The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and ...deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits in thunder, Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,... From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jea...lous of the apartment And all that it contains, myself and spinach In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder At his own astonished becoming...."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I started out by believing God for a newer car than the one I was driving. I started out believing God for a nicer apartment than ...I had. Then I moved up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the movie woman's world is designed to remind us that a woman may live in a mansion, an apartment, or a yurt, but it's all the... same thing because what she really lives in is the body of a woman, and that body is allowed to occupy space only according to the dictates of polite society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It so happened that, a few weeks later, "Old Ernie" [Ernest Hemingway] himself was using my room in New York as a hide-out from li...terary columnists and reporters during one of his rare stopover visits between Africa and Key West. On such all-too-rare occasions he lends an air of virility to my dainty apartment which I miss sorely after he has gone and all the furniture has been repaired.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whoever today speaks of human existence in terms of power, efficiency, and "historical tasks" ... is an actual or potential assass...in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You feel you could pucker up and blow away the miles between 49 Bard Road [Brixton] and that apartment in New York where I could b...e tomorrow morning, if the apartment still existed, if Peregrine still existed, if the past weren't deeper than the sea, more difficult to cross.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I used to like this town.... Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good-hearted and peacefu...l.... Now ... we've got the big money, the sharpshooters, the percentage workers, the fast dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit--and Cleveland. We've got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can think of many amusing parallels. For example, "the Borough of ... announces: Miss Jones, the splendid principal of our gramm...ar school, has been offered the position of cook and housekeeper by the family next door, and so we feel obliged to dismiss her and make room for one of the young girls just graduated from training college. Miss Jones may not care to be a cook but since she has that privilege we don't think it right for her to continue to teach, valuable as her services are to the community." Or, "the Educational Committee of ... Borough has adopted a rule to employ no more men teachers who have vegetable gardens, and to notify those men now in its employ who possess vegetable gardens or are contemplating acquiring one that they will be dismissed. We are actuated by the following reasons: (1) The place of a man with a vegetable garden is at home working in his garden. (2) We feel, as a general rule, that a man with a vegetable garden will, to some extent, suffer in his efficiency as a teacher. We have no evidence of this; in fact the vegetable gardeners whom we are about to dismiss are among our best teachers, but nevertheless, we feel that as a general policy our rule is sound from an educational standpoint. (3) A man with a garden will not starve. Therefore, it is unfair to continue paying him a salary as a teacher while men who have no vegetable gardens are waiting for posts [ellipses in original].LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »