“The spokesman was speaking in totalitarianese, which is to say, technologese, which is to say any language which succeeds in stripping itself of any moral content.”
“He had come to decide that the center of America might be insane… Any man or woman who was devoutly Christian and worked for the American Corporation, had been caught in an unseen vise whose pressure could split their mind from their soul. For the center of Christianity was a mystery, the son of God, and the center of the corporation was a detestation of mystery, a worship of technology. Nothing was more intrinsically opposed to technology than the bleeding heart of Christ.”
“If you wish me to act the clown, I will take out my modest little Jewish dick and put it on the table. You can all spit at it and laugh at it. And then I’ll walk away, and you’ll find it was just a dildo I left there. I hadn’t shown you the real one!”
“[That] noble common man was obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him. The sanity of said common democratic man was in his humor, his humor was in his obscenity.”
I’m reading The Armies of the Night—the first time I’ve ever read Norman Mailer. There’s something to admire in his writing, not the least of which is that he doesn’t seem to let competence keep him from trying things. See above for example.
“There was a side of Sloan, she had decided, that she mistrusted, a side that could be summed up by saying that he was a Republican. Up to now this had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans—it was almost a part of being a man. But she did not like the thought of a Republican controlling the destiny of a helpless baby.”
onwingedfeet-deactivated2012122 asked: How did you like Graham Greene? I've not run across many who partake in his novels, especially his "Catholic" ones.
I liked The Power and the Glory a lot. The fineness of his prose and his other skills as a novelist make it easy to look past his Catholicism. I have The End of the Affair on my stack, but grad school has kept me from getting to it (or much else of my fun reading).
