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looked something like a poisonous essence kept in a cut-glass bottle, seeming but the more deadly because everything about it is dauntily neat, from the stopper covered with white kid to the label and the thread. His peremptory manner, the eruption on his blotched countenance, the green eyes, and a malignant something about him, - all these things struck the beholder with the same sense of surprise as , the storm-clouds in a blue sky. If in his private office, as he showed himself to La Cibot, he was the common knife that a murderer catches up for his crime, - now, at the Prèsidente's door, he was the daintily-wrought dagger which a woman sets among the ornaments on her what-not.

4-26-84

"There are no second acts in American lives."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

141

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs

"Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out."

E.M. Forster - Selected Letters Vol 1 - Harvard

"... Hardy, I have idolatrous reverence for him. He is one of the few writers one trusts. What he said to a friend of mine is very illuminating: "I am a very stupid man." He lacks the allowed intelligence that one expects as a matter of course in this cultivated age - a lack that is often a sign of creative power. Michelangelo lacked, so did William S.; Goethe is the only genius who was not stupid."