Shared Flashcard Set

Details

20th C British Novel
For the final
151
English
Undergraduate 4
05/06/2013

Additional English Flashcards

 


 

Cards

Term
But to a less tax-paying, or more discriminating, eye it is quite simply the most beautiful sea rampart on the south coast of England.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

opinionated narrative voice

Term
The colors of the young lady's world was then in the first fine throes of the discovery of aniline dyes. And what the feminine, by way of comparison for so much else in her expected behavior, demanded of a color was brilliance, not discretion.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Sarah doesn't fit feminine role

Term
The clothes were black. The wind moved them, but the figure stood motionless, staring, staring out to sea, more like a living memorial to the drowned, a figure from myth, than any proper fragment of the petty provincial day.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Sarah

Term
She had taken off her bonnet and held it in her hand; her hair was pulled tight back inside the collar of the black coat--which was bizarre, more like a man's riding coat than any woman's coat that had been in fashion in those past forty years.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Sarah's dress

Term
Quite apart from their scientific value (a vertical series taken from Beachy Head in the early 1860s was one of the first practical confirmations of the theory of evolution) they are very beautiful little objects; and they have the added charm that they are always difficult to find.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles' test fossil

Term
...the Echinodermia had been "shamefully neglected," a familiar justification for spending too mcuh time in too small a field. But whatever his motives he had fixed his heart on tests.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles and tests (fossils)

Term
Well, we laugh, But perhaps there is something admirable in this dissociation between what is most comfortable and what is most recommended. We meet here, once again, this bone of contention between the two centuries: is duty to drive us, or not? If we take this obsession with dressing the part, with being prepared for every eventuality, as mere stupidity, blindness to the empirical, we make, I think, a grave--or rather a fivolous--mistake about our ancestors; because it was men not unlike X, and as overdressed and overequipped as he was that day, who laid the foundations of all our modern science.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

X = Charles, on evolution and science in the time

Term
I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and "voice" of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

narrator on his own work

Term
But possiblity is no t permissibility....Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

narrator on his own work

Term
There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist. And I must conform to that definition.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

narrator on freedoms

Term
I know it was wicked...blasphemous, but I knew no other way to break out of what I was. If I had left that room, and returned to Mrs. Talbot's, and resumed my former existence, I know that by now I should be truly dead...and by my own hand. What has kept me alive is my shame, my knowing that I am truly not like other women...Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame, can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant's Whore.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Sarah

Term
She stared out to sea, and something in the set of her face suggested to him that she felt she had made a mistake; that he was trite, a mere mouther of convention. There was something male about her there. Charles felt himself an old woman; and did not like the feeling.
Definition

French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles and Sarah

Term
She turned and looked at him then. There was once again a kind of penetration of his real motive that was disconcertingly naked. We can sometimes recognize the looks of a century ago on a modern face; but never those of a century to come. A moment, then she walked past him back to the thorn. He stood in the center of the little arena.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles and Sarah

Term
There was something intensely tender and yet sexual in the way she lay; it awakened a dim echo of X of a moment from his time in Paris. Another girl, whose name now he could not even remember, perhaps had never known, seen sleeping so, one dawn, in a bedroom overlooking the Seine.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles sees Sarah asleep, first chance meeting

Term
X did not know it, but in those brief poised seconds above the waiting sea, in that luminous evening silence broken only by the waves' quiet wash, the whole Victorian Age was lost. And I do not mean he had taken the wrong path.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles, breaking decorum

Term
To most Englishmen of his age such an intuition of X's real nature would have been repellent; and it did very faintly repel--or at least shock--Y. He shared enough of his contemporaries' prejudices to suspect sensuality in any form; but whereas they would, by one of those terrible equations that take place at the behest of the superego, have made X vaguely responsible for being born as she was, he did not. For that we can thank his scientific hobbies.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

X=Sarah, Y=Charles

Term
Darwinism, as its shrewder opponents realized, let open the floodgates to something far more serious than the undermining of the Biblical account of the origins of man; its deepest implications lay in the direction of determinism and behaviorism, that is, towards philosophies that reduce morality to a hypocrisy and duty to a straw hut in a hurricane. I do not mean that X completely exonerated Y; but he was far less inclined to blame her han she might have imagined.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

X=Charles, Y=Sarah

Term
Under this swarm of waspish self-inquiries he began to feel sorry for himself--a brilliant man trapped, a Byron tamed; and his mind wandered back to X, to visual images, attempts to recollect that face, that mouth, that generous mouth. Undobtedly it awoke some memory in him, too tenuous, perhaps too general, to trace to any source in his past; but it unsettled him and haunted him, by calling to some hidden self he hardly knew existed...she made him aware of a deprivation.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles thinking about Sarah (X)

Term
We may explain it biologically by Darwin's phrase: cryptic coloration, survival by learning to blend with one's surroundings--with the unquestioned assumptions of one's age or social caste. Or we can explain this flight to formality sociologically. When one was skating over so much thin ice--ubiquitous economic oppression, terror of sexuality, the flood of mechanistic science--the ability to close one's eyes to one's own absurd stiffness was essential.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

scientific ideas explain social situations

Term
...those visions of the contented country laborer and his brood made so fashionable by George Morland and his kind...were as stupid and pernicious a sentimentaliztion, therefore a suppression of reality, as that inour own Hollywood films of "real" life. One look at Millie and her ten miserable siblings should have scorched the myth of the Happy Swain into ashes; but so few gave that look. Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls round its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

narrator on Victorian society

Term
But he was a gentleman; and gentlement cannot go into trade. He sought for a way of saying so; and failed.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

about Charles taking over Mr. Freeman's business

Term
"I would have you repeat what you said, what was it, about the purpose of this theory of evolution. A species must change...?"
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Mr. Freeman to Charles

Term
In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to a perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality--history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

on evolution

Term
For it was less a profounder reality he seemed to see than universal chaos, looming behind the fragile structure of human order.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

on evolution

Term
...beset by a maze of crosscurrents and swept hopelessly away from his sage anchorage of judicial, and judicious, sympathy. He saw the scene she had not detailed: her giving herself. He was at one and the same time Varguennes enjoying her and the man who sprang forward and struck him down; just as X was to him both an innocent victim and a wild, abandoned woman. Deep in himself he forgave her her unchastity; and glimpsed the dark shadows where he might have enjoyed it himself.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles thinking about Sarah (X)

Term
Indeed it was hardle X he now thought of--she was merely the symbol around which had accreted all his lost possibilities, his extinct freedoms, his never-to-be-taken journeys. He had to say farewell to something; she was merely and conveniently both close and receding.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles about Sarah (X)

Term
...it did not happen quite in the way you may have been led to believe...we have a habit of writing fictional futures for ourselves, although perhaps today we incline more to put ourselves into film. We screen in our minds hypotheses about how we might behave, about what might happen to us; and these novelists or cinematic hypotheses often have very much more effect on how we actually do behave, when the real future becomes the present, than we generally allow.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Fowels playing games with the reader

Term
To be sure he did not think in quite the detailed and coherent narrative manner I have employed; nor would I swear that he followed Mrs. X's postmortal career in quite such interesting detail. But he certainly wished her to the Devil, so it comes to almost the same thing.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Fowels about Charles and Mrs. Poulteney

Term
But above all it seemed to set X a choice; and while one part of him hated having to choose, we come near the secret of his state on that journey west when we know that another part of him felt intolerably excited by the proximity of the moment of choice.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles thinking about his future: with Ernestina or Sarah

Term
In all but a very few Victorian atheists...and agnostics there was a profound sense of exclusion, of a gift withdrawn. Among friends of like persuasion they might make fun of follies of the Church...but Christ remaind, a terrible anomaly in reason. He could not be for them what he is to so many of us today, a competely secularized figure, a man called Jesus of Nazareth with a brilliant gift for metaphor, for creating a personal mythology, for acting on his beliefs. All the rest of the world believed in his divinity; and thus his reproach came stronger to the unbeliever.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Victorian faith

Term
Victorians lived much closer to that cruelty; the intelligent and sensitive felt far more personally responsible; and it was thus all the harder, in hard times, to reject the universal symbol of compassion.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Victorian faith

Term
You know your choice. You stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honor, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are free and crucified. Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities, and their hate.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

narrator's conversation with Charles

Term
He began to understand X's deciet. She knew he loved her; and she knew he had been blind to the true depth of that love. The false version of her betrayal by Varguennes, her other devices, were but stratagems to unblind him; all she had said after she had brought him to the realization was but a test of his new vision.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles thinking about Sarah (X)

Term
...to see the "soul" as more real than the body, far more real, their only real self; indeed hardly connected with the body at all, but floating high over the beast; and yet, by some inexplicable flaw in the nature of things...
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

sexual bad, spiritual good

Term
And they remained staring at each other as if their clothes had suddenly dropped away and left them facing each other in nakedness
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Sarah and Charles' look in the Victorian ending

Term
Can you not see, a solution exists?
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

what Charles imagines Sarah to be thinking when he's about to leave her at the end

Term
"No. It is as I say. You have not only planted the dagger in my breast, you have delighted in twisting it. A day will come when you shall be called to account for what you have done to me. And if there is justice in heaven--your punishment shall outlast eternity!"
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

Charles to Sarah when they finally meet again at the end

Term
...he has at last found an atom of faith in himself, a true uniqueness, on which to build; has already begun, though he would still bitterly deny it, though there are tears in his eyes to support his denial, to realize that life, however advantageiously X may in some ways seem to fit the role of Sphinx, is not a symbol, is not one riddle and one failure to guess it, is not to inhabit one face alone or to be given up after on losing throw of the dice; but is to be, however inadequately, emptily, hopelessly into the city's iron heart, endured. And out again, upon the unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea.
Definition

The French Lieutenant's Woman

 

the modern individualist

X=Sarah

Term
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds--for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

world: modern and past

 

Charles

Term
I had been there before; I knew all about it.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles in Prologue

Term
I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles narration

Term
X's faith was an enigma to me at that time, but not one which I felt particularly concerned to solve. I had no religion. I was taken to church weekly as a child, and at school attened chapel daily, but, as though in compensation, from the time I went to my pupblic school I was excused church in the holidays. The view implicit in my education was that the basic narrative of Christianity had long been exposed as a myth, and that opinion was now divided as to whether its ethical teaching was of present value, a division in which the main weight went against it
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles on religion

Term
Religion was a hobby which some people professed and others did not; at the best it was slightly ornamental, at the worst it was the province of "complexes" and "inhibitions"--catchwords of the decade--and of the intolerance, hypocrasy, and sheer stupidity attributed to it for centuries. No one had ever suggested to me that these quaint obesrvances expressed a coherent philosophic system and intrasigeant historical claims; nor, had they done so, would I have been much interested.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles on religion

Term

X: "Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me."

Y: "But, my dear X, you can't seriously believe it all."

X: "Can't I?"

Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

X=Sebastian, Y=Charles

Term

X: "So you see we're a mixed family religiously...and I wouldn't know chich of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, and that's all I want...I wish I liked Catholics more."

Y: "They seem just like other people."

X: "My dear Y, that's exactly what they're not--particularly in this country, where they're so few. It's not just that they're a clique...but they've got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time."

Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

X=Sebastain, Y=Charles

Term

X: "You are an artist, Z, what do you think of it aesthetically?"

Y: "I think it's beautiful."

X: "Is it Good Art?"

Z: "Well, I don't quite know what you mean. I think it's a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it wil be greatly admired."

X: "But surely it can't be good twenty years ago and good in eighty years, and not good now?"

Z: "Well, it may be good now. All I mean is that I don't happen to like it much."

X: "But is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good?"

Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

X=Brideshead, Y=Cordelia, Z=Charles

Term
"When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating...He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Cara about Lord Marchmain hating

Term
But I was untoughed by her faith as I was by her charm; or, rather, I was touched by both alike. I had no mind then for anything except X, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet know how black was the threat. His constatn, despairing prayer was to be left alone.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles about his friendship with Sebastian (X)

Term
"It seems to me that without your religion X would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles to Bridesead about Sebastian (X)

Term
"The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

a priest to Lady Marchmain, in Rex's eduation

Term
We had by no means reach the cognac, but here we were on the subject of himself. In twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to tell. I closed my mind to him as best I could and gave myself to the food before me, but sentences came breaking in on my happinesse, recalling me to the harsh, aquisitive world which X inhabited. He wanted a woman; he wanted the best on the market, and he wanted her cheap; that was that it amounted to.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles on Rex wanting Julia

Term
If she apostasized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Julia and Catholocism

Term
From that moment she shut her mind against her relgion. And X saw this and added it to her new grief for Y and her old grief for her husband and to the deadly sickness in her body, and took all these sorrows with her daily to church; it seemed her heart was transfixed with the swords of her dolours, a living heart to match the plaster and paint; what comfort she took home with her, God knows.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Julia loses her relgion, X=Lady Marchmain, Y=Sebastian

Term
"I don't believe these priests know everyting. I don't believe in hell for things like that. I don't know what I believe in it for anything. Anyway, that's our lookout. We're not asking you to risk your souls. Just keep away."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Julia on her marriage to Rex

Term
I often think of that bathroom--the water colours dimmed by steam and the huge towel warming on the back of the chintz armchair--and contrast it with the uniform, clinical little chambers, glittering with chromium plate and looking-glass, which pass for luxury in the modern world.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles rejecting modern and dwelling on old world

Term
"I was right years ago--more years, I am happy to say, than either of us shows--when I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear X, it has killed you."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Anthony to Charles (X)

Term
"He's no patient. Not like a young man at all. He lies there and never complains--and there is much to complain of. We have no facilities. The Government give us what they can spare from the soldiers. And he is so kind. There is a poor German boy with a foot that will not heal and secondary syphilis, who comes here for treatment. X found him starving in Tangier and took him in and gave him a home. A real Samaritan."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

monk about Sebastian (Lord Flyte=X)

Term
"You know, X, it's rather a pleasant change when all your life you've had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Sebastian to Charles (X) about Kurt

Term
"After she was buried the priest came in--I was there alone. I don't think he saw me--and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, X, poor agnostic. i stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn't any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can't tell you waht it felt like."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Cordelia talking to Charles

Term
"I got on best with her of any of us, but I don't believe I ever really loved her. Not as she wanted or deserved. It's odd I didn't, because I'm full of natural affections...You didn't like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy...she was saintly but she wasn't a saint. No one could really a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. I suppose you think that's all bosh."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Cordelia about her mother to Charles

Term
"They know all about it, X and his widow; they've got it in the black and white; they bought it for a penny at the church door. You can get anything there for a penny, in black and white, and nobody to see that you pay; only an old woman with a broom at the other end, rattling round the confessionals, and a young woman lighting a candle at the Seven Dolours. Put a penny in the box, or not, just as you like; take your tract. There you've got it, in black and white."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Julia characterizing the church (X=Brideshead)

Term
"Of course it's a think psychologists could explain; a preconditioning from childhood; feelings of guilt from the nonsense you were taught in the nursery. You do know at heart that it's all bosh, don't you?"
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles on church/morality to Julia

Term
"...the family haven't been very constant, have they> There's him gone and X gone and Y gone and Z gone. But God won't let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Y first got durnk--I mean the bad evening. Father Brown said something like 'I caught him' (the thief) 'with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.'"
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Cordelia to Charles

 

X=Lord M, Y=Sebastian, Z=Julia

Term
"One can have no idea what the suffering may be, to be maimed as he is--no dignity, no power of will. No one is ever holy without suffering. It's taken that form with him...I've seen so much suffering in the last few years; there's so much coming for everybody soon. It's the spring of love"
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Cordelia to Charles about Sebastian

Term

X: "He's got a wonderful will to live, hasn't he?"

Doctor: "Would you put it like that? I should say a great fear of death."

X: "Is there a difference?"

Doctor: "Oh dear, yes. He doesn't derive any strength from his  fear, you know. It's wearing him out."

Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

X=Charles

Term
"Oh God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin," and the man on the bed opened his eyes and gave a sigh, the sort of sigh I had imagined people made at the moment of death, but his eyes moved so that we knew there was still life in him...But there was no need for fear; the hand moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and X made the sign of the cross. Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles about Lord M (X)

Term
It opened a prospect; the prosepect one gained at the turn of the avenue, as I had first seen it with X, of the secluded valley, the lakes falling away one below the other, the old house in the foreground, the rest of the world abandoned and forgotten; a world of its own of peace and love and beauty; a soldier's dream in a foreign bivouac; such a prospect perhaps as a high pinnacle of the temple afforded after the hungry days in the desert and the jackal-haunted nights. Need I reproach myself if sometimes I was rapt in the vision?
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles on Brideshead

Term
"I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him. One can only hope to see one step ahead. But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable... the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enought to do; to set up a rival good to God's. Why should I be allowed to understand that, and not you, X?...if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end."
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Julia breaking it off with Charles (X)

Term
Perhaps, I thought, while her words still hung in the air between us like a wisp of tobacco smoke--a thought to fade and vanish like smoke without a trace--perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, sntching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

Charles, love a symbol of something we really want

Term
Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame--a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out...I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.
Definition

Brideshead Revisited

 

A possible conversion for Charles

Term
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. X, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.
Definition

1984

 

X=Winston

Term
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words?"
Definition

1984

 

Syme

Term
"Take 'good,' for instantce. If you have al word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of 'good,' what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like 'excellent' and 'splendid' and all the rest of them? 'Plusgood' covers the meaning, or 'doubleplusgood' if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word."
Definition

1984

 

Syme

Term
His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself...
Definition

1984

 

Winston sinking into doublethink

Term
The thing that now suddenly struck X was that his mother's death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he percieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood  by one another without needing to know the reason.
Definition

1984

 

X=Winston

Term

X: "You are a slow learner, Y."

Y: "How can I help it? How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four." 

X: "Sometimes, Y, sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."

Definition

1984

 

X=O'Brien, Y=Winston

Term
"There are three stages in your reintegration. There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance. It is time for you to enter upon the second stage."
Definition

1984

 

O'Brien to Winston

Term
"Will you understand, X, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the over act: the thought it all we care about. We do not merely destry our enemies; we change them. Do you understand what I mean by that?"
Definition

1984

 

O'Brien to X=Winston

Term
"We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us; so long as he resists us we never destry him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him."
Definition

1984

 

O'Brien to Winston

Term
"What happens to you here is down to the point from which there is no coming back. Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
Definition

1984

 

O'Brien to Winston

Term
A feeling of weariness had overwhelmed him. The faint, mad gleam of enthusiasm had come back into X's face. He knew in advance what X would say: that the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail, cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness for that of others.
Definition

1984

 

Winston thinking of X=O'Brien

Term
"We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested soely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites."
Definition

1984

 

O'Brien to Winston

Term

"There will be no loyalty, except loyalty toward the Party. there will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no employment of the process of life. ALl competing pleasures will be destroyed."

 

Definition

1984

 

O'Brien to Winston

Term

"Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?"

 

Definition

1984

 

O'Brien

Term

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever."

 

Definition

1984

 

O'Brien

Term
"We control life, X, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable."
Definition

1984

 

O'Brien to X=Winston

Term

X:"No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe--I don't know, some spirit, some principle--that you will never overcome."

Y:"Do you belive in God, X?"

X:"No."

Y:"That what is it, this priciple that will defeat us?"

X:"I don't know. The spirit of Man."

Y:"And do you consider yourself a man?"

X:"Yes."

Y:"If you are a man, X, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are alone?" 

Definition

1984

 

X=Winston, Y=O'Brien

Term
"If I wished, I sould float off this floor like a soap bubble."
Definition

1984

 

O'Brien

Term
The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a "real" world where "real" things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
Definition

1984

 

Winston's thoughts

Term
For a moment he had had an overwhelming hallucination of her presence. She had seemed to be not merely with him, but inside him. It was as though she had got into the texture of his skin. In that moment he had loved her far more than he had ever done when they were together and free. Also he knew that somewhere or other she was still alive and needed his help.
Definition

1984

 

Winston thinking of Julia

Term
In the old days he had didden a heretical mind beneath an appearance of conformity. Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate.
Definition

1984

 

Winston unable to "convert"

Term
Yet he came out of the blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself.  He must interpose another human being, the body of another human being, between him and the rats.
Definition

1984

 

Winston in room 101

Term
Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood that in the whole world there was just one person to whom he could transfer his punishment--one body that he could thrust between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over and over: "Do it to X!"
Definition

1984

 

Winston about X=Julia

Term
...X knew that before the journey ended he'd find his face becoming creased and flabby, like an old bag, with the strain of making it smile and show interest and speak its few permitted words, of steering it between a collapse into helpless fatigue and tautening with anarchic fury.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Jim Dixon

Term

X: "Is it a good article?"

Y: "Good? How do you mean, good? Good?"

X: "Well, is it any more than accurate and the sort of thing that gets turned out? Anything beyond the sort of thing that'll help you to keep your job?"

Y: "Good God, no. You don't think I take that sort of stuff seriously, do you?"

Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Beesley, Y=Dixon

Term
Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chiang Kai-shek, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages. Had people ever been as nasty, as self-indulgent, as dull, as wrong as they'd been in the Middle Ages--X's way of referring to the Middle Ages?
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon thinking about the Middle Ages, X=Margaret

Term
He'd read somewhere, or been told, that somebody like Aristotle or I.A. Richards had said that the sight of beauty makes us want to move towards it. Aristotole or I.A. Richards had been wrong about that, hadn't he?
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon at odds w/tradition

Term
...the possession of the signs of sexual privilege is the important thing, not the quality nor the enjoyment of them. X felt he ought to feel calmed and liberated at reaching this conclusion, but he didn't, any more than unease in the stomach is alleviate by discovery of its technical name.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Dixon

Term
The sight of this seemed to undam X's mind; for the first time since arriving at the College he thought he felt real, over-mastering, orgiastic boredom, and its companion, real hatred. If Y didn't speak in the next five seconds, he'd do something which would get himself flung out without possible question--not the things he'd often dreamed of when sitting next door pretending to do work...No, he'd just say, quite quietly and very slowly and distinctly, to give Y a good chance of catching his general drift: Look here, you old cockchafer, what makes you think you can run a history department, even at a place like this, eh, you old cockchafer? I know what you'd be good at, you old cockchafer...
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon's inner thoughts about Y=Welch

Term
Left with nothing to say, X realized houw wild a notion the cockchafer speech had been. He'd never be able to tell Y what he wanted to tell him, any more than he'd ever be able to do the same with Z. All the time he'd thought he was bringing the matter of his probation to a head he'd merely been a winkle on the pin of Y's evasion-technique; verbal this time instead of the more familiar physical form, but a technique adapted to meet stronger pressur than he himself could hope to bring to bear on it.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Dixon can't say what he really thinks to either Y=Welch or Z=Margaret

Term
"Words change the thing, and anyway the whole procedure's different. People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening every day. They ought to realize that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working-out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word 'love' as a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechizing about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it."
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon

Term
For once in his life X resolved to bet on his luck. What luck had come his way in the past he'd distrusted, stingily held on to until the chance of losing his initial gain was safely past. It was time to stop doing that.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Dixon

Term
It occured to him that she'd done this merely as a manoeuvre to arouse his desire, and arouse it for no purpose beyond that of somehow feeding her vanity. Then he rejected so familiar and contemptible a notion: she was too trustworthy for that...
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon thinking about Christine

Term
More than ever he felt secure: here he was, quite able to fulfil his fole, and, as with other roles, the longer you played it the better chnce you had of playing it agian. Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, and the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon

Term
"Well, hard luck," X broke in before he should have time to relent. A grandiose disgust for the whole proceedings had filled him; not merely for this one hand, but for the whole game of poker, of non-strip poker, that he and Y were playing. Biting his lips, he vowed to himself that this time he'd take whateer she might have to deal out. He remembered Carol's phrase about not throwing Y any lifebelts. Well, he'd thrown his last one.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Dixon, Y=Margaret

Term
The bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totempole on a crap reservation, X thought. "You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totempole on a crap reservation," he said.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Dixon to Bertrand

Term
"It's not so much a question of having obligations towards him or anything like that. I just don't want to behave foolishly. Not that I think there's anything foolish about coming to see you. Oh, I just don't seem to be able to put it in any way that sounds at all sensible...I'm afraid all I can ask you to do is try to understand. I know that's what people always say, and I don't feel I understand very well myself, so how I can expect you to I don't know, but there it is."
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Christine breaking it off with Dixon

Term
"What I'm trying to do now is take the rough with the smooth. The rough parts are still as rough as they were when we talked about it in the taxi. But I must make an effort; I mustn't walk out of things just when I feel like it, I can't go about expecting people to behave as I want them to the whole time. There's bound to be a certain amount of up and down in a relationship like the one I'm having with X. It's no use getting in a paddy about that, it's got to be accepted, even if I don't want to accept it. The trouble is I've got to push you areound while I'm doing it."
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Christine on her relationship with X=Bertrand

Term

"You're talking as if you were the one who initiated everything. If anybody was responsible for all sorts of trouble, as you call it, it was me. Not htat I think I'm much to blame for anything, any more than you were. It was all perfectly natural. All this self-reproch strikes me as a bit forced."

 

Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon to Christine

Term
"Yes, there's not really much to choose between us when you look into it. You're keepin gup your little affair with X because you think that on the whole it's safer to do that, in spite of the risks attached to that kind of thing, that to chance your arm with me. You know thte snags about him, but you don't know the snags about me...It's just a sort of stodgy, stingy caution that's the matter with us; you can't even call it looking after number one...That's all there is to it; and the worst of it is I shall go on doing exactly what I was going to do in the first place. It just shows how little it helps you to know where you stand."
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon to Christine, X=Bertrand

Term

X: "I've a notion you're not too happy in it; am I right?"

Y: "Yes, I think you are right, on the whole."

X: "Where's the trouble? In you or in it?"

Y: "On, both, I should say. They waste my time and I waste theirs."

X: "Mm, I see. It's a waste of time teaching history, is it?"

Y: "No. Well taught and sensibly taught, history could do people a hell of a lot of good. But in practice it doesn't work out like that. Things get in the way. I don't quite see who's to blame for it. Bad teaching's the main thing. Not bad students, I mean."

Definition

Lucky Jim

 

X=Gore-Urquhart, Y=Dixon

Term
"Here you go then, laddie. No need to worry; to hell with all this."
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Gore-Urquhart to Dixon

Term
While he read, things becang slowly to go wrong for the third time, but not, as before, with what he was saying or how he was saying it. These things had to do with the inside of his head. A feeling, not so much of drunkenness, but of immense depression and fatigue, was taking almost tangible shape there.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon thinking about the loss of Christine during his speech

Term
Well, if this was going to be his last public appearace here, he'd see to it that people didn't forget it in a hurry. He'd do some good, however small, to some of those present, however few. No more imitations, they frightened him too much, but he could suggest by his intonation, very subtly of course, what he thought of his subject and the worht of the statements he was making.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon during his speech

Term
X began to laugh noislily and blushing at the same time. Y laughed too. He thought what a pity it was that all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing. Now that something had happened which really deserved a face, he'd none to celebrate it with.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon (Y) happy about ending up with Christine (X)

Term
X drew in breath to denounce them both, then blew it all out again in a howl of laughter. His steps faltered; his body sagged as if he'd been knifed. With Y tugging at his arm he halted in the middle of the group, slowly doubling up like a man with the stitch, his spectables misting over with the exertion of it, his mouth stuck ajar in a rictus of agony. "You're..." he said. "He's..."
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon (X) laughing at the Welchs, and Christine (Y) trying to help him away

Term
He wouldn't have thought it possible that a man who'd done so exactly what he'd set out to do could feel so violent a sense of failure and general uselessness...It was luck you needed all along; with just a little more luck he'd have been able to switch his life on to a momentarily adjoining track, a track designed to swing aside at once away from his own.
Definition

Lucky Jim

 

Dixon

Term
In the desert it is easy to lose a sense of demarcation. When I came out of the air and crashed into the desert, into those troughs of yellow, all I kept thinking was, I must build a raft....I must build a raft. And here, though I was in the dry sands, I knew I was among water people.
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient

Term
Many books open with an author's assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle.
Definition
The English Patient
Term
But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed throught, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat.
Definition
The English Patient
Term
"I have seen editions of The Histories with a sculpted portrait on the cover. Some statue found in a French museum. But I never imagine Herodotus this way. I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, pieving together a mirage. 'This history of mine,' Herodotus says, 'has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.' What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history--how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love..."
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient

Term
"I've always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is?"
Definition

The English Patient

 

Hana to Kip

Term
And something in him made him step back from even the naive innocence of such a remark. The successful defusing of a bomb ened novels. Wise white fatherly men shook hands, were acknowledged, and limped away, having been coaxed out of solitude for this special occasion. But he was a professional. And he ramined the foreigner, the Sikh.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip about Hana

Term
"Those accepted filled up the courtyard. The coded results written into our skin with yellow chalk. Later, in the lineup, after a brief interview, an Indian officer chalked more yellow onto the slates tied around our necks. Our weight, age, district, standard of education, dental condition and what unit we were best for. I did not feel insulted by this. I am sure my brother would have been, would have walked in fury over to the well, hauled up the bucket, and washed the chalk markings away. I was not like him. Though I loved him. Admired him. I had this side to my nature which saw reason in all things."
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
"Quite early on I had discovered the overlooked space open to those of us with a silent life."
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
"He broke the tradition of our family and refused, in spite of being the oldest brother, to join the army. He refused to agree to any situation where the English had power. So they dragged him into their jails."
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
There were rivers of desert tribes, the most beautiful human I've met in my life. We were German, English, Hungarian, African--all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states.
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient

Term
The desert could not be claimed or owned--it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundered shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East. Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape. Fire and sand. We left the harbours of oasis.
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient

Term
But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient

Term
When he talked like that she hated him, her eyes remaining polite, her mind wanting to slap him. She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kathrine thinking about The English Patient

Term
He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient and Katharine

Term
He is just a thief. What X wants is his arms around the sapper and Y or, better, people of his own age, in a bar where he knows everyone, where he can dance and talk with a woman, rest his head on her shoulder, lean his head against her brow, whatever, but he knows first he must get out of this desert, its architecture of morphine. He needs to pull away from the invisible road to El Taj.
Definition

The English Patient

 

X=Caravaggio

Term
"No. I'm putting things into place. I was always a private man. It is difficult to realize I was so discussed."
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient to Caravaggio

Term
Now he listened with a pleasure because she was singing again, but this was quickly altered by the way she sang. Not hte passion of her at sixteen but echoing the tentative circle of light around her in the darkness. She was singing it as if it was something scarred, as if one couldn't ever again bring all the hope of the song together. It had been altered be the five years leading to this night of ther twenty-first birthday in the forty-fifth year of the twentith century. Singing in the voice of a tired traveller, alone against everything. A new testament.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Caravaggio listening to Hana sing

Term
There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. That was the only sureness. The one voice was the single unspoiled thing. A strong snail of light.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Caravaggio listening to Hana sing

Term
That time when we had nothing to do with the world. I keep thinking of the Russian book he always carried. Russia has always been closer to my country than to his. Yes, X is a man who died because of nations.
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient about Madox (X)

Term
Within two weeks even the ides of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chanrt between distances and legned between nature and storyteller. Sandford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconcious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for the was within it.
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient

Term
May God make safety your companion, X had said. Good-bye. A wave. There is God only in the desert, he wanted to acknowledge that now. Outside of this there was just trade and power, money and war. Financial and military despots shaped the world.
Definition

The English Patient

 

X=Madox

Term
We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climebd into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography--to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.
Definition

The English Patient

 

The English Patient

Term
Wherever X is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Y's body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them.
Definition

The English Patient

 

X=Hana, Y=Kip

Term
...then realizes this is a gesture not of pain but of his need to hold the earphones tight against his brain. He is a hundred yards away from her in the lower field when she hears a scream emerge from his body which had never raised its voice among them.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Hana hears Kip

Term
X looks condemned, separate from the world, his brown face weeping.
Definition

The English Patient

 

X=Kip

Term
He slams his back against the wall and stops his shaking. Plaster dust in the air around them. I sat at the food of this bed and listened to you, Uncle. These last months. When I was a kid I did that, the same thing. I believed I could fill myself up with what older people taught me. I believed I could carry that knowledge, slowly altering it, but in any case passing it beyond me to another.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behaviour. I knew if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger I'd be banished. If I tied the wrong kind of know in a tie I was out. Was it just ships that gave you such power? Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses?
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
You and then the Americans converted us. With your missionary rules. And Indian soldiers wasted their lives as heroes so they could be pukkah. You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us into this? Here...listen to what you people have done.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip to The English Patient

Term
If he closes his eyes he sees the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map, the hurricane of heat withering bodies as it meets them, the shadow of humans suddenly in the air. This tremor of Western wisdom.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers. Never trust Europeans, he said. Never shake hands with them. But we, oh, we were easily impressed--by speeches and medals and your ceremonis. What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing, limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen?
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Kip

Term
He knows the young soldier is right. They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation.
Definition

The English Patient

 

Caravaggio about Kip being right

Term
"In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful X and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one's own morality. I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Y is my David."
Definition

The English Patient

 

Hana talking about Caravaggio's (X) David with the Head of Goliath, Y=Kip

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