no man or woman among them sang above a whisper.

Previously the boy had believed that the greatest testament to love was the guarantee—which he had had all his life—of total personal security.

But these later models were security risks, easily hacked, and the children of personnel were not meant to carry hackable devices. That’s how much my father loves me,

Bill Peek could think of more than a few Pathways boys of his acquaintance who wouldn’t hesitate to take her under the next boardwalk and put a finger inside her. And the rest. As the son of personnel, however, Bill Peek was held to a different standard.

If you lived round here, Bill Peek, you’d’ve known Maud, if you understand me correctly. You would’ve known Maud right up to the Biblical and beyond. Terrible. But Aggie’s cut from quite different sod, thank goodness!”

What a sodden dump it was! Just as everyone had warned him it would be. The only people left in England were the ones who couldn’t leave.

In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.

A white child and an Indian child, gender not important, should express deep affection in a childlike way.

Indians must see visions. White people can have the same visions if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian then the white person is Indian by proximity. White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves.

They should destroy the lives of any white women who choose to love them. All white women love Indian men. That is always the case.

brown hills, mountains, fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water. If she is compared to murky water, however, then she must have a secret.

Reason

And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart — one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself — to offer violence to its own nature — to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only — that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute.

where the wonder-stricken belfry-man sat smoking in a state of dignity and dismay. But the little chap seized him at once by the nose; gave it a swing and a pull; clapped the big chapeau-de-bras upon his head; knocked it down over his eyes and mouth; and then, lifting up the big fiddle, beat him with it so long and so soundly, that what with the belfry-man being so fat, and the fiddle being so hollow, you would have sworn that there was a regiment of double-bass drummers all beating the devil’s tattoo up in the belfry of the steeple of Vondervotteimittiss.

All people who hold sinecure offices are held in more or less respect, and as the belfry-man of Vondervotteimittiss has the most perfect of sinecures, he is the most perfectly respected of any man in the world.

usurpations