Author: Gem

“I had never published the following Account of my Life, had it not been at the Desire of several of my particular Friends. As they had heard (a considerable Time after I enter’d Trumpeter on board the Revenge Privateer) that I was kill’d, with several others, by the Spaniards, in attacking a Bark near the Canary Islands, my returning safe to England surpriz’d them very much, and made them curious to enquire into the Manner of my Deliverance.”

“When that letter came in London I was most awfully sorry and wished I had never seen the boy. I was perfectly miserable and from trying to imagine how he felt I almost felt I was a criminal.”

It was not until I was seven that I became embarrassed by my father’s lack of self-consciousness. He had just discovered the Bates ‘better sight without glasses’ book and method. One exercise involved rolling the eyeballs in order to strengthen the internal muscles of the eye. Another, called ‘palming’, required one to place one’s palms over both eyes and to imagine a starless night or black velvet. When my father chose to do these exercises, sitting beside me on a District Line train en route to Dorking via Wimbledon, I sat in silence, cheeks burning, convinced that our fellow passengers would think him crazy.

“Fields’ family made little more than a token search. His mother felt that, at eleven, he was young to set up on his own, but the problems of four other children diverted her mind. The attitude of Fields’ father could perhaps be summed up by the handy phrase ‘good riddance.'”

“The dreadful year of 1789 was upon us, and fear had already seized the minds of wise men and women. I remember the events of one evening in particular; I had invited some people to a concert in my house. Most of those who arrived were quite distraught; they had been to Longchamps that morning and the populace, gathered at the barrier of L’Etoile, had hurled abuse at all those who passed by in carriages; the wretched folk jumped onto the tailboards crying ‘Next year you will be travelling behind and we will be inside!’ as well as a thousand other insults of an even more vicious nature.”

“No sooner had I sat down to write to the Count, but a page from the Prince came to me, saying, that the Prince desired to speak with me: at this message my blood ran chill in every vein, as if I had been informed of some sudden accident….”

“When Molière fled from Paris, he became, in the phrase of the theatre, a “barn-stormer.” An ox- cart was his home, his play-house some vacant grange or tennis-court. Eventually he obtained a following in certain towns, and recognition as an official entertainer in at least two provinces ; yet for nearly thirteen years he was at best a vagabond, tramping the highroads of France beside his unwinged chariot.”

Joy of life seems to me to arise from a sense of being where one belongs, as I feel right here; of being foursquare with the life we have chosen. All the discontented people I know are trying sedulously to be something they are not, to do something they cannot do. In the advertisements of the county paper I find men angling for money by promising to make women beautiful and men learned or rich — overnight — by inspiring good farmers and carpenters to be poor doctors and lawyers. It is curious, is it not, with what skill we will adapt our sandy land to potatoes and grow our beans in clay, and with how little wisdom we farm the soils of our own natures. We try to grow poetry where plumbing would thrive grandly! — not knowing that plumbing is as important and honourable and necessary to this earth as poetry….

“One interesting aspect of the music of Philip Glass is that despite its supposed ‘avant-garde’ modernity, it utilizes elements that have been around for over a thousand years. Almost all of Glass’s compositions employ a ground bass, a series of unchanging bass notes upon which are stacked a variety of short melodies and scales. The ground bass evolved out of the ‘cantus firmus’ used in Gregorian Chant and was characteristic in Baroque music.”

“In August 1874, backed by not only the New York Herald but also Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Stanley sailed once again for Zanzibar. With 347 porters, guides and dependants, laden with rifles, the expedition that marched for the Lualaba on 17 November was even bigger and more extravagant than the one he had raised to rescue Livingstone….”

“My suitcase weighed forty kilograms, and the moment I tried to carry it out of Dum Dum Airport the truth of the matter tapped upon my spine. There was no way I was going to haul this behemoth through the streets of India. The only solution was to extract the absolute essentials, put the thing in storage and reclaim it on my departure from Calcutta. My first thought was that I’d have to find a tourist hotel, and leave the bag in a storage room or behind a desk. But as I glanced around the baggage claim area, I spied a squarish, hand-lettered sign above an open door: LEFT LUGGAGE.”

“I’ve got a three-year-old son who thinks I go into space every day, and he loves the whole idea. He’s one of the few children who learned to count from ten down to one before he learned to count it the other way. So he thinks it’s wonderful and he thinks it’s mundane. He thinks it’s all possible — lots of people go up into space. He hasn’t quite realized that it’s still a fairly new occupation.”

“When I was sixteen, I saw a girl of angelic beauty seated in the window of a house on the block where I lived. Though I had never before seen an angel, she was exactly how I imagined an angel should look. She lived so near, yet somehow I had never met her, nor even seen her. Perhaps it’s because my eyes weren’t ready to see her until that moment. I knew I had to meet her, but I wasn’t certain how to do it.”

“Our love comes from friendship, our sex is sex. Plain old sex. Our sex doesn’t involve love and that’s how we like it.”

Since the spiritualist movement in France explicitly supported the rebirth doctrine, French psychics and trance mediums often tended to claim recollections about their past existences. Few researchers took such statements seriously until the 1890s, when Catherine Elise Mueller, a trance medium in Geneva, Switzerland, came into prominence with her reincarnation claims….

One or two years later I was living with my parents during the summer in the village of Heiligenstadt, near Vienna. Our dwelling fronted on the garden and Beethoven had rented the rooms facing the street. Both set of apartments were connected by a hall in common which led to the stairs. My brothers and I took little heed of the odd man who in the meanwhile had grown more robust, and went about dressed in a most negligent, indeed even slovenly way, when he shot past us with a growl. My mother, however, a passionate lover of music, allowed herself to be carried away, now and again….

FOOT SHOW
Meaning: Insult.
Action: A sitting or reclining person shows the sole of his shoe to his companion.
Background: In certain countries, if this is done accidentally, it can cause serious trouble. People have even been murdered for showing the sole of a shoe to someone….

Brian and Marilyn Wilson move out of their rented apartment in Gardner Street, West Hollywood, and take up residence at their new home at 1448 Laurel Way in an expensive area of Beverly Hills. Shortly after the couple moves in, Brian hires a carpenter to build a wooden box in the dining room….

Just as her career was well under way, Dorothy faced a dreadful personal crisis. Biographical sketches published during her lifetime mention that she and her husband had an adopted son whose name was John Anthony Fleming. At her death her public learned a little more about him because he was her sole heir, apart from her old friend and literary executor Muriel St. Clare Byrne. Dorothy and her husband had unofficially adopted Anthony when he went to boarding school.

An incident occurring at daybreak, on Saturday, December 9, 1531, in Mexico, [represents] the culmination of all the superstitions we have discussed. Of tremendous sociological and psychological impact, it has left physical traces that can still be seen — and, indeed, are still an object of much devotion — today. On that long-ago morning, a fifty-seven-year-old Aztec Indian whose Nahuatl name was Singing Eagle and whose Spanish name was Juan Diego was going to the church of Tlaltclolco, near Mexico City. Suddenly he froze in his tracks as he heard a concert of singing birds, sharp and sweet. The air was bitterly cold: no bird in its right mind would sing at such hour, and yet the harmonious music went on….