Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.
quotations
from Conversations in Sicily by Elio Vittorini
“in the eyes of others my remembering looked like crying”
translated by Alane Salierno Mason
from Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli
In varying degrees, some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts! They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen–these menacing, coffee-colored boys and girls, with their obsidian hair and slant eyes. They will fall from the skies, on our cars, on our green lawns, on our heads, on our schools, on our Sundays. They will make a racket, they will bring their chaos, their sickness, their dirt, their brownness. They will cloud the pretty views, they will fill the future with bad omens, they will fill our tongues with barbarisms. And if they are allowed to stay here they will–eventually–reproduce!
We wonder if the reactions would be different were all these children of a lighter color: of better, purer breed and nationalities. Would they be treated more like people? More like children? We read the papers, listen to the radio, see photographs, and wonder.
from I’ll Sell You A Dog by Juan Pablo Villalobos
And then, just when it seemed like nothing else could happen, everything shifted, as if some joker had moved it all around, and suddenly there were stockings in the fridge, broken light bulbs under my pillow, the cockroaches were reading Proust, the dead grew tired of being dead and the past was no longer what it had been.
translated by Rosalind Harvey
Mario Cuomo on doing the right thing
Every time I done something that doesn’t feel right, it’s ended up not being right.
Mario Cuomo on how to teach
I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in fifty years what my father taught me by example in one week.
RIP Jimmy Breslin: in memory from his novel The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
Baccala is one of the many Mafia bosses who generally are depicted as controlling sprawling businesses. He has been involved in a number of legitimate enterprises. At one time he was one of the city’s largest dress-manufacturers. He used threats, acid, and non-union help. People in the garment industry referred to a Baccala dress as “the buy or die line.” The chief assistant in the dress factory, Seymour Lipman, had a brother-in-law named Dave, who also was in the garment business. Dave sold Seymour material. It took four sets of books to do it, but Seymour Lipman and his brother-in-law Dave wound up with houses in Miami. Baccala was losing eighty cents each time he sold a dress. At the first-anniversary party for his dress business, Baccala arrived at the factory with a can of gasoline in each hand.
In another business venture, Baccala and his chief of the East Harlem mob, Gigi off of 116th Street, entered into what they felt would be a gigantic stock-swindling operation. They were doing business with, they were assured, complete suckers. “High-class Protestant people, what could they know?” Gigi off of 116th Street said. Then the high-class Protestants went to Nassau for a week. Baccala and Gigi suddenly lost $140,000 each in the market and were indicted for illegal trading in potato futures.
After being arraigned, Baccala growled, “I shoot-a somebody, but first I gotta find out-a who I shoot-a and what for I shoot-a him.”
It cost him another $35,000 in legal fees before the indicment was dismissed.
But as money makes geniuses of all men, Baccala is known as an immensely successful real-estate holder in Brooklyn. The first thing a Sicilian in America seeks is property. This is a reaction to centuries of peasantry. Baccala’s first money went for a small house with a back yard in Canarsie. He planted fig trees in the back yard and when it got cold he covered them with tar paper and put paint cans on the tops of the trees. This, along with religious statues and flamingos on the front lawns, is the most familiar sight in an Italian neighborhood.
from ADA Ben Stone on Law & Order tv series
“If you’re gonna stick your finger in my eye, Mr. Ballard, clean your own nails first.”
from Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi
If a man or woman flails about, he not only
Smashes his house,
He burns the whole world down.
translated by Robert Bly
from the film Hud, based on the novel Horseman, Pass By by Larry McMurtry
Little by little, the look of the country changes because of the men we admire.
Leonard Durso 