Hungry people have the cunning of wild beasts.
I haven’t found a drug yet that can get you anywhere near as high as sitting at a desk writing.
I was thinking; my mind was running at top speed, scanning and sorting my options. They ranged all the way from Dumb and Dangerous to Crazy, Evil, and utterly wrong from the start.
They were professionally deviant, but they had a few things in common. They depended, mostly from habit, on newspapers and magazines for the bulk of their income; their lives were geared to long chances and sudden movement; and they claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.
Assassins, like politicians and journalists, are not attracted to losers.
I beat him like a mad dog with mange every time I got a chance, and I am proud of it. He was scum.
Well,” he said. “I hope to God I never make forty – I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.
There was no moon, but I could hear the surf a few yards in front of us. I spread my filthy cord coat on the sand for a pillow, then fell down and went to sleep.
It was almost May. I knew that New York was getting warm now, that London was wet, that Rome was hot – and I was on Vieques, where it was always hot and where New York and London and Rome were just names on a map.
You have to be very mean to get a laugh on the campaign trail. There is no such thing as paranoia.
Superstar politicians and superstar quarterbacks have the same kind of delicate egos, and people who life on that level grow very accustomed to very thin, rarified air. They have trouble breathing in the lower altitudes; and if they can’t breath right, they can’t function.
It occurred to me one evening, as I sat by myself in Al’s patio, that a man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long. I’d been doing it for ten years and I had a feeling that my reserve was running low.
But instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the framework, for good or ill. They may not have an answer, but at least they are still on their feet.
Sunday is not a good day for traveling in the South. Most public places are closed – especially the bars and taverns – in order that the denizens of this steamy, atavistic region will not be distracted from church. Sunday is the Lord’s day, and in the South he still has clout – or enough, at least, so that most folks won’t cross him in public. And those few who can’t make it to church will likely stay home by the fan, with iced tea, and worship him in their own way.
Art is long and life is short, and success is very far off.” – J. Conrad.
It is entirely conceivable – given the known effects of Ibogaine – that Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs. We.
Sending Muskie against Nixon would have been like sending a three-toed sloth out to seize turf from a wolverine.
The scene I had just witnessed brought back a lot of memories – not of things I have done but of things I have failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back.
This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling “conciousness expansion” without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously. After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him... but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.
McGovern is the only major candidate – including Lindsay and Muskie – who invariably gives a straight answer when people raise these questions. He lines out the painful truth, and his reward has been just about the same as that of any other politician who insists on telling the truth: He is mocked, vilified, ignored, and abandoned as a hopeless loser by even his good old buddies like Harold Hughes. On.