Read through the most famous quotes by topic #vie
In the window were displayed the covers of several pornographic videos. “The Story of O-Positive,” Armod said aloud. “I don’t understand. Is that like HIV positive?” “Idiot,” Mordr said, slapping Armod lightly upside the head. “Ah, but I am in the mood for good literature,” Ivak said with a grin. “How about these? A Tale of Two Vampyres. The Stakes of Wrath. Or that one.” He pointed to the left. “Great Neckspectations.” “I still don’t understand.” Armod was frowning, although his white skin did color when he craned his head from side to side and realized what one of the pictures depicted. “Now me, I always did like a good classic mystery movie,” Sigurd added, also grinning. “A Tomb with a View.” Vikar worried that they were embarrassing Alex, but then she said, “My favorite is Vlad Really Did Impale Her.” His brothers glanced at him, then Alex, and burst out laughing. “Mayhap I will not kill her after all,” Mordr declared, giving Alex a wink that did not sit well with Vikar. Not one bit. “Can we buy some?” Armod asked. ↗
Everyone knows that children and teens want to blend in and follow the crowd. And from whom do they learn this lesson? Adults, of course. Let's face it: Americans follow the herd. If you want to be successful, we are told in myriad ways, conformity is the way to go. Look at corporate America, with its "team player" ethic and all the strict rules delineating what you can and cannot wear on Casual Fridays. Consider the cycles of women's fashion, which dictate when square-toed, chunky-heeled shoes are out and when pointy-toed, ankle-straining stilettos are in. And what about best-seller lists and electoral horse-race polls and movie box-office postings? Everyone wants to know what everyone else is reading and seeing and thinking--so that they can go out and read and see and think the very same things themselves. If adults possess this tendency to efface themselves in this way, teenagers have it magnified to the thousandth degree. But studying and following the fashions of the times are not enough; teens also feel a need to be associated with fashionable people--the popular people. Their goal is to crack the glass ceiling that separates mere mortals from the "in" crowd. If they are unsuccessful, and most are, they console themselves with a clique of their own. Even an unpopular clique is, the thinking goes, is better than no clique at all. ↗
There are a few other things. Weesee, when she used that word, Loup-garou, was right, at least in a sense. The word means werewolf.' Whitaker protested with a gasp of astonishment. 'They don't exist,' he said sharply, jolted by a memory of old movies. The doctor replied quickly: 'No, of course not. Not that way, not like some monster, a vampire or some such' 'What's the matter with him?' The doctor spoke softly, unwilling to stop until he had talked out the whole scope of the problem. 'It is a type of encephalitis. Uncommon, but there, as solidly classified in medical literature as measles. Late effects of acute infectious encephalitis, lycanthropy, to be exact. Once it was called a form of monomania. Morbus lupinus is another name.' 'You will have to hunt him down. Then he will have to be kept in a cell, for a long time, under strong drugs, probably until he dies.' De Glew touched his throat, cleared it slightly. 'The alternative is that you hunt him down and kill him. He will kill, Aaron.' 'Won't it pass?' asked Whitaker incredulously. 'I don't think so, not permanently. And pass for how long? Suppose he is only mad one day out of four.' The doctor paused. 'Or when the moon is full. Or when he sees it full in his mind's eye. ↗
He said that for those who hadn't been to California, what it was most like was an enchanted island. The spitting image. Just like in the movies, but better. People live in houses, not apartment buildings, he said, and then he embarked on a comparison of houses (one-story, at most two-story), and four- or five-story buildings where the elevator is broken one day and out of order the next. The only way buildings compared favorably to houses was in terms of proximity. A neighborhood of buildings makes distances shorter, he said. Everything is closer. You can go walking to buy groceries or you can walk to your local tavern (here he winked at Reverend Foster), or the local church you belong to, or a museum. In other words, you don't need to drive. You don't even need a car. And here he recited a list of statistics on fatal car accidents in a county of Detroit and a county of Los Angeles. And that's even considering that cars are made in Detroit, he said, not Los Angeles. ↗
The leaves were long, the grass was green, The hemlock-umbels tall and fair, And in the glade a light was seen Of stars in shadow shimmering. Tinuviel was dancing there To music of a pipe unseen, And light of stars was in her hair, And in her raiment glimmering. There Beren came from mountains cold, And lost he wandered under leaves, And where the Elven-river rolled. He walked along and sorrowing. He peered between the hemlock-leaves And saw in wonder flowers of gold Upon her mantle and her sleeves, And her hair like shadow following. Enchantment healed his weary feet That over hills were doomed to roam; And forth he hastened, strong and fleet, And grasped at moonbeams glistening. Through woven woods in Elvenhome She lightly fled on dancing feet, And left him lonely still to roam In the silent forest listening. He heard there oft the flying sound Of feet as light as linden-leaves, Or music welling underground, In hidden hollows quavering. Now withered lay the hemlock-sheaves, And one by one with sighing sound Whispering fell the beechen leaves In the wintry woodland wavering. He sought her ever, wandering far Where leaves of years were thickly strewn, By light of moon and ray of star In frosty heavens shivering. Her mantle glinted in the moon, As on a hill-top high and far She danced, and at her feet was strewn A mist of silver quivering. When winter passed, she came again, And her song released the sudden spring, Like rising lark, and falling rain, And melting water bubbling. He saw the elven-flowers spring About her feet, and healed again He longed by her to dance and sing Upon the grass untroubling. Again she fled, but swift he came. Tinuviel! Tinuviel! He called her by her elvish name; And there she halted listening. One moment stood she, and a spell His voice laid on her: Beren came, And doom fell on Tinuviel That in his arms lay glistening. As Beren looked into her eyes Within the shadows of her hair, The trembling starlight of the skies He saw there mirrored shimmering. Tinuviel the elven-fair, Immortal maiden elven-wise, About him cast her shadowy hair And arms like silver glimmering. Long was the way that fate them bore, O'er stony mountains cold and grey, Through halls of iron and darkling door, And woods of nightshade morrowless. The Sundering Seas between them lay, And yet at last they met once more, And long ago they passed away In the forest singing sorrowless. ↗
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. (writing about US President Warren G. Harding) ↗
Islamic science is related profoundly to the Islamic world view. It is rooted deeply in knowledge based upon the unity of Allah or al-tawhid and a view of the universe in which Allah’s Wisdom and Will rule and in which all things are interrelated reflecting unity on the cosmic level. In contrast, Western science is based on considering the natural world as a reality which is separate from both Allah and the higher levels of being. At best, Allah is accepted as the creator of the world, as a mason who has built a house which now stand on its own. His intrusion into the running of the world and His continuous sustenance of it are not accepted in the modern scientific world view. ↗
Though he never actually joined it, he was close to some civilian elements of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which was the most Communist (and in the rather orthodox sense) of the Palestinian formations. I remember Edward once surprising me by saying, and apropos of nothing: 'Do you know something I have never done in my political career? I have never publicly criticized the Soviet Union. It’s not that I terribly sympathize with them or anything—it's just that the Soviets have never done anything to harm me, or us.' At the time I thought this a rather naïve statement, even perhaps a slightly contemptible one, but by then I had been in parts of the Middle East where it could come as a blessed relief to meet a consecrated Moscow-line atheist-dogmatist, if only for the comparatively rational humanism that he evinced amid so much religious barking and mania. It was only later to occur to me that Edward's pronounced dislike of George Orwell was something to which I ought to have paid more attention. ↗
I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know him. He was a brave and decent man, who in a series of articles in the London Times had floated the first-ever trial balloon for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. 'Well tell him he is a traitor,' barked my host. 'And tell him we have only one way with those who betray us.' The rest of the interview passed as so many Middle Eastern interviews do: too many small cups of coffee served with too much fuss; too many unemployed heavies standing about with nothing to do and nobody to do it with; too much ugly furniture, too many too-bright electric lights; and much too much faux bonhomie. The only political fact I could winnow, from Abu Nidal's vainglorious claims to control X number of 'fighters' in Y number of countries, was that he admired the People's Republic of China for not recognizing the State of Israel. I forget how I got out of his office. ↗
#arafat #china #interviews #iraq #israel
The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it. ↗
