Carmen's speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors, and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can't speak shouldn't be in charge of a city, she's always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance.
[On Anger][T]he instinct of self-preservation, setting itself against everything that interferes with our pleasures and comfort. What is called temper, with its fruits of anger and strife, has its roots in the physical constitution, and is one among the sins of the flesh.[of the spirit . . .][T]he doing our will rather than His. In relation to our fellow-men it shows itself in envy, hatred, and want of love, cold neglect or harsh judging of others.[of fear . . .]The fear of God need never hinder the faith in Him. And true faith will never hinder the practical work of cleansing.
Calmly, deliberately, he moved his hands down to her breasts and molded his fingers over them. Jay inhaled sharply, and he said, "Easy, easy," as he stroked the soft mounds. "Steve, no." But her eyes were closing as warm pleasure built in her, her blood beating slowly and powerfully through her veins. His thumbs rubbed over her nipples and she quivered, her breasts beginning to tighten. "You're so soft." His voice roughened even more. "God, how I've wanted to touch you. Come here, sweetheart.
What good does it do me, after all, if an ever-watchful authority keeps an eye out to ensure that my pleasures will be tranquil and races ahead of me to ward off all danger, sparing me the need even to think about such things, if that authority, even as it removes the smallest thorns from my path, is also absolute master of my liberty and my life; if it monopolizes vitality and existence to such a degree that when it languishes, everything around it must also languish; when it sleeps, everything must also sleep; and when it dies, everything must also perish?
Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by the things they see they judge of things very different which they have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.
She looked at the produce stalls, a row of jewels in a case, the colors more subtle in the winter, a Pantone display consisting only of greens, without the raspberries and plums of summer, the pumpkins of autumn. But if anything, the lack of variation allowed her mind to slow and settle, to see the small differences between the almost-greens and creamy whites of a cabbage and a cauliflower, to wake up the senses that had grown lazy and satisfied with the abundance of the previous eight months. Winter was a chromatic palate-cleanser, and she had always greeted it with the pleasure of a tart lemon sorbet, served in a chilled silver bowl between courses.
Thus posed, the problem of unbrotherliness can oppose socialism, which uses and abuses the word bortherhood while rejecting fatherhood. Socialism has no opponent. Religions, with their transcendental content, being "not of this world", with the Kingdom of God only within us, cannot stand up to socialism. Socialism may even seem to be an implementation of Christian ethics. Only the union of sons in the name of the fathers, as a counterweight to union for the sake of progress and comfort at the expense of the fathers, exposes the immorality of socialism. To unite for the sake of one's own comfort and pleasure is the worst way of wasting one's life - intellectually, aesthetically and morally.
1) Work on one thing at a time until finished.2) Start no more new books, add no more new material to "Black Spring."3) Don't be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.4) Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!5) When you can't create you can work.6) Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.7) Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.8) Don't be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
This was no longer art: it even destroyed the harmony of the portrait itself. They were alive, they were human eyes! It seemed as if they had been cut out of a living man and set there. Here there was not that lofty pleasure which comes over the soul at the sight of an artist's work, however terrible its chosen subject; here there was some morbid, anguished feeling. 'What is it?' the artist asked himself involuntarily. 'It's nature all the same, its living nature––why, then, this strangely unpleasant feeling? Or else the slavish, literal imitation of nature is already a trespass and seems like a loud, discordant cry?