Quotes From Books

[Mind Flayer Monk]

Post interesting quotes/passages here from books you are reading or just skimming through.

[Mind Flayer Monk]

This is a short passage about General Lansdale in the Philippines after WW2 trying to put down an insurrection by the Huks (or EBritannica link).

-------
"On one occasion he (General Lansdale) accompanied a unit which captured, killed and decapitated a Huk guerrilla. Seizing the head, Lansdale began to ask it questions, to which, obviously enough, there were no answers. He grew angrier and started slapping the head, until the Filipinos piped up: 'Colonel, Colonel, it is dead. It cannot talk to you.' Lansdale rounded on them: 'No, you stupid son of a bitch! Of course it can't! But it could have, if you hadn't been so fucking stupid as to sever the head from the body!' He threw the head to the ground."
-----

From: Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh

[aldousburbank]

See Spot run.

[136 or 142]

From "The Complete Yes Minister: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by the Right Hon. James Hacker M.P"  'Edited' by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay


From the introduction:
"A final word of thanks.  We were most grateful to have had a few conversations with Sir Humphrey himself before the advancing years, without in way impairing his verbal fluency, disengaged the operation of his mind from the content of his speech."

[albrecht]

From "The Complete Yes Minister: The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister by the Right Hon. James Hacker M.P"  'Edited' by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay


From the introduction:
"A final word of thanks.  We were most grateful to have had a few conversations with Sir Humphrey himself before the advancing years, without in way impairing his verbal fluency, disengaged the operation of his mind from the content of his speech."

'Yes, Minister' was brilliant and was so friggin true about politics and was very prescient. The "Big Brother" episode I think of with all the NSA, IRS, and Obamacare databases, wiretapping, and data-mining etc. (Where the minister has to try to explain the government database that "won't be used" but also "is important.")

[Eddie Coyle]

    Gore Vidal speaking about Richard Goodwin, "an Iago in pursuit of an Othello" from Gary Wills- "The Kennedy Imprisonment".

    Jane Fonda "I identify with Israel unequivocally"..."I love Israel"..."Israel rarely makes mistakes". These quotes coming after Israel's invasion of Lebanon, summer of '82. Also likened Arafat to Hitler. From Noam Chomsky-"The Fateful Triangle".


     Obviously, Palestinian casting agents were/are in short supply.

[Étouffée]

"I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.” [/size][/color]

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"No man with a good car needs to be justified!"[/size][/color]
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― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood[/size][/font]

[Mind Flayer Monk]

    Gore Vidal speaking about Richard Goodwin, "an Iago in pursuit of an Othello"

I had to dig around on Goodwin. After reading this unenlightening wiki post (other than finding out his wife wrote Team of Rivals) I found this explanation of Goodwin:

(my bolds in the quoted passage below)
----------
"He (Tad Szulc) told Hurwitch that he had tried the thought (launching a
second 'liberation war' in Cuba to oust Castro -MFM) out on several peo­ple,
including Richard Goodwin, who had been named White House
coordinator of Cuban affairs after the Bay of Pigs. A few days later,
Szulc visited Hurwitch again and reported that he "was making good
progress with his project, and might even have a meeting" with President Kennedy
on the subject. "Foolishly;' Hurwitch wrote in his
memoir, "I thought he was boasting."

Goodwin, as Szulc and Hurwitch did not know, had fallen out of
favor and was soon to be reassigned from Kennedy's personal staff in
the White House to the State Department. With his unkempt hair,
gleaming eyes, and swarthy complexion, Goodwin was an anomaly
among the buttoned-down Kennedy men. His brilliance as a speech­
writer was widely recognized: Goodwin had been editor of the Har­vard
Law Review and a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix
Frankfurter. But in the eyes of those close to the president, this did
not compensate for his independence, ambition, and lack of reverence
for those above him. Goodwin understood that Jack Kennedy
did not stand on protocol when it came to plotting against Fidel Cas­tro;
he also understood the power of careful flattery. His praise, in a
series of job-enhancing memoranda to Kennedy, was aimed not at
the president but at his brother. On November  1,  in an "eyes only"
memorandum released years later under the Freedom of Informa­tion Act,
the young aide (young aide=Goodwin -MFM) appropriated Szulc's ideas
as his own, en­dorsing  the concept of a "command operation" to handle
an "all-out attack on the Cuban problem . . . . I believe that the Attorney
General would be the most effective commander of such an operation.
Either I or someone else should be assigned to him as Deputy for this activ-
ity." On the next day Goodwin tried again in a second memorandum,
and dropped the name of Tad Szulc. ''As for propaganda, I thought
we might ask Tad Szulc to take a leave of absence from the Times and
work on this one;' Goodwin wrote. A week later Szulc met with
Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department and spent more than an
hour afterward with the president and Goodwin in the Oval Office."
---------
From The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh

[zeebo]

Cool thread Monk.  Here's one I just read last nite that caught my attention:

"Culture is like a smog.  To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated."

from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

[Mind Flayer Monk]

Cool thread Monk.  Here's one I just read last nite that caught my attention:

"Culture is like a smog.  To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated."

from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

I just listened to this audiobook on a long drive.

[zeebo]

I just listened to this audiobook on a long drive.

I'm thinking some of it's edgy content might help keep one alert.

[Eddie Coyle]

I had to dig around on Goodwin. After reading this unenlightening wiki post (other than finding out his wife wrote Team of Rivals) I found this explanation of Goodwin:

      I haven't read Hersh's book in about 12 years, but that passage is perfect and I'm tempted to re-read again. Goodwin and Doris Kearns are extolled beyond belief in Boston by the Chris Matthews/Mike Barnicle old boy network that still thinks it's 1960. Front running opportunist is being kind to describe Goodwin, moving from host to host like the tick he was. LBJ and McCarthy were fools for letting him get involved so deeply in their camps.

[ItsOver]

"My advice to you is to start drinking heavily."  Oh wait, that was from a movie.

[Robert Ghostwolf's Ghost]

"'Every night he dreams he's holding a live fish in his hands.'"

[maureen]

"But life has such diversity, I sometimes remarkably lose eternity in the passing moment."

[basswood]

“My one and only chicken, bequeathed to me by Robinson, dreaded the noon hour the same as I did, he'd go back in with me. For three weeks the chicken lived with me like that, following me like a dog, clucking constantly, seeing snakes wherever he went. One day of extreme boredom, I ate him.” LFC

[Mind Flayer Monk]

---
"(Edward) Sellon and other young men of his generation were still free to follow a well-established pattern of sexual indulgence which stretched back beyond the days of Clive. Creating a seraglio in the Indian style had been one of Sir Matthew Mite's daydreams in The Nabob, and at least one of his kind actually did so. He rented a home in Soho Square, where he lived with his wife and six imported Indian concubines. All shared a common bedroom with the beds in a circle, allowing the nabob to make nocturnal tours. Fearful that his exotic concubines might fire the lust of London's rakes, he forbade them to walk the streets unchaperoned. His wife was extraordinarily accommodating..."
---
From Raj, the Making and Unmaking of British India by Lawrence James (1997)

The Nabob

[zeebo]

"There are few things more discomfiting than a spontaneous outburst of genuine decency from someone you're determined to dislike for no good reason."

from Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts

[Eddie Coyle]

   "The chaotic American frontier of the 1760's and 1770's, symbol of the new continent, had itself been less an unprecedented New World melting pot than a backwards stew pot of the same Protestant religious and ethnic groups -Scots, Scotch-Irish,English, Huguenot and some Germans and Dutch that had in a smaller measure already met and mingled along Ulster's own rugged 17th Century border. The new United States needed a myth and one took shape around the idea of an independent, liberated America as an altogether new kind of country"

    From The Cousins' Wars by Kevin Phillips.

[basswood]

“The omelette tasted like flannel.” ~ James Blish,  "A Case of Conscience"

[Little Hater]

[his] father the history professor had always maintained the key to understanding our culture lay in the names of Shiloh and Antietam. It was only in their aftermath that we discovered how many of our own countrymen - who spoke the same language and practiced the same religion and lived on the same carpet-like, green, undulating, limestone-ridged farmland - we would willingly kill in support of causes that were not only indefensible but had little to do with our lives.

James Lee Burke -  Rain Gods

[basswood]

“The general root of superstition: namely, that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss; and commit to memory the one, and forget and pass over the other.” ~ Francis Bacon, The Collected Works

[Camazotz Automat]

I'm about to start reading Stephen King's recently published Revival.

The dedication page struck me in just the right way and is worth posting:


This book is for some of the people who built my house:

Mary Shelley

Bram Stoker

H. P. Lovecraft

Clark Ashton Smith

Donald Wandrei

Fritz Leiber

August Derleth

Shirley Jackson

Robert Bloch

Peter Straub

And ARTHUR MACHEN, whose short novel
The Great God Pan has haunted me all my life.

[aldousburbank]

Amazing quantities of flab here. - big guts and big butts. (And big mouths behind me.) All must die. 

Neil Peart, "Ghost Rider", 2002
Describing a scene encountered in Winnemucca, Nevada.

[GeorgieForPresident2216]

The mid-century advent of particle accelerators led to a boom in the number of so-called elementary particles that physicists had discovered.  There were pions, kaons, eta mesons, rho mesons, hyperons, and more.  Willis Lamb, during his own Nobel lecture in 1955, cracked, "The finder of a new elementary particle used to be rewarded by a Nobel Prize, but such a discovery now ought to be punished by a ten-tbousand-dollar fine."
-Sean Carrol (2012), The Particle at the end of the universe, New York: Penguin Group Inc.

Hahahahahaha!

I'm such a geek.

[basswood]

..."The finder of a new elementary particle used to be rewarded by a Nobel Prize, but such a discovery now ought to be punished by a ten-tbousand-dollar fine."
-Sean Carrol (2012), The Particle at the end of the universe, New York: Penguin Group Inc.

Hahahahahaha!

I'm such a geek.

That's pretty good 

[NW Kro͞oˈsādər]

“This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken.”― Stephen R. Donaldson, The Wounded Land

[Camazotz Automat]

"I've always been a movie fan. During the 1980s I saw a lot of them, mostly on my own. I dozed off on occasion (Heathers, for instance - that one was a nodder for sure), but mostly I'd make it through no matter how stoned I was, surfing on noise and color and impossibly beautiful women in scanty clothing. Books are good, and I read my share, and TV's okay if you're stuck in a motel room during a rainstorm, but for Jamie Morton, there was nothing like a movie up there on the big screen. Just me, my popcorn, and my super-sized Coke. Plus my heroin, of course. I'd take an extra straw from the concession stand, bite it in half, and use it to snort the powder off the back of my hand. I didn't get to the needle until 1990 or '91, but I got there eventually. Most of us do. Trust me on this."

Revival by Stephen King (2014)

[Mind Flayer Monk]

----------------------
''The order for a census stated that it is being held to gather data for
administrative purposes. That's a neat phrase, but it contains catastrophe . . .
We are certain that this census is being taken  for the purpose of expelling
'nonproductive elements? And there are a great many of us now . . . .
We are all caught in a net, doomed to destruction."

(Chaim) Kaplan was not alone in fearing the census. (Adam) Czerniakow was
besieged with questions about the purpose of this count.?7 The deeply
Talmudic community, which had little left except its faith and teachings,
understood well that censuses were ominous in Jewish history.
The Bible itself taught that unless specifically ordered by God, the census
is evil because through it the enemy  will  know your strength...

On October  28, 1939,  for the Jewish people of Warsaw, everything
stopped. That day they were counted.

Throughout the day, thousands of census forms were brought to the
Jewish Community Center, generally by the house superintendents in Jewish
buildings.

The results came with almost magical speed.  In  a little more than forty­
eight hours, all the forms had been counted. By October  31,  Czerniakow had
been informed there were some  360,000  Jews in Warsaw. The exact number
was  359,827,  revealing the community's precise dimensions: Jews infancy to
age  15: . . . 46,172  men and  45,439  women; Jews aged  16-59 . . . lO4,273
men and  131,784  women; Jews aged  60  and over  . . . 13,325  men and  16,933
women; undetermined . . . only  537  men and  1,364  women. Employed . . .
155,825.  Unemployed, including infants and invalids  . . . 204,002.  Artisans
. . .  73,435.  The Germans even knew that many Jewish artisans were practic­
ing without a license by comparing the census results with the actual number
of artisan licenses previously issued by the local authorities.
...
The Nazi quantification and regimentation of Jewish demographics in
Warsaw and indeed all of Poland was nothing less than spectacular-an
almost unbelievable feat. Savage conditions, secrecy, and lack of knowledge by
the victims would forever obscure the details of exactly how the Nazis man­aged
to tabulate the cross-referenced information on  360,000  souls within
forty-eight hours.
But this much is known: The Third Reich possessed only one method
of tabulating censuses: Dehomag's Hollerith system. Moreover, IBM was in
Poland, headquartered in Warsaw. In fact, the punch card print shop was just
yards from the Warsaw Ghetto at Rymarska Street  6.  That's where they pro­duced
more than  20  million cards."
--------------------------------

From IBM and the Holocaust. By Edwin Black. 2001.

[WildCard]

"The internal dialogue is what grounds us. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so. The passageway into the world of sorcerers opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off the internal dialogue.

"To change our idea of the world is the crux of sorcery, and stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it. The rest is just padding. Nothing of what we do, with the exception of stopping the internal dialogue, can by itself change anything in us, or in our idea of the world. "

Tales of Power, Castaneda