Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it’s obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter. More
“What do you want to do?” she said.
“Whatever you want to do.”
“I want to do whatever’s best for you.”
“What’s best for me is to please you,” I said.
“I want to make you happy, Jack.”
“I’m happy when I’m pleasing you.”
“I just want to do what you want to do.”
“I want to do whatever’s best for you.”
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If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet Majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death.
You’d see me with my puffy, petulant face,
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Holding his knife, the bearlike Mongolian officer looked at Yamamoto and grinned. To this day, I remember that smile. I see it in my dreams. I have never been able to forget it. No sooner had he flashed this smile than he set to work. His men held Yamamoto down with their hands and knees while he began skinning Yamamoto with the utmost care. It truly was like skinning a peach. I couldn’t bear to watch. I closed my eyes. When I did this, one of the soldiers hit me with his rifle butt. He went on hitting me until I opened my eyes. But it hardly mattered: eyes open or closed, I could still hear Yamamoto’s voice. He bore the pain without a whimper-at first. But soon he began to scream. I had never heard such screams before: they did not seem part of this world. The man started by slitting open Yamamoto’s shoulder and proceeded to peel off the skin of his right arm from the top down-slowly, carefully, almost lovingly. More
They untied Yamamoto and led him to the staked-off area. There they tied his arms and legs to the four stakes. Stretched out on the ground, stark naked, Yamamoto had several raw wounds on his body.
“As you know, these people are shepherds,” said the Russian officer. “And shepherds use their sheep in many ways: they eat their flesh, they shear their wool, they take their hides. To them, sheep are the perfect animal. They spend their days with sheep-their whole lives with sheep. They know how to skin them with amazing skill. The hides they use for tents and clothing. Have you ever seen them skin a sheep?”
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Each afternoon in the deserted cinema
The latent sexual content of the automobile crash. Numerous studies have been conducted to assess the latent sexual appeal of public figures who have achieved subsequent notoriety as auto-crash fatalities, e.g. James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, Albert Camus. Simulated newsreels of politicians, film stars and TV celebrities were shown to panels of (a) suburban housewives, (b) terminal paretics, (c) filling station personnel. Sequences showing auto-crash victims brought about a marked acceleration of pulse and respiratory rates. Many volunteers became convinced that the fatalities were still living, and later used one or other of the crash victims as a private focus of arousal during intercourse with the domestic partner.
WISE MAN. What have you got the shears for?
FOOL. I won’t tell you. If I told you, you would drive them away.
WISE MAN. Whom would I drive away?
FOOL. I won’t tell you.
WISE MAN. Not if I give you a penny?
FOOL. No.
WISE MAN. Not if I give you two pennies.
FOOL. You will be very lucky if you give me two pennies, but I won’t tell you.
WISE MAN. Three pennies?
FOOL. Four, and I will tell you!
WISE MAN. Very well, four. But I will not call you Teigue the Fool any longer.
Gleeman,’ said the lay brother, ‘I also make rhymes; I make manywhile I sit in my niche by the door, and I sorrow to hear the bards railing upon the friars. Brother, I would sleep, and therefore I makeknown to you that it is the head of the monastery, our graciousabbot, who orders all things concerning the lodging of travellers.’
A little called anything shows shudders.
Come and say what prints all day. A whole few watermelon. There is no pope.
No cut in pennies and little dressing and choose wide soles and little spats really little spices.
It is against all scientific reason for two people who hardly know each other, with no ties at all between them, with different characters, different upbringings, and even different genders, to suddenly find themselves commited to living together, to sleeping in the same bed, to sharing two destinies that perhaps were fated to go in opposite directions. He would say: “The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
-Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
“I adore you because you made me a whore.”
Said in another way, she was right. Florentino Ariza had stripped her of the virginity of a conventional marriage, more pernicious than congenital virginty or the abstinence of widowhood. He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
-Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Chapter 1: Watermelon
Sickening sweet taste of my childhood, bottled up, in peaches, white grape, and vanilla. Smooth but sour. Childhood, my land of enchantment, life, my ever lasting childhood. To write is to step onto a magic carpet and fly off into endless trips of nostalgia. Despair tastes sweet, like peaches, and white grapes, and the smell of vanilla. Personalities contained in bottles of scent, fragrances defying analysis. I am passionate about the sense of smell, taste, touch. Vision—the looking at the surface, it eludes me, it leaves me utterly befooled. Nothing is to be trusted except the most banal sentimentalism. I form my conclusions only through pure, heart wrenching emotion. And that’s where it all begins.
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Major Major Major Major had had a difficult time from the start.
Last week the Sentinel Bonny Baby Competition was held at Prince’s Building. And late last night the body of a dead male baby was found, neatly wrapped in a brown paper parcel, on the rubbish dump at Cocorite.
I have seen the baby and I am in a position to say that it did not win a prize in our Bonny Baby Competition.
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