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| An Angel at my Table (1990) |
"Cry, Cries of animals. A special word is used for the cry, call or sound of many animals, and it would be wrong or even ludicrous to use these words indiscriminately. Thus, a dog does not 'buzz' and a bee does not 'bark'. The following are appropriate words for each:
Apes gibber
Asses bray
Bears growl
Bees hum
Beetles drone
Bitterns boom
Blackbirds and thrushes whistle
Bulls bellow
Calves bleat
Cats mew, purr, swear and caterwaul
Chaffinches chirp and pink
Chicks cheep
Cocks crow
Cows low
Crows caw
Cuckoos cuckoo
Deer bell
Dogs bark, bay, howl, whine and yelp
Doves coo
Ducks quack
Eagles, vultures and peacocks scream
Falcons chant
Flies buzz
Foxes bark and yelp
Frogs croak
Geese cackle and hiss
Grasshoppers chirp
Guinea pigs and hares squeak
Hawks scream
Hens cackle and cluck
Horses neigh and whinny
Hyenas laugh
Jays and magpies chatter
Kittens mew
Linnets chuckle
Lions and tigers roar and growl
Mice squeak and squeal
Monkeys chatter and gibber
Nightingales pipe and warble
Owls hoot and screech
Oxen low and bellow
Parrots talk
Pigs grunt, squeak and squeal
Pigeons coo
Ravens croak
Rooks caw
Screech owls screech or shriek
Sheep and lambs bleat
Snakes hiss
Sparrows chirp
Stags bellow and call
Swallows twitter
Swans cry and sing just before death
Turkeys gobble
Wolves howl
For some animals there are also words to imitate the cry, call or sound itself. Thus:
Cats go 'miaow'
Cocks go 'cock-a-doodle-doo'
Cows go 'moo'
Dogs go 'woof" [sic]
Donkeys go 'hee-haw'
Guinea fowls go 'come back'
Nightingales go 'jug jug'
Owls go 'to-whit to-whoo'
Pigs go 'oink'
Sheep and lambs go 'baa'
Yellowhammers go 'a little bit of bread and no cheese'"
"Finally Pilate began to take offense. Although she was hampered by huge ignorances, but not in any way unintelligent, when she realized what her situation in the world was and would probably always be she threw away every assumption she had learned and began at zero. First off, she cut her hair. That was one thing she didn't want to think about anymore. Then she tackled the problem of trying to decide how she wanted to live and what was valuable to her. When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old. ..."
... She gave up, apparently, all interest in table manners or hygiene, but acquired a deep concern for and about human relationships."
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| Barfly (1987) "woof, woof, woof, woof!" |
"'If you keep your hands just that way,' he said, 'and then bring them down straight, straight and fast you can drive that knife right smack in your cunt. Why don't you do that? Then all your problems will be over.' He patted her cheek and turned away from her wide, dark, pleading, hollow eyes."
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| Barfly (1987) "... oh, beautiful..." |
("What?")
"Every other week you pull everything out of this cabinet, spread it out on the kitchen floor, then crawl around in it like an archeologist."
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| Sweetie (1989) |
"And the bodies spoke to me. I saw stories in flesh, the untold tales of dead arms just hanging there, of pelvises locked in 'Park,' of clenched fists and locked jaws, in physiques molded into attitudes of 'I'm not good enough' or 'Get out of my way.' Chests sunken in shame, shoulders riding high, voices edgy with anger or constricted with fear. The body never lies.
Who could believe that the secret lay in movement? In making a home of this flesh we cart around like a burden?'
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| Not Quite Human 2 (1989) |
"'When I was a kid,' she began after a pause, 'I found a rope doll, an Indian doll. I liked it better than all my other dolls for a while, because I could pretend it was anything I longed for it to be.'"
"Our egos are menageries of dull, predictable soap opera characters we learn to play. They keep us from being who we are, knowing how to live and what to do, by sapping our creative power and sabotaging the authentic expressions of human energy..."
"But fellers, I pleaded into the whorled ear of rain, fair's fair, now, isn't it? Fair's fair?
Yet, even in the face of that time-revered truth, the phantoms hung back; fair might be fair and all, they couldn't argue with that, but when it came to first baseman--or second or third--they wanted a cool head and a brave heart, not some dang punk who throws his fist up in front of his specs every time he sees a fast one skipping in his general direction.
But guys...
Not some dang sissy who falters, fidgets, and finally faints dead away and wakes up five minutes later with his trousers around his ankles and an ammonia capsule under his nose--just because a nurse pricked him from behind with a little penicillin.
Wait, fellers; it wasn't just a prick. The needle was this long!
This long, the sissy says. This long. Willa listen at him.
It was so! Please, fellers ...maybe home base?
Home base. Willa just listen at the pantywaist.... C'mon; let's get at it..."
"Nothing there. Nothing but dreams and delusion. They all were driven by the need for something else. But when the drive was over, and the dreaming and deluding worn out, they all ended up with the same dull old scene."
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| Sweetie (1989) |
"When I was young and walked this way--somber, sallow, and morose as a mudball--when I was six and eight and ten and thought my life doled out to me in mean, cheap distances... when I was a boy and should have sprinted barefoot in bib overalls along these ways where quails piped and field mice hid... 'why was I kept in Buster Brown oxfords and corduroy slacks and a room full of big-little books?'...
... 'Why was I spun into an upstairs cocoon? This is a land for childhood frolic, with forests dark and magical... why, then, did I refuse it as my world-to-grow-up-in?'
The question had a new and fearful ring to me. Always before, whenever I brooded in some moody apartment with some melancholy wine and let my mind wander back to stand gaping, perplexed and horrified, on the brink of my past, I was able to fix the blame on some convenient villain: 'It was my brother Hank; it was my ancient fossil of a father, who frightened and disgusted me; it was my mother, whose name be frailty... they were the ones who tore my young life asunder!'...
... But that doubting moon wouldn't let me get away with it. 'Be fair, be fair... Can you blame the first ten years on the eleventh?'"Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey
"... Kesey stopped writing novels for more than twenty years. Decades later he offered this bit of advice to writers:
'... And God will tell you to come to him and sing his praises. And he will promise that if you do, all the muses that ever visited Shakespeare will fly in your ear and out your mouth like golden pennies. It's the job of the writer in America to say, "Fuck you, God, fuck you and the Old Testament you rode in on, fuck you." The job of the writer is to kiss no ass, no matter how big and holy and white and tempting and powerful. Anytime anybody says come to me and says, "Write my advertisement, be my ad manager," tell him "Fuck you." The job is always to be exposing God as the crook, as the sleaze ball.'"
"And I never understood why until that afternoon in Wakonda at the union meeting, sitting there remembering how I'd lost my bobcats, looking out the window of the grange hall at the spot where my boat had sunk in the bay, and hearing Floyd Evenwrite say to old man Syverson: 'All it wants is its fair advantage.'
So as close as I can come to explaining it, friends and neighbors, that is why that river is no buddy of mine. It's maybe the buddy of the brant geese and the steelhead. It is mighty likely a buddy of old lady Pringle and her Pioneer Club in Wakonda -- they hold oldtime get-togethers on the docks every Fourth of July in honor of the first time some old moccasined hobo come paddling across in his dugout a hundred years ago, the Highway of Pioneers they call it... and who the hell knows, maybe it was, just like now it is the railroad we used to float our log booms down -- but it still is no personal friend of mine. Not just the thing about the bobcats; I could tell you a hundred stories, probably, give you a hundred reasons showing why I got to fight that river. Oh, fine reasons; because you can spend a good deal of time thinking during those thinking times, when you're taking timber cruises walking all day long with nothing to do but check the pedometer on your foot, or sitting for hours in a stand blowing a game call, or milking in the morning when Viv is laid up with cramps -- a lot of time, and I got a lot of things about myself straight in my mind: I know, for an instance, that, if you want to play this way, you can make the river stand for all sorts of other things. But doing that it seems to me is taking your eye off the ball; making it more than what it is lessens it. Just to see it clear is plenty. Just to feel it cold against you or watch it flood or smell it when the damn thing backs up from Wakonda with all the town's garbage and sewage and dead crud floating around in it stinking up a breeze, that is plenty. And the best way to see it is not looking behind it -- or beneath it or beyond it -- but dead at it.
And to remember that all it wants is its fair advantage."
"So by keeping my eye on the ball I found it just came down to this: that that river was after somethings I figured belonged to me. It'd already got some and was all the time working to get some more. And in as how I was well known as one of the Ten Toughest Hombres this side of the Rockies, I aimed to do my best to hinder it.
And as far as I was concerned, hindering something meant -- had always meant -- going after it with everything you got, fighting and kicking, stomping and gouging, and cussing it when everything else went sour. And being just as strong in the hassle as you got it in you to be. Now that's real logical, don't you think? that's real simple. If You Wants to Win, You Does Your Best. Why, a body could paint that on a plaque and hang it up over his bedstead. He could live by it. It could be like one of the Ten Commandments for success. 'If You Wants to Win You Does Your Best.' Solid and certain as a rock; one rule I was gut-sure I could bank on.
Yet it took nothing more than my kid brother coming to spend a month with us to show me that there are other ways of winning -- like winning by giving in, by being soft, by not gritting your goddamn teeth and getting your best hold... winning by not, for damned sure, being one of the Ten Toughest Hombres west of the Rockies. And show me as well that there's times when the only way you can win is by being weak, by losing, by doing your worst instead of your best.
And learning that come near to doing me in."
"'Who knows who he snatched it from,' the seamstress thought. 'To think I had to eat what a thieving wind brought me!'"
"Julien felt himself hardly worthy of so much devotion -- in truth he was weary of heroics. He would have found a simple, naive, even a timid tenderness affecting, whereas, on the contrary, the notion of an audience, of the presence of others, was always a requisite to Mathilde's haughty soul."
"Little by little, self-command returned. He compared himself to a general who has just half won a great battle. The advantage is assured, he said to himself -- and is immense; but what will happen tomorrow? all could be lost in an instant.
With a passionate gesture he opened the Memoirs Dictated at St. Helena by Napoleon, and forced himself to read them for two long hours; his eyes alone were doing the reading -- but that did not signify; he compelled himself to go on. During this strange exercise, his heart and mind, soaring to the highest possible plane, worked on unconsciously. This is a heart altogether different from that of Mme de Rênal, he was saying to himself -- but got no further.
'Make her afraid,' he cried suddenly, flinging the book away. The enemy will obey me only so far as I frighten him, that's when he daren't despise me."
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| Addams Family Values (1993) |
