“To speak of yesterday, today, and tomorrow is simply to give different names to the same illusion.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
Category: Lit & Crit
“While we are all made from the same all too human substance, the same flesh, bones, blood, skin and laughter, tears and sweat, some of us become cowards and others heroes, some are aggressive and others pacifists.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“The time for miracles has either passed or has not yet come, and besides, miracles, genuine miracles, whatever people say, are not such a good idea, if it means distorting logic and the very nature of things in order to prove them.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Conflicts between fathers and sons, the inheritance of guilt, the disavowal of kith and kin, the sacrifice of innocents, go back a long way in time and promise to be endless.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“In truth I say unto you that many things in this world could be known before it is too late, if husbands and wives were only to confide in each other as husbands and wives.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Life chooses itself for us, without asking for our consent to its decisions.” – Mikhail Iossel, “All of It”
“Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.” – Henry James, Sr., writing to his sons Henry and William (quoted in José Donoso, El obsceno pajaro de la noche)
“Good and Evil do not exist in themselves, each is simply the absence of the other.” – José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (trans. Giovanni Pontiero)
“Ninth Air Force – A XIX Tactical Air Command squadron uniquely effects surrender of a number of German ground troops. Germans on roads being strafed by the squadron northeast of Carrouges, France, wave white flags, whereupon planes buzz the road and shepherd enemy troops into a column which then proceeds to US lines to surrender.” – Kit C. Carter and Robert Mueller, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II Combat Chronology, 1941 – 1945
“The Confederacy was not just a separatist movement, it was an existential threat to the very idea of freedom, liberty, the pursuit of happiness—it could not be abided, and that conflict left so many dead that the streets of Gettysburg were once littered with so many corpses that it was weeks getting them into the mass graves. The town was covered in the rotting dead and the stench of them, all lying underneath the Pennsylvania sun. . . . a town where, once the armies moved on to fight again elsewhere, there weren’t enough people left alive to wash the blood from the streets and the gore from the walls—that’s what civil war means.” – Noah Caldwell-Gervais, The Lincoln Highway: Across America on the First Transcontinental Motor Route (emphasis in original)
“He farting from the bathroom, she farting from the bedroom, like two mooses calling in the night.” – Lydia Davis, “May, Excerpts from a Journal, January to June, 1997 ”
“Sometimes I’m grateful that no one uses my washcloth. And that I can go to the store and buy brand new sponges at any time . . .” – Lydia Davis, “March, Excerpts from a Journal, January to June, 1997 ” (ellipsis and emphasis in original)
“1 B-17, upon an alleged submarine sighting, drops 4 depth charges and 1 bomb whereupon a whale breaks water. Weather cancels other missions.” – Eleventh Air Force Operations, January 30, 1943, U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, Combat Chronology (compiled by Kit C. Carter & Robert Mueller)
“Ambition and the blessed simplicities of action don’t always quarter in comfort.” – Regina Corrado and Ted Mann, “True Colors,” Deadwood
“To work for crumbs or to keep from the lash says maybe a slave’s what you are.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“Change ain’t lookin’ for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.” – David Milch and Regina Corrado, “I Am Not the Fine Man You Take Me For,” Deadwood
“No nation is rich enough or productive enough to supply and maintain battlefronts where there is no longer a battle.” – War Department “Reports on Overseas Construction” (quoted by Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943)
“Luke’s description in Acts of the early church’s communism of goods in Jerusalem is one that good Christians have striven heroically for the better part of two millennia to pretend not to notice.” – David Bentley Hart, “Notes on Authorship,” The New Testament: A Translation
“Pain or damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man, and give some back.” – Jody Worth, “E. B. Was Left Out,” Deadwood
“The Creator, in His infinite wisdom, salted His works so that where gold was, there also you’d find rumor. Though He decreed just as firm that the opposite wouldn’t always hold.” – Ted Mann, “Requiem for a Gleet,” Deadwood
“Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.” – Ted Mann, “Sold Under Sin,” Deadwood
“I mean, you—you gotta behave like a grown fuckin’ man, huh? You gotta shut the fuck up. Don’t be sorry, don’t look fuckin’ back, because . . . believe me, no one gives a fuck.” – Ricky Jay, “Jewel’s Boot Is Made for Walking,” Deadwood
“As a base of operations, you cannot beat a fuckin’ saloon.” – Malcolm MacRury, “Plague,” Deadwood
“During the first nineteen months of its participation in World War II, the U.S. Army purchased almost 950,000 trucks, nineteen times the number it had procured during the corresponding period of World War I. From Pearl Harbor to V-J Day it procured for its own and Allied forces some 84,000 tanks, 2.2 million trucks, 6.2 million rifles, 350,000 artillery pieces, .5 billion rounds of ground artillery ammunition, 41 billion rounds of small arms ammunition. It shipped overseas 127 million measurement tons of cargo, and 7.3 million troops and other passengers.” – Richard M. Leighton and Robert W. Coakley, Global Logistics and Strategy: 1940-1943
“It is better and cheaper to have a strong Army and not need it than it is to need a strong Army and not have it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“Any politician should be put in jail who votes for an appropriation bill and fails to vote the tax to pay for it.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“I can see it in a vision. It comes to haunt me at night. I am standing there knee deep in the water and all around me as far as the eye can see are dead men, floating like a school of dynamited fish. They are all floating face up with their eyes wide open and their skins a ghastly white. They are looking at me as they float by and they are saying, ‘Patton, you bastard, it’s your fault. You did this to me. You killed me.’” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
“The early Christians were (in the strictly technical sense) communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days are in fact taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime.” – Richard Bentley Hart, “Introduction” to The New Testament: A Translation (emphasis in original)
“‘Knowledge is power,’ but to a degree only. Its possession per se will raise a man to mediocrity, but not to distinction.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “The Secret of Victory”
“The quickest way to get to heaven is to advance across open ground swept by effective enemy anti-tank fire.” – Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr., “Use of Armored Formations, Letter of Instruction No. 3, 20 May 1944 ”