Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you've half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up y...our nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you're doing a hundred miles an hour in a suburban side street.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
pulling off the fat diamond engagement ring, pulling off the elopement wedding ring,... and holding them, clicking them in thumb and forefinger, the indent of twenty-five years, like a tiny rip leaving its mark....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.... (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be all right, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don't want children?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Diddy-Wah-Diddy ... is a place of no work and no worry for man or beast. The road to it is so crooked that a mule pulling a load o...f fodder can eat off the back of the wagon as he plods along. All curbstones are chairs, and all food is already cooked. Baked chickens and sweet potato pies, with convenient knives and forks, drift along crying, 'Eat me! Eat me!'LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is ... useful to distinguish between the pornographic, condemned in every society, and the bawdy, the ribald, the shared vulgar...ities and jokes, which are the safety valves of most social systems. Pornography is a most doubtful safety valve. In extreme cases it may feed the perverted imagination of the doomed man who starts by pulling a little girl's braid and ends by cutting off a little girl's head, as each increasing stimulus loses its effectiveness and must be replaced by a more extreme one. This is particularly true of the pornography primarily designed to be brooded over in secret. But is quite otherwise with the music hall jokes, the folk ribaldry at a wedding, the innocent smut of the smoking rooms, where men who are perennially faithful to their wives exchange stories which release explosive laughter. Pornography does not lead to laughter, it leads to deadly serious pursuit of sexual satisfaction divorced from personality and from every other meaning. The uproarious laugh of the group who recognize a common dilemma--the laughter of a group of women at the story of the intractable unborn who refused to budge and merely shivered under the effects of the quart of ice cream hopefully eaten by its poor mother, the laughter of a group of men at the story of the bride who asked to be "frightened" a fourth time--is the laughter of human beings who are making the best of the imperfect social arrangements within which their life here on earth is conducted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The next moment he was "showing off" with all his might--cuffing boys, pulling hair, making faces--in a word, using every art that... seemed likely to fascinate a girl and win her applause.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
People who begin sentences with "I may be old-fashioned but--" are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the t...ime would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Medusa, come, we'll turn him into stone," they shouted all together glaring down, "how wrong we were to let off Theseus lightly!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »