John Coltrane - I've been listening to the 'Trane again. It blows you away, because I know more now and I hear more now and I had a life that I've lived!
The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.
A writer like me must have an utter confidence, an utter faith in his star. It's an almost mystical feeling, a feeling of nothing-can-happen-to me, nothing-can-touch-me.... I once had it. But through a series of blows, many of them my own fault, something happened to that sense of immunity and I lost my grip.
The terrorists believe that free societies are essentially corrupt and decadent and, with a few hard blows, they can force us to retreat. They are mistaken.
And writers say, as the most forward bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the young and tender wit
Is turn'd to folly, blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime,
And all the fair effects of future hopes.
I have never been able to understand why the tax comes as such a body blow to many people since the rate on long-term capital gain is lower than on most likes of endeavor (tax policy indicated digging ditches is regarded as socially less desirable than shuffling stock certificates).
Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.
Such is your cold coquette, who can't say "No," And won't say "Yes," and keeps you on and off-ing On a lee-shore, till it begins to blow, Then sees your heart wreck'd, with an inward scoffing.
Who ever lives looking for pleasure only, his senses uncontrolled, immoderate in his enjoyments, idle and weak, the tempter will certainly overcome him, as the wind blows down a weak tree.