It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

Mailstrom

I see the universe, Joe, as a kind of sandstorm in outer space with winds of mega-hurricane velocity, but instead of grains of sand it's shards and splinters of glass.

Mailstrom / belladonna

"The Women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were it's only victims."

Mailstrom / cleansing

Take your cup down to the Caspian, dip, and drink. It did not always taste of salt. Yahweh's watery slaughter may have purified the earth, but it left his seas a ruin, brackish with pagan blood and the tears of wicked orphans.

Mailstrom / atropine

I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff— I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

Operation Swamp 0000

To: The States, or any one of them, or any city of The States, Resist much, Obey little; Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved; once fully enslaved,no nation, state, city, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

Hollywood In Memoriam

As he turned to take the ball, a dam burst against the side of his head and a hand grenade shattered his stomach.

Mailstrom / cleaver

"I HEARTILY ACCEPT the motto, — "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.

Mailstrom / wretched

He was in the land all right, well away, in orbit, and I knew what it was like, having tried it like everybody else had done, but at this time I'd got to thinking it was a cowardly sort of a beschch, O my brothers. You'd lay there after you'd drunk the old moloko...

Mailstrom / wetwork

Will tourists someday stare mystified at the rusting hulks of New York's skyscrapers, much as we stare today at the jungle-overgrown ruins of Maya cities?

Cedocore / RSWTB

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Judson Ogram / Moira Waag

Have you ever heard the term 'hostages'? That's the latest punishment for saboteurs. It's the most horrible thing you can imagine. Leading citizens--innocent people--are taken prisoner to await their execution. If the Gestapo can't find the saboteur, they simply grab five hostages and line them up against the wall. You read the announcements of their death in the paper, where they're referred to as 'fatal accidents.' - October 9, 1942

Secure Broadcast Informatics

There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out.

Mailstrom / corrida

He's now living in a little apartment somewhere in New York City, and he's a part-time social worker working with teenage drop-outs. Very promising scholar—if he'd done what he was told, he would have gone on and right now he'd be a professor somewhere at some big university. Instead he's working part-time with disturbed teenaged kids for a couple thousand dollars a year. That's a lot better than a death squad, it's true—it's a whole lot better than a death squad. But those are the techniques of control that are around.

Mailstrom / spore

You couldn't blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.

The fact was, Earth's economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It was a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.

Mailstrom / fratricide

Rattlesnakes! Don’t take chances with ’em, an’ if they argue, shoot first. If a kid’ll kill a cop, what’ll the men do? Thing is, get tougher’n they are. Treat ‘em rough. Scare ‘em.

The Price of Treason

Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one...

Mailstrom / regret

Heather's favourite number is two. She has two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, two hands, and two feet. Heather has two pets: a ginger-colored cat named Gingersnap and a big black dog named Midnight. Heather also has two mommies: Mama Kate and Mama Jane.

Mailstrom / sickle

At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the girl office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk.

Mailstrom / slander

For your hospitality our sincerest thanks, and for your offer of professional assistance our grateful acceptance. Terms: cash on delivery, up to and not exceeding one fourteenth of total profits (if any); all traveling expenses guaranteed in any event; funeral expenses to be defrayed by us or our representatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for.

Another Version of the Truth

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

The Water Turned to Blood

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell" -- and tore it up.

Secure Broadcast Informatics

I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth.

Mailstrom / tumbrel

GALLIMARD. Butterfly, Butterfly...(He forces himself to turn away, as the image of Song fades out, and talks to us.)The limits of my cell are such: four-and-a-half meters by five.

Mailstrom / widow

I had miscalculated with Luce. I thought after talking to me he would decide that I was normal and leave me alone. But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everyone would leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people - especially doctors - had doubts about normality. They weren’t sure normality was up to the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

Mailstrom / parasite

But the compassion lasted for only a few minutes. He understood it all, knew he could do nothing about it any longer, and was not even tempted. What was the use? He sighed and the acuteness of his mood slipped out with his breath. There were some things you could never fix. It was too mixed-up. A man had to get out by himself or he became like Hennessey, worrying over every gimcrack in his life.

Mailstrom / venom

Mostly out of laziness, I decide to start my low-wage life in the town nearest to where I actually live, Key West, Florida, which with a population of about 25,000 is elbowing its way up to the status of a genuine city. The downside of familiarity, I soon realize, is that it's not easy to go from being a consumer, thoughtlessly throwing money around in exchange for groceries and movies and gas, to being a worker in the very same place. I am terrified, especially at the beginning, of being recognized by some friendly business owner or erstwhile neighbor and having to stammer out some explanation of my project. Happily, though, my fears turn out to be entirely unwarranted: during a month of poverty and toil, no one recognizes my face or my name, which goes unnoticed and for the most part unuttered. In this parallel universe where my father never got out of the mines and I never got through college, I am 'baby,' 'honey,' 'blondie,' and, most commonly, 'girl.'

Mailstrom / gasoline

On June 13, 1910, Arthur James Balfour lectured the House of Commons on 'the problems with which we have to deal in Egypt.' 'These,' he said, 'belong to a whole different category than those affecting the Isle of Wight or West Riding of Yorkshire.'

Mailstrom / flense

We shall best understand the probable course of natural selection by taking the case of a country undergoing some physical change, for instance, of climate. The proportional numbers of its inhabitants would almost immediately undergo a change, and some species might become extinct.

Judson Ogram / John Ferminger

Arawak men and women, naked, tawny and full of wonder, emerged from their villages onto the island's beaches and swam out to get a closer look at the strange big boat. When Columbus and his sailors came ashore carrying swords, speaking oddly, the Arawaks ran to greet them, brought them food, water, gifts. He later wrote of them in his log: They brought us...and many other things. They are well built, with good bodies and handsome features. They do not bear arms...With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.

Another Version of the Truth / Revisonism

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Operation Chip Sweep

BOB: [to David/Bud and Bill] 'You are charged with descration of a public building and the intentional use of prohibited paint colors in violation of The Pleasantville Code of Conduct and "Laws of Common Decency." Do you admit that on the night of May 1 you did consciously and willfully apply the following FORBIDDEN paint colors to the North Wall of the Pleasantville Police Station: Red, Pink, Vermilion, Puce, Chartreuse, Umber, Blue, Aqua, Ox Blood, Green, Peach, Crimson, Yellow, Olive and Magenta?'

One Country at a Time

...I felt fear's echo, and along with that I felt the unhinged, uncontrollable joy which had been its accompaniment and opposite face, joy which had broken out sometimes in those days like Northern Lights across black sky...

Mailstrom / bitter

Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won't have to be afraid all the time.

Free Rebel Art

There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of fall mornings...

Grace the Teacher & Red Horse Vector

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names. I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground. I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.

US Wiretap

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead!

Mailstrom / infarction

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack.

Mailstrom / pliers

The decades - Fiyero thought, in love with her or at least so frightened for her that he could mistake it for love -- the decades looked on and didn't see her passing. They stared from their fixed mounts across at each other and didn't see the revolution striding between them, on her way to destiny.

Judson Ogram / Moira Waag