Tag: quotes

Book Passage of the Week (12/12/2015) – from Christopher Hitchens

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Tuesday will mark four years since Christopher Hitchens died.

You can read plenty about his career here and it’s always a pleasure to listen to him talk. My favorite is where he shreds Jerry Falwell:

He was a prolific writer too, whether it was exposing Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger or religion. He also supported the Iraq War and never backed down. There’s something to admire about that.

The quote below is from god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It was one of several atheist books released during the time, along with Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Christopher Hitchens is easily the best (and most tolerable) of their little group.

Anyways…

Nothing optional–from homosexuality to adultery — is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.

And that reminds me: whenever I hear Rick Perry ramble on about homosexuality, I wonder if the bathroom tiles still hurt his knees or if he’s gotten used to it by now.

Book Passage of the Week (12/4/2015) – from Child of God, by Cormac McCarthy

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Let’s look at some prose this week:

The yellow trees on the mountain subsided into yellow and flame and to ultimate nakedness. An early winter fell, a cold wind sucked among the black and barren branches. Alone in the empty shell of a house the squatter watched through the moteblown glass a rimshard of bonecolored moon come cradling up over the black balsams on the ridge, ink trees a facile hand had sketched against the paler dark of winter heavens.

January 2008 at the college bookstore. I was thinking about adding another class, when  I spotted Child of God on the bookshelf.

I’d found my new class.

I had read The Road the year before, which I discovered through the old Rudius Media Writing Forum (and isn’t a shame that place shut down? Now we’re stuck with the Absolute Write funhouse), and that book made me a huge Cormac McCarthy fan. I don’t like all his books — Cities of the Plain was awful, and I never finished The Crossing — but when he gets it right, he gets it right.

Here’s one more from Child of God. Because why not?

And you could see among the faces a young girl with candyapple on her lips and her eyes wide. Her pale hair smelled of soap, womanchild from beyond the years, rapt below the sulphur glow and pitchlight of some medieval fun fair. A lean skylong candle skewered the black pools in her eyes. Her fingers clutched. In the flood of this breaking brimstone galaxy she saw the man with the bears watching her and she edged closer to the girl by her side and brushed her hair with two fingers quickly.

On a related note, it seems Christmas is coming early in 2016.