrect, but speak about them I must."

"The funniest thing in the world is a general trying on a nickname."

"On another evening, as we were on our way to dinner, I kicked the kid with carefully calibrated force as we were crossing the Pont Mirabeau, she had been pissy all day, driving us crazy, her character improved instantly, wonderfully, this is a tactic that can be used exactly once."

"Show me a man who has not married a hundred times and I’ll show you a wretch who does not deserve God’s good world."

"The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General."

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it—and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?""I'd hate it," said Hazel."There you are," said George. "The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

"That's all right—" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

"And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use."

"It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor."

"George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying?" he said to Hazel."Yup," she said."What about?" he said."I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television.""

"The Institute for Justice, in a recent paper (Streets of Dreams), reported that of America's fifty largest cities, nineteen allowed mobile vending carts to stay in one spot for only short periods, twenty prohibited setting up near brick-and-mortar businesses selling similar goods, and thirty-three established No Vending Zones in well-travelled areas. And in Atlanta, the city actually set up a corporate street-vending monopoly, forcing former cart vendors to rent kiosks for $20,000 a year. That's $1,667 a month in additional overhead for a business model that previously had almost none. … In Kurt Vonnegut's story "Harrison Bergeron," a Handicapper-General imposed handicaps on those that were smarter, better looking, or more talented than average so that nobody would feel bad. In this case, the Handicapper-General works for downtown business establishments, imposing a $20k penalty for being more competitive."

"Although not a libertarian, Kurt Vonnegut has long had an important place in my heart as well as my anti-state thinking for his great antiwar books Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night as well as his terrific short story "Harrison Bergeron.""

"Vonnegut's protagonist/hero is no libertarian. Unlike Anthems protagonist, who dreamed of becoming a scholar, Harrison Bergeron wants to be emperor."

"Rousseau incorrectly held, essentially, that we are all free insofar as we are equally enslaved. My own view to the contrary is that Rousseau's main failure was his not taking his own anti-slavery position (found elsewhere in his Social Contract) to its logical conclusion. Had he done so, he would have had to adopt the libertarian position and recognise that the so-called "equality" (later) found in Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron" is not, in fact, conducive to Liberty."

"The horror we all instinctively feel at these stories is the intuitive recognition that men are not uniform, that the species, mankind, is uniquely characterized by a high degree of variety, diversity, differentiation."

"“But every clever crime is founded ultimately on some one quite simple fact—some fact that is not itself mysterious. The mystification comes in covering it up, in leading men's thoughts away from it.”"

"“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down. The kind man drinks and turns cruel; the frank man kills and lies about it.”"

"“Have you ever noticed this—that people never answer what you say? They answer what you mean—or what they think you mean”"

""Reverend sir," cried Angus, standing still, "are you raving mad, or am I?" "You are not mad," said Brown, "only a little unobservant."

"Ten false philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle Castle. But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe."

"…Oh, let me be silly a little. You don't know how unhappy I have been. And now I know that there has been no deep sin in this business at all. Only a little lunacy, perhaps—and who minds that?"

"You have to know something of the mind as well as the body," answered the priest; "we have to know something of the body as well as the mind."

"The modern mind always mixes up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about miracles. A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because it is a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil) instead of indirectly through nature or human wills."

"I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland. I only said it was always dangerous."

"…Never mind; one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."

"“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”"

"How do you know all this?" he cried. "Are you a devil?" "I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart"

"We are taught that if a man has really bad first principles, that must be partly his fault. But, for all that, we can make some difference between a man who insults his quite clear conscience and a man with a conscience more or less clouded with sophistries."

"After the first silence the small man said to the other: "Where does a wise man hide a pebble?" And the tall man answered in a low voice: "On the beach." The small man nodded, and after a short silence said: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf?" And the other answered: "In the forest.""

"... when the priest said again: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest?" "Well, well," cried Flambeau irritably, "what does he do?" "He grows a forest to hide it in," said the priest in an obscure voice. "A fearful sin.""

"Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?"

"Private lives are more important than public reputations. I am going to save the living, and let the dead bury their dead."

"One is never thinking of the real sorrow," said the strange priest. "One can only be kind when it comes."

"There's a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight," answered the other. "What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end."

"No machine can lie," said Father Brown; "nor can it tell the truth."

"What we all dread most," said the priest in a low voice, "is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare."

"Mere figure and gait, however distant, are more likely to remind us of somebody than a well-made-up face quite close."

"If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it."

"Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it's a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So you saw that map among tropic birds and shells and thought it was a map of Pacific Islands. It was the map of this river."

"I was sea-sick," said Father Brown simply. "I felt simply horrible. But feeling horrible has nothing to do with not seeing things."

"But consider. The more a man feels lonely the less he can be sure he is alone. It must mean empty spaces round him, and they are just what make him obvious."

"The more alone he is, the more certain he is to be seen."

""Real madmen," explained Father Brown, "always encourage their own morbidity. They never strive against it. But you are trying to find traces of the burglar; even when there aren't any. You are struggling against it. You want what no madman ever wants." "And what is that?" "You want to be proved wrong," said Brown."

"We can direct our moral wills; but we can't generally change our instinctive tastes and ways of doing things."

"There is only one enemy," said Father Brown, "whom it is easier to kill with a dagger than a sword." "I know," said the woman. "Oneself."

"...but one often has to choose between feeling a damned fool and being one."

"Human science can never be quite certain of things like that," said Father Brown, still looking at the red budding of the branches over his head, "if only because of the difficulty about definition and connotation. What is a weapon? People have been murdered with the mildest domestic comforts; certainly with tea-kettles, probably with tea-cosies. On the other hand, if you showed an Ancient Briton a revolver, I doubt if he would know it was a weapon—until it was fired into him, of course."

"The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen."

"If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him."

"One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling."

"His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million."

"Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities."

"Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?"

"I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."

"Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil."

"One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."

"Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue."

"The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person."

"To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it."

"...If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."

"I know that journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."

"I don’t believe in anything," answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. "I'm a man of science."

"I don't believe in anything; I'm a journalist," answered the melancholy being—“Boon, of the Daily Wire. ..."

"No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."

"If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it."

"For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven."

"She hasn't got any intellect to speak of; but you don't need any intellect to be an intellectual."

"It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem."

"Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth,fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question."

"There was no mistake—he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten—a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing."

"The old man looked placidly from one to the other for a moment, and then suddenly spoke in a cracked and ancient voice. "Are you my father?" he demanded. ..."Because if you are," went on the old man querulously, "I wish you'd get me out of this place—or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here,""

"Despite his aged stoop, Benjamin Button—for it was by this name they called him instead of by the appropriate but invidious Methuselah—was five feet eight inches tall."

"[T]he rattle bored him, and... he found other and more soothing amusements when he was left alone. ...Mr. Button discovered one day that during the preceding week be had smoked more cigars than ever before—a phenomenon, which was explained a few days later when, entering the nursery unexpectedly, he found the room full of faint blue haze and Benjamin, with a guilty expression on his face, trying to conceal the butt of a dark Havana. This, of course, called for a severe spanking, but Mr. Button found that he could not bring himself to administer it. He merely warned his son that he would "stunt his growth.""

"He brought home lead soldiers, he brought toy trains, he brought large pleasant animals made of cotton... But, despite all his father's efforts, Benjamin refused to be interested. He would steal down the backstairs and return to the nursery with a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, over which he would pore through an afternoon, while his cotton cows and his Noah's ark were left neglected on the floor. Against such a stubbornness Mr. Button's efforts were of little avail."

"[T]he outbreak of the Civil War drew the city's attention to other things. A few people who were unfailingly polite racked their brains for compliments to give to the parents—and finally hit upon the ingenious device of declaring that the baby resembled his grandfather... Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were not pleased, and Benjamin's grandfather was furiously insulted."

"Several small boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles—he even managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father. Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something everyday, but he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging."

"When his grandfather's initial antagonism wore off... [t]hey would sit for hours, these two, so far apart in age and experience, and, like old cronies, discuss with tireless monotony the slow events of the day."

"[H]is parents'—they seemed always somewhat in awe of him and, despite the dictatorial authority they exercised over him, frequently addressed him as "Mr.""

"He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of his mind and body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such case had been previously recorded."

"At his father's urging he made an honest attempt to play with other boys, and frequently he joined in the milder games—football shook him up too much, and he feared that in case of a fracture his ancient bones would refuse to knit."

"When he was five he was sent to kindergarten... He was inclined to drowse off to sleep in the middle of... tasks, a habit which both irritated and frightened his young teacher. To his relief she complained to his parents, and he was removed from the school. [They] told their friends that they felt he was too young."

"[O]ne day a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, while looking in the mirror, Benjamin made... an astonishing discovery. Did his eyes deceive him, or had his hair turned... from white to iron-gray... Was the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced? Was his skin healthier and firmer..? He could not tell. He knew that he no longer stooped, and that his physical condition had improved..."

"He went to his father. "I am grown," he announced determinedly. "I want to put on long trousers." His father hesitated. "Well," he said finally, "I don't know. Fourteen is the age for putting on long trousers—and you are only twelve." "But you'll have to admit," protested Benjamin, "that I'm big for my age.""

"Finally a compromise was reached. Benjamin was to continue to dye his hair. He was to make a better attempt to play with boys of his own age. He was not to wear his spectacles or carry a cane in the street. In return for these concessions he was allowed his first suit of long trousers..."

"Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of normal ungrowth."

"When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver and descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to Yale College. Benjamin passed..."

"The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before him. ...The registrar pointed sternly to the door. "Get out," he said. "Get out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic." ..."The idea!" he shouted. "A man of your age trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are you? Well, I'll give you eighteen minutes to get out of town.""

"The word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the college. Men ran hatless out of classes, the football team abandoned its practice and joined the mob, professors' wives with bonnets awry and bustles out of position, ran shouting after the procession, from which proceeded a continual succession of remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin Button."

"Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his head from the window. "You'll regret this!" he shouted. "Ha-ha!" the undergraduates laughed. "Ha-ha-ha!" It was the biggest mistake that Yale College had ever made..."

"In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and he signalised his birthday by going to work for his father in Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware. It was in that same year that he began "going out socially"—that is, his father insisted on taking him to several fashionable dances. Roger Button was now fifty, and he and his son were more and more companionable—in fact, since Benjamin had ceased to dye his hair... they appeared about the same age, and could have passed for brothers."

"I like men of your age," Hildegarde told him. "Young boys are so idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to appreciate women." ..."You're just the romantic age," she continued—"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is—oh, sixtyis too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty." ..."I've always said," went on Hildegarde, "that I'd rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than marry a man of thirty and take care of him."

"When, six months later, the engagement of Miss Hildegarde Moncrief to Mr. Benjamin Button was made known (I say "made known," for General Moncrief declared he would rather fall upon his sword than announce it), the excitement in Baltimore society reached a feverish pitch. The almost forgotten story of Benjamin's birth was remembered and sent out upon the winds of scandal in picaresque and incredible forms. It was said that Benjamin was really the father of Roger Button, that he was his brother who had been in prison for forty years, that he was in disguise—and, finally, that he had two small conical horns sprouting from his head."

"The Sunday supplements of the New York papers played up the case with fascinating sketches which showed the head of Benjamin Button attached to a fish, to a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid brass. He became known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of Maryland. But the true story, as is usually the case, had a very small circulation."

"[E]very one agreed with General Moncrief that it was "criminal" for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain Mr. Roger Button published his son's birth certificate in large type in the Baltimore Blaze. No one believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see."

"So many of the stories about her fiance were false that Hildegarde refused stubbornly to believe even the true one. In vain General Moncrief pointed out to her the high mortality among men of fifty—or, at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain he told her of the instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde had chosen to marry for mellowness, and marry she did..."

"The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly. ...the family fortune was doubled—and this was due largely to the younger member of the firm."

"Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the couple to its bosom. Even old General Moncrief became reconciled to his son-in-law when Benjamin gave him the money to bring out his History of the Civil War in twenty volumes..."

"Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It was typical of his growing enthusiasm for pleasure that he was the first man in the city of Baltimore to own and run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he made of health and vitality. "He seems to grow younger every year," they would remark."

"There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him. ...[S]he had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. ...She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end."

"At the outbreak of the in 1898 his home had for him so little charm that he decided to join the army. With his business influence he obtained a commission as captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he was made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel just in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. He was slightly wounded, and received a medal. ...[B]ut his business required attention, so he resigned his commission and came home. He was met at the station by a brass band and escorted to his house."

"[H]e looked now like a man of thirty. Instead of being delighted, he was uneasy—he was growing younger. He had hitherto hoped that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his age in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked his birth would cease to function. He shuddered. His destiny seemed to him awful, incredible."

"Hildegarde... appeared annoyed, and he wondered if she had at last discovered that there was something amiss. ..."Well," he remarked lightly, "everybody says I look younger than ever.""

"[H]e found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gaiety grew stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest of the young married women, chatting with the most popular of the debutantes, and finding their company charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful eyes."

"His social activities... interfered to some extent with his business, but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt that he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had recently graduated from Harvard."

"He and his son were... often mistaken for each other. This pleased Benjamin—he soon... grew to take a naive pleasure in his appearance."

"One September day in 1910... a man, apparently about twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman at Harvard... He did not... mention the fact that his son had been graduated from the same institution ten years before."

"[I]n the football game with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with such a cold, remorseless anger that he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen field goals for Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to be carried singly from the field, unconscious. ...[I]n his... junior year he was scarcely able to "make" the team. The coaches said that he had lost weight, and it seemed to the more observant among them that he was not quite as tall as before. He made no touchdowns... In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He had grown so slight and frail that one day he was taken by some sophomores for a freshman..."

"His studies seemed harder to him—he felt that they were too advanced. He had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas's, the famous preparatory school... and he determined after his graduation to enter himself at St. Midas's, where the sheltered life among boys his own size would be more congenial to him."

"Say," he said to Roscoe one day, "I've told you over and over that I want to go to prep, school." ..."I can't go alone," said Benjamin helplessly. "You'll have to enter me and take me up there." "I haven't got time," declared Roscoe abruptly. ..."you'd better not go on with this business much longer. You better pull up short. You better... turn right around and start back the other way. This has gone too far to be a joke. It isn't funny any longer. You—you behave yourself!"

"Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears. "And another thing," continued Roscoe, "when visitors are in the house I want you to call me 'Uncle'—not 'Roscoe,' but'Uncle,' do you understand? It looks absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name. Perhaps you'd better call me 'Uncle' all the time, so you'll get used to it.""

"Benjamin wandered dismally upstairs and stared at himself in the mirror. He had not shaved for three months, but he could find nothing on his face but a faint white down with which it seemed unnecessary to meddle."

"America had joined the Allied cause during the preceding month, and Benjamin wanted to enlist, but, alas, sixteen was the minimum age, and he did not look that old. His true age, which was fifty-seven, would have disqualified him, anyway."

"[A] letter bearing a large official legend in the corner... informed him that many reserve officers who had served in the Spanish-American War were being called back into service with a higher rank, and it enclosed his commission as brigadier-general... with orders to report immediately. ...Benjamin was measured, and a week later his uniform was completed."

"Saying nothing to Roscoe, he left the house one night and proceeded by train to Camp Mosby, in South Carolina, where he was to command an infantry brigade."

"The colonel came up, drew rein, and looked coolly down at him with a twinkle in his eyes. "Whose little boy are you?" he demanded kindly." I'll soon darn well show you whose little boy I am! "retorted Benjamin in a ferocious voice. "Get down off that horse!""

""Here!" cried Benjamin desperately. "Read this." And he thrust his commission toward the colonel. The colonel read it, his eyes popping from their sockets. "Where'd you get this?" he demanded, slipping the document into his own pocket. "I got it from the Government, as you'll soon find out!" "You come along with me," said the colonel with a peculiar look. ...Two days later... his son Roscoe materialised from Baltimore, hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, sans uniform, back to his home."

"In 1920 Roscoe Button's first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it "the thing" to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby's own grandfather. ...Five years later Roscoe's little boy had grown old enough to play childish games with little Benjamin under the supervision of the same nurse. Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same day, and Benjamin found that playing with little strips of coloured paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs, was the most fascinating game in the world."

"Roscoe's son moved up into the first grade after a year, but Benjamin stayed on in the kindergarten. He was very happy. Sometimes when other tots talked about what they would do when they grew up a shadow would cross his little face as if in a dim, childish way he realised that those were things in which he was never to share."

"The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third year to the kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand what the bright shining strips of paper were for.He cried because the other boys were bigger than he, and he was afraid of them. The teacher talked to him, but though he tried to understand he could not understand at all."

"He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana... became the centre of his tiny world. On bright days they walked in the park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and say "elephant," and Benjamin would say it after her, and when he was being undressed for bed that night he would say it over and over aloud to her: "Elyphant, elyphant, elyphant." ...And when the long day was done at five o'clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods..."

"There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana... and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called "sun." When the sun went his eyes were sleepy—there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him."

"The past—the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather—all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been."

"He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed—there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence."

"And then he remembered nothing."

"When he was hungry he cried—that was all."

"Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness."

"Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind."

"According to Fitzgerald, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was written as a response to a quip by Mark Twain “to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end”..."

"Fitzgerald’s famous short story... is a work of magical realism... The principle is simple... an old man and “grew up” in reverse... It’s a wonderful idea, rife with comic potential and also allegorical possibility. ...[T]he story succeeds with a sense of gentle satire and no need for much in the way of flash. ...The tale is most touching at its end, where it even triggers an element of longing in the reader. ...Benjamin ...loses his memories in the way one sponges away the writing on a blackboard; it’s as if the life he lived hasn’t happened. ...The flippancy of Fitzgerald’s style maintains an emotional distance ...that treats the absurd and uncanny as plausible. ...Fitzgerald ...seems mainly interested in the reversal of the natural order and... in finding a way to thematize time’s relativity in a linear narrative. Oddly, “Benjamin Button” seems both of its time and ahead of it."

"Why are fiction writers so regularly engaged by the conceit of a back-to-front life? ...Of his mother nothing is heard except that she is "all right" after the prodigious delivery. Her absence reflects the chilly bloodlessness of this account..."

"He comes silently and unannounced; yet all--how strange--yea, all recognize Him, at once! The population rushes towards Him as if propelled by some irresistible force; it surrounds, throngs, and presses around, it follows Him.... Silently, and with a smile of boundless compassion upon His lips, He crosses the dense crowd, and moves softly on."

"Children strew flowers along His path and sing to Him, 'Hosanna!' It is He, it is Himself, they say to each other, it must be He, it can be none other but He! He pauses at the portal of the old cathedral, just as a wee white coffin is carried in, with tears and great lamentations...in the coffin lies the body of a fair-child, seven years old...The little corpse lies buried in flowers. 'He will raise the child to life!' confidently shouts the crowd... The procession halts, and the little coffin is gently lowered at his feet. Divine compassion beams forth from His eyes, and as He looks at the child, His lips are heard to whisper once more, 'Talitha Cumi'--and 'straightway the damsel arose.' The child rises in her coffin. Her little hands still hold the nosegay of white roses which after death was placed in them, and, looking round with large astonished eyes she smiles sweetly..."

"A terrible commotion rages among them, the populace shouts and loudly weeps, when suddenly, before the cathedral door, appears the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor himself.... He pauses before the crowd and observes. He has seen all. He has witnessed the placing of the little coffin at His feet, the calling back to life. And now, his dark, grim face has grown still darker; his bushy grey eyebrows nearly meet, and his sunken eye flashes with sinister light. Slowly raising his finger, he commands his minions to arrest Him..."

"Such is his power over the well-disciplined, submissive and now trembling people, that the thick crowds immediately give way, and scattering before the guard, amid dead silence and without one breath of protest, allow them to lay their sacrilegious hands upon the stranger and lead Him away.... That same populace, like one man, now bows its head to the ground before the old Inquisitor, who blesses it and slowly moves onward. The guards conduct their prisoner to the ancient building of the Holy Tribunal; pushing Him into a narrow, gloomy, vaulted prison-cell, they lock Him in and retire.... ""

"And his prisoner, does He never reply? Does He keep silent, looking at him, without saying a word?"... Of course; and it could not well be otherwise... The Grand Inquisitor begins from his very first words by telling Him that He has no right to add one syllable to that which He had said before. To make the situation clear at once, the above preliminary monologue is intended to convey to the reader the very fundamental idea which underlies Roman Catholicism--as well as I can convey it, his words mean, in short: 'Everything was given over by Thee to the Pope, and everything now rests with him alone; Thou hast no business to return and thus hinder us in our work'... In this sense the Jesuits not only talk but write likewise."

"'Hast thou the right to divulge to us a single one of the mysteries of that world whence Thou comest?' enquires of Him my old Inquisitor, and forthwith answers for Him. 'Nay, Thou has no such right. For, that would be adding to that which was already said by Thee before; hence depriving people of that freedom for which Thou hast so stoutly stood up while yet on earth...."

"Anything new that Thou would now proclaim would have to be regarded as an attempt to interfere with that freedom of choice, as it would come as a new and a miraculous revelation superseding the old revelation of fifteen hundred years ago, when Thou didst so repeatedly tell the people: "The truth shall make you free." Behold then, Thy "free" people now!' adds the old man with sombre irony. 'Yea!... it has cost us dearly.' he continues, sternly looking at his victim. 'But we have at last accomplished our task, and--in Thy name.... For fifteen long centuries we had to toil and suffer owing to that "freedom": but now we have prevailed and our work is done, and well and strongly it is done."

"Art Thou as well aware of what awaits Thee in the morning?... tomorrow I will condemn and burn Thee on the stake, as the most wicked of all the heretics; and that same people, who to-day were kissing Thy feet, tomorrow at one bend of my finger, will rush to add fuel to Thy funeral pile..."

"His words mean, in short: 'Everything was given over by Thee to the Pope, and everything now rests with him alone; Thou hast no business to return and thus hinder us in our work.' In this sense the Jesuits not only talk but write likewise."

"He [the Grand Inquisitor] seriously regards it as a great service done by himself, his brother monks and Jesuits, to humanity, to have conquered and subjected unto their authority that freedom, and boasts that it was done but for the good of the world... 'For only now,' he says (speaking of the Inquisition) 'has it become possible to us, for the first time, to give a serious thought to human happiness. Man is born a rebel, and can rebels be ever happy?..."

"Thou has been fairly warned of it, but evidently to no use, since Thou hast rejected the only means which could make mankind happy; fortunately at Thy departure Thou hast delivered the task to us.... Thou has promised, ratifying the pledge by Thy own words, in words giving us the right to bind and unbind... and surely, Thou couldst not think of depriving us of it now!'""

"Having disburdened his heart, the Inquisitor waits for some time to hear his prisoner speak in His turn. His silence weighs upon him. He has seen that his captive has been attentively listening to him all the time, with His eyes fixed penetratingly and softly on the face of his jailer, and evidently bent upon not replying to him. The old man longs to hear His voice, to hear Him reply; better words of bitterness and scorn than His silence."

"Suddenly He rises; slowly and silently approaching the Inquisitor, He bends towards him and softly kisses the bloodless, four-score and-ten-year-old lips. That is all the answer. The Grand Inquisitor shudders... He goes to the door, opens it, and addressing Him, 'Go,' he says, 'go, and return no more... do not come again... never, never!' and--lets Him out into the dark night."

"The following is an extract from M. Dostoevsky's celebrated novel, The Brothers Karamazof, the last publication from the pen of the great Russian novelist, who died a few months ago, just as the concluding chapters appeared in print. Dostoevsky is beginning to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest among Russian writers. His characters are invariably typical portraits drawn from various classes of Russian society, strikingly life-like and realistic to the highest degree. The following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor."

"In one of the most electrifying chapters of all of world literature, Russian writer Feodor Dostoevsky imagines an unexpected arrival of Jesus Christ in Seville, Spain, during the height of the Holy Inquisition. Jesus enters the city unannounced, silently, but people recognize him immediately. People gather around him, amazed, and Jesus, with a smile of compassion, walks across down the crowd, irradiating love. He extends his hands over their heads and blesses them, and those who touch his clothes receive power and healing. A man blind since his birth shouts, “Lord, heal me, that I may see you”, and the scales fall from his eyes and the man begins to see. The crowd weeps for joy and kisses the ground on which Jesus walks, and children lay flowers on his path and sing “Hosanna.”... People are moved, ecstatic, but suddenly the door of the cathedral opens. The Cardinal... raises his hand and orders that Jesus be arrested... we see the Cardinal open the iron door of the cell...and saying, “Why should you come now, to hinder us in our work? ”... Fortunately the church has recognized Jesus’ mistake, says the Inquisitor....and for this the Inquisitor must burn Jesus on the stake, lest he disturbs the work of the Church."

"Among other things, the Grand Inquisitor mocks Jesus for bringing... autonomous moral liberty to his followers, an autonomy that they do not want and cannot endure... Rather than “taking over man’s freedom,” he taunts Christ, “you increased it still more for them.” ... The horror of this moral autonomy — this glimpse into the abyss — led Jesus’ followers to submit to authoritarian rule over their religious and moral lives, epitomized — the Inquisitor charges — by a caricature of the Roman Catholic hierarchy."

"[…] Great sport, hunting.” “The best sport in the world,” agreed Rainsford. “For the hunter,” amended Whitney. “Not for the jaguar.” “Don’t talk rot, Whitney,” said Rainsford. “You’re a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares how a jaguar feels?” “Perhaps the jaguar does,” observed Whitney. “Bah! They’ve no understanding.” “Even so, I rather think they understand one thing—fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death.” “Nonsense,” laughed Rainsford. “This hot weather is making you soft, Whitney. Be a realist. The world is made up of two classes—the hunters and the huntees. Luckily, you and I are hunters."

"[…) The place has a reputation—a bad one.” “Cannibals?” suggested Rainsford. “Hardly. Even cannibals wouldn’t live in such a God-forsaken place. But it’s gotten into sailor lore, somehow. Didn’t you notice that the crew’s nerves seemed a bit jumpy to-day?” “They were a bit strange, now you mention it. Even Captain Nielsen——” “Yes, even that tough-minded old Swede, who’d go up to the devil himself and ask him for a light. Those fishy blue eyes held a look I never saw there before. All I could get out of him was: ‘This place has an evil name among sea-faring men, sir.’ Then he said to me, very gravely: ‘Don’t you feel anything?’—as if the air about us was actually poisonous. Now, you mustn’t laugh when I tell you this—I did feel something like a sudden chill."

"[…] But sometimes I think sailors have an extra sense that tells them when they are in danger. Sometimes I think evil is a tangible thing—with wave lengths, just as sound and light have. An evil place can, so to speak, broadcast vibrations of evil."

"“Where there are pistol shots, there are men. Where there are men, there is food,” he thought. But what kind of men, he wondered, in so forbidding a place? An unbroken front of snarled and ragged jungle fringed the shore."

"Rainsford’s first impression was that the man was singularly handsome; his second was that there was an original, almost bizarre quality about the general’s face. He was a tall man past middle age, for his hair was a vivid white; but his thick eyebrows and pointed military moustache were as black as the night from which Rainsford had come. His eyes, too, were black and very bright. He had high cheek bones, a sharp-cut nose, a spare, dark face, the face of a man used to giving orders, the face of an aristocrat."

"“Ivan is an incredibly strong fellow,” remarked the general, “but he has the misfortune to be deaf and dumb. A simple fellow, but, I’m afraid, like all his race, a bit of a savage.” “Is he Russian?” “He is a Cossack,” said the general, and his smile showed red lips and pointed teeth. “So am I.”"

"“I’ve always thought,” said Rainsford, “that the Cape buffalo is the most dangerous of all big game.” For a moment the general did not reply; he was smiling his curious red-lipped smile. Then he said slowly: “No. You are wrong, sir. The Cape buffalo is not the most dangerous big game.” He sipped his wine. “Here in my preserve on this island,” he said, in the same slow tone, “I hunt more dangerous game. Rainsford expressed his surprise. “Is there big game on this island?” The general nodded. “The biggest.” “Really?” “Oh, it isn’t here naturally, of course. I have to stock the island.” “What have you imported, General?” Rainsford asked. “Tigers?” The general smiled. “No,” he said. “Hunting tigers ceased to interest me some years ago. I exhausted their possibilities, you see. No thrill left in tigers, no real danger. I live for danger, Mr. Rainsford.” The general took from his pocket a gold cigarette case and offered his guest a long black cigarette with a silver tip; it was perfumed and gave off a smell like incense. “We will have some capital hunting, you and I,” said the general. “I shall be most glad to have your society.” “But what game——” began Rainsford. “I’ll tell you,” said the general. “You will be amused, I know. I think I may say, in all modesty, that I have done a rare thing. I have invented a new sensation. May I pour you another glass of port, Mr. Rainsford?”"

"“So,” continued the general, “I asked myself why the hunt no longer fascinated me. You are much younger than I am, Mr. Rainsford, and have not hunted as much, but you perhaps can guess the answer.” “What was it?” “Simply this: hunting had ceased to be what you call ‘a ​sporting proposition.’ It had become too easy. I always got my quarry. Always. There is no greater bore than perfection.” The general lit a fresh cigarette. “No animal had a chance with me any more. That is no boast; it is a mathematical certainty. The animal had nothing but his legs and his instinct. Instinct is no match for reason. When I thought of this it was a tragic moment for me, I can tell you.” Rainsford leaned across the table, absorbed in what his host was saying. “It came to me as an inspiration what I must do,” the general went on. “And that was?” The general smiled the quiet smile of one who has faced an obstacle and surmounted it with success. “I had to invent a new animal to hunt,” he said. “A new animal? You’re joking.” “Not at all,” said the general. “I never joke about hunting. I needed a new animal. I found one. So I bought this island, built this house, and here I do my hunting. The island is perfect for my purposes—there are jungles with a maze of trails in them, hills, swamps——” “But the animal, General Zaroff?” “Oh,” said the general, “it supplies me with the most exciting hunting in the world. No other hunting compares with it for an instant. Every day I hunt, and I never grow bored now, for I have a quarry with which I can match my wits.” Rainsford’s bewilderment showed in his face. “I wanted the ideal animal to hunt,” explained the general. “So I said, ‘What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?’ And the answer was, of course, ‘It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason.’” “But no animal can reason,” objected Rainsford. “My dear fellow,” said the general, “there is one that can.” “But you can’t mean——” gasped Rainsford. “And why not?” “I can’t believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke.” “Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting.” “Hunting? Great Guns, General Zaroff, what you speak of is murder.”"

"“Life is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong. The weak of the world were put here to give the strong pleasure. I am strong. Why should I not use my gift? If I wish to hunt, why should I not? I hunt the scum of the earth: sailors from tramp ships—lassars, blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels—a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them.” “But they are men,” said Rainsford hotly. “Precisely,” said the general. “That is why I use them. It gives me pleasure. They can reason, after a fashion. So they are dangerous.”"

"“It’s a game, you see,” pursued the general blandly. “I suggest to one of them that we go hunting. I give him a supply of food and an excellent hunting knife. I give him three hours’ start. I am to follow, armed only with a pistol of the smallest caliber and range. If my quarry eludes me for three whole days, he wins the game. If I find him”—the general smiled—“he loses.” “Suppose he refuses to be hunted?” “Oh,” said the general, “I give him his option, of course. He need not play that game if he doesn’t wish to. If he does not wish to hunt, I turn him over to Ivan. Ivan once had the honour of serving as official knouter to the Great White Czar, and he has his own ideas of sport. Invariably, Mr. Rainsford, invariably they choose the hunt.” “And if they win?” The smile on the general’s face widened. “To date I have not lost,” he said."

"The bed was good, and the pajamas of the softest silk, and he was tired in every fibre of his being, but nevertheless Rainsford could not quiet his brain with the opiate of sleep. He lay, eyes wide open. Once he thought he heard stealthy steps in the corridor outside his room. He sought to throw open the door; it would not open. He went to the window and looked out. His room was high up in one of the towers. The lights of the château were out now, and it was dark and silent; but there was a fragment of sallow moon, and by its wan light he could see, dimly, the courtyard. There, weaving in and out in the pattern of shadow, were black, noiseless forms; the hounds heard him at the window and looked up, expectantly, with their green eyes. Rainsford went back to the bed and lay down. By many methods he tried to put himself to sleep. He had achieved a doze when, just as morning began to come, he heard, far off in the jungle, the faint report of a pistol."

"Even so zealous a hunter as General Zaroff could not trace him there, he told himself; only the devil himself could follow that complicated trail through the jungle after dark. But perhaps the general was a devil——"

"His first thought made him feel sick and numb. The general could follow a trail through the woods at night; he could ​follow an extremely difficult trail; he must have uncanny powers; only by the merest chance had the Cossack failed to see his quarry. Rainsford’s second thought was even more terrible. It sent a shudder of cold horror through his whole being. Why had the general smiled? Why had he turned back? Rainsford did not want to believe what his reason told him was true, but the truth was as evident as the sun that had by now pushed through the morning mists. The general was playing with him! The general was saving him for another day’s sport! The Cossack was the cat; he was the mouse. Then it was that Rainsford knew the full meaning of terror."

"Rainsford knew he could do one of two things. He could stay where he was and wait. That was suicide. He could flee. That was postponing the inevitable."

"General Zaroff had an exceedingly good dinner in his great panelled dining hall that evening. With it he had a bottle of Pol Roger and half a bottle of Chambertin. Two slight annoyances kept him from perfect enjoyment. One was the thought that it would be difficult to replace Ivan; the other was that his quarry had escaped him; of course, the American hadn’t played the game—so thought the general as he tasted his after-dinner liqueur. In his library he read, to soothe himself, from the works of Marcus Aurelius. At ten he went up to his bedroom. He was deliciously tired, he said to himself, as he locked himself in. There was a little moonlight, so, before turning on his light, he went to the window and looked down at the courtyard. He could see the great hounds, and he called, “Better luck another time,” to them. Then he switched on the light. ​A man, who had been hiding in the curtains of the bed, was standing there “Rainsford!” screamed the general. “How in God’s name did you get here?” “Swam,” said Rainsford. “I found it quicker than walking through the jungle.” The general sucked in his breath and smiled. “I congratulate you,” he said. “You have won the game.” Rainsford did not smile. “I am still a beast at bay,” he said, in a low, hoarse voice. “Get ready, General Zaroff.” The general made one of his deepest bows. “I see,” he said. “Splendid! One of us is to furnish a repast for the hounds. The other will sleep in this very excellent bed. On guard, Rainsford. . . .” He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided."

"Anybody can write a short story—a bad one, I mean—who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills."

"Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people,—arresting people, with fiery and appealing faces. But when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one."

"... there are more goodish novels than there are good short stories, and I think a short story has to be very good to have any effect. And I think that you could probably... 100 short stories would be all there are, almost. Really great short stories. That’s probably not true, but there are so few really great short stories. A novel is a big bulky thing, you know. I suppose, well, with Kipling’s stories they’ve had a great effect, and O. Henry’s stories have. Shall we say that I think a great short story teller should have as much effect as a great novelist. I think that’s the answer, isn’t it, but there are so few. They really are. Maugham and O. Henry, Kipling, Maupassant. They’re not... Bret Harte’s done a few, but there’re not a great many."

"...In a pool of sand and silt a starfish had thrust its arms up stiffly and was holding its body away from the stifling mud. "It's still alive," I ventured. "Yes," he said, and with a quick yet gentle movement he picked up the star and spun it over my head and far out into the sea. It sunk in a burst of spume, and the waters roared once more. "There are not many who come this far," I said, groping in a sudden embarrassment for words. "Do you collect?" "Only like this," he said softly, gesturing amidst the wreckage of the shore. "And only for the living." He stooped again, oblivious of my curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water. "The stars," he said, "throw well. One can help them." "I do not collect," I said uncomfortably, the wind beating at my garments. "Neither the living nor the dead. I gave it up a long time ago. Death is the only successful collector.""

"..."On a point of land, I found the star thrower...I spoke once briefly. "I understand," I said. "Call me another thrower." Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer. After us, there will be others...Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung...For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together beside an unknown hurler of suns... We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of the perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back to life again.""

"An old man had a habit of early morning walks on the beach. One day, after a storm, he saw a human figure in the distance moving like a dancer. As he came closer he saw that it was a young woman and she was not dancing but was reaching down to the sand, picking up a starfish and very gently throwing them into the ocean. "Young lady", he asked, "Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" "The sun is up, and the tide is going out, and if I do not throw them in they will die." "But young lady, do you not realise that there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it? You cannot possibly make a difference." The young woman listened politely, paused and then bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it into the sea, past the breaking waves, saying: "It made a difference for that one." The old man looked at the young woman inquisitively and thought about what she had done. Inspired, he joined her in throwing starfish back into the sea. Soon others joined, and all the starfish were saved."