Hostage is a crucifying aloneness. It is a silent, screaming slide into the bowels of ultimate despair. Hostage is a man hanging b...y his fingernails over the edge of chaos, feeling his fingers slowly straightening. Hostage is the humiliating stripping away of every sense and fibre of body and mind and spirit that make us what we are. Hostage is a mutant creation filled with fear, self-loathing, guilt and death-wishing. But he is a man, a rare, unique and beautiful creation of which these things are no part.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his ow...n death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The father of a daughter is nothing but a high-class hostage. A father turns a stony face to his sons, berates them, shakes his an...tlers, paws the ground, snorts, runs them off into the underbrush, but when his daughter puts her arm over his shoulder and says, "Daddy, I need to ask you something," he is a pat of butter in a hot frying pan.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hereditary monarchy offers numerous advantages for America. It is the only form of government able to unify a heterogeneous people.... Thanks to centuries of dynastic marriage, the family tree of every royal house is an ethnic grab bag with something for everybody. We need this badly; America is the only country in the world where you can suffer culture shock without leaving home. We can't go on much longer depending upon disasters like Pearl Harbor and the Iranian hostage-taking to "bring us together."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If I were to be taken hostage, I would not plead for release nor would I want my government to be blackmailed. I think certain gov...ernment officials, industrialists and celebrated persons should make it clear they are prepared to be sacrificed if taken hostage. If that were done, what gain would there be for terrorists in taking hostages?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While the system of holding people in hostage is as old as the oldest war, a fresher note is introduced when a tyrannic state is a...t war with its own subjects and may hold any citizen in hostage with no law to restrain it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A woman hostage will call a young thief "hero"... and look at him with love, even if she's lost her mind with grief because her family has been slaughtered. As far as virtues go, who can hold a grudge?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A lover is never a completely self-reliant person viewing the world through his own eyes, but a hostage to a certain delusion. He ...becomes a perjurer, all his thoughts and emotions being directed with reference, not to an accurate and just appraisal of the real world but rather to the safety and exaltation of his loved one, and the madness with which he pursues her, transmogrifying his attention, blinds him like a victim.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »