#235

“Lo mejor de la santidad son las tentaciones.” (Valle-Inclán, 1963: 21).

VALLE-INCLÁN Ramón Del (1963). Sonata De Primavera Y Sonata De Estío. Madrid: Editorial Espasa-Calpe.

#234

“The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn't look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh boy – they sure did picked up the wrong guy to lynch that time!

And that thought had a brother: 'There are right people to lynch.' Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had, He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn't possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was a thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privilege of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections” (id, 75-76).

#233

“They were trying to re-invent themselves and their universe. Science-fiction was a big help (...) He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoievsky. 'But that isn't enough anymore'” (id, 70-71).

#232

“He became slightly unstuck in time, saw the alte movie backwards, then forwards again. It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.

The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded American, though, and some of the bombers were still in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new” (id, 54).

#231

“GOD GRANT ME

THE SERENITY TO ACCEPT

THE THINGS I CANNOT CHANGE,

COURAGE

TO CHANGE THE THINGS I CAN,

AND WISDOM ALWAYS

TO TELL THE

DIFFERENCE”

(id, 46).

#230

“When a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly fir people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future always have existed, always will exist” (Vonnegut, 1979: 25).

VONNEGUT, Kurt (1979). Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade. A Duty-dance with Death. St. Albans: Triad/Panther Books.

#229

“Dark meat, hams gigantic, chest of a smallish horse, plaited with muscle. Were men built like that, he thought: run fifty miles an hour, leap twelve-foot fences, probably still be consuming each other. Truly eating the Enemy's flesh. Difficult tow age modern war, too much flesh destroyed. Everything more personal. Man as he's built now is too puny for his own ego. Flesh the color of the feline. Sweetish, it must be. Sickening. Filthy animals, all of us. Deserve extinction. Except for the brain, thank god. Have to give credit when due. Too much the killer though. Incredibly oversexed. Copulate with anything that will stand still. Two three times a day. Fifty, sixty years of the two-backed beast” (id, 197-198).

#228

“Stealing ins not only supposed to be to be unprofitable and selfish but unmanly and unpatriotic. Stealing something as little and helpless as a bull elk, anyway. Big stealing is something else, but it always happens to big men and they always get caught or ruined. The little man confesses, pleading a lapse of memory, bad health, confusion, on order to prove himself above the littleness of the thing he tried to take home in his lunchpail. The policeman is your friend and the laws are your laws and if in this land you can't tighten enough guts to find an opportunity, then you're not a man at all, you're a pissant. Or crazy. Worse. You can be different, but only if you're different like in everyone else in your area is different” (id, 112-113).

#227

“There sat a coyote, calf-eater, lamb-stealer, fawn-killer and hamstringer – glaring across an old dead cow as if to say: Fuckyou buddy. With or without the words you talk and the gun you pack, I'm ten times the animal you are” (id, 93).

#226

“The entire timber business was a harvest designed to keep the government busy, keep a few dozen or so rich men rich, provide hundreds of jobs for the hicks – and a few lieutenentcies (...) of course, it provided, too, for schools like the one in his small town where he had been taught in twelve compulsive years to read, write and believe. What a hick he had been. Fuck them” (id, 47-48).

#225

“They would listen to America groping for answers, trembling with outrage, pity, compassion, confusion – old men with shaky voices indignant over how things had changed, young kids earnestly delivering the most common clichés as if they had invented them that very instant” (Shetzline, 1969: 21).

SHETZLINE, David (1969). Heckletooth 3. New York, Toronto: Random House.

#224

“Any biography is chance, and, beginning at conception, chance – the tyranny of contingency – is everything” (Roth, 2010: 242-243).

ROTH, Philip (2010). Nemesis. London: Jonathan Cape.

#223

“A fool in love like that will blow
The sun and moon and all the stars
To amuse his sweetheart an hour or so.” (id, 101)

#222

“(...) While it bubbled away

I could build a thousand bridges, I daresay.

Not only art, not only science

Are needful for it, also patience.

Quiet spirits work for years, only long length

Of time will give a subtle fermentation strength.” (id, 82)

#221

“Go on, despise science and reason,
Highest of all the powers that humans have,
And only let the lying spirit give
You strength in works of magic and illusion.
Then without question you are mine –
Fate's gift to him's a spirit always driving
On and on, allowed free reign,
And in its headlong striving
It overleaps the joys of earthly living.” (id, 62)

#220

“The way you look at things, my friend

Is just the usual way they get looked at.

We need a cleverer way than that

Before life's pleasures end” (id, 61).

#219

“Fire and blood we have and copious

Birds and beasts and gulphs and rocky tors.

Whithin the girdle of these walls confined

Pace out Creation's whole round

And with a measured haste propel

Yourselves from heaven through the world to hell” (Goethe, 2005: 10).

GOETHE, Johann von (2005). Faust, Part I. Translated by David Constantine. London: Penguin Books.