Admiration

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Engels’ analysis is not simply negative. It does in fact provide a model for change. His proposals are both equitable and feasible recommendations for the general conduct of sexuality in a revolutionary society. He has a certain reasonable appreciation of fidelity and advocates temporary associations, freed of the economic considerations of the older forms and based on “individual sexlove,” his own precise if rather colorless phrase for a phenomenon whose development he traces to fairly recent times, and evolving from courtly and romantic love. In insisting that the economic element be utterly purged from all sexual associations Engels went beyond other nineteenth-century theorists by arguing that marriage would continue to be a variety of prostitution (e.g., sex in return for money or commodities) until it ceases to be in any sense an involuntary contract essentially economic in character. The analogy he adopts here is interesting: a woman who enters upon or perseveres in a marriage for economic motives is in the position of a worker who contracts himself to an employment disadvantageous to his interests or inclinations, merely in order to eat. Other theorists-Mill, for example-urged woman’s right to work, to enter the professions etc., but imagined many women and most married women would remain in the home tending children and continuing in economic dependency. But Engels is both more logical and more radical: only with the end of male economic dominion and the entrance of women into the economic world on perfectly equal and independent terms will sexual love cease to be barter in some manner based on financial coercion. Quite as one would expect, Engels’ foresight is strongest in the area of economy. Mill had thought legal change would be sufficient and was content that if women obtained suffrage and a just property law, most might well continue in their traditional roles. Engels realized very well that woman’s legal disabilities were not the cause but merely the effect of patriarchy. The removal of such invidious law would not give women equal status unless it were accompanied with total social and economic equality and every opportunity of personal fulfillment in productive work. Engels’ argument that one cannot be a dependent and still an equal is very compelling. There is no free contract, such as marriage might ideally become, Engels insists, unless both members are free in every respect, including the economic. Here his argument is based on the observation that the concentration of all economic resources into male hands has made the relation of the sexes much like that of one economic class to another:

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Mrs. Cole, by the way, could not have given me a greater mark of her regard than in managing for me the choice of this young gentleman for my master of the ceremonies: for, independent of his noble birth and the great fortune he was heir to, his person was even uncommonly pleasing, well shaped and tall; his face marked with the small-pox, but no more than what added a grace of more manliness to features rather turned to softness and delicacy, was marvellously enlivened by eyes which were of the clearest sparkling black; in short he was one whom any woman would, in the familiar style, ready call a very pretty fellow. I was now handed by him to the cockpit of our match, where, as I was dressed in nothing but a white morning gown, he vouchsafed to play the male Abigail on this occasion, and spared me the confusion that would have attended the forwardness of undressing myself: my gown then was loosen’d in a trice, and I divested of it; my stays next offered an obstacle which readily gave way, Louisa very readily furnished a pair of scissors to cut the lace; off went that shell and dropping my uppercoat, I was reduced to my under one and my shift, the open bosom of which gave the hands and eyes all the liberty they could wish. Here I imagined the stripping was to stop, but I reckon short; my spark, at the desire of the rest, tenderly begged, that I would not suffer the small remains of a covering to rob them of a full view of my whole person; and for me, who was too flexibly obsequious to dispute any point with them, and who considered the little more that remained as very immaterial, I readily assented to whatever he pleased-In an instant, then, my under petticoat was untied and at my feet, and my shift drawn over my head, so that my cap, slightly fastened, came off with it, and brought all my hair down (of which, be it again remembered without vanity, that I had a very fine head) in loose disorderly ringlets, over my neck and shoulders, to the no unfavourable set-off of my skin.

• From My People (2022)

  Edwards is “determined to keep fighting—not with my fists, but with my brains and with my dignity.” It is that spirit and endurance that mark the handful of black women doctors in the New York–New Jersey area who in the mid-1920s pioneered in overcoming barriers of race and sex, not only in medical schools but also in their practices in hospitals and among blacks as well as whites. According to the Census Bureau, there were sixty-five black women doctors in this country in 1920. By 1970, according to the bureau, there were 1,051. On a recent Sunday, black women doctors in the metropolitan area, who now number over one hundred, honored Dr. Edwards and five other black physicians who began practicing in the 1920s, including Dr. Agnes Griffin, who at eighty-one is still practicing ophthalmology in the parlor floor office of her Brooklyn brownstone. The six women were cited by the Susan Smith McKinney Steward Medical Society at a luncheon at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Cumulatively, they have more than three hundred years’ medical practice. The two-year-old society, according to Dr. Muriel Petioni, its president, is one of the first organizations of black women doctors in the country. Its aims are to aid young black women medical students and to document the achievements of black physicians. Dr. Steward, for whom the society was named, was an 1870 graduate of the New York Medical College for Women, and, according to the society, was the third black woman in the United States to have formal medical training. Only one of the honorees—Dr. E. Mae McCarroll, a 1925 graduate of the Women’s Medical College in Pennsylvania—has left the area, and she could not attend the luncheon. The seventy-seven-year-old doctor, who in 1946 became the first black appointed to a Newark City Hospital, formally closed her Newark practice in 1973. Dr. May E. Chinn, one of the society’s founders, was one of those honored. She recalled that her father, who had been a slave, opposed her even going to college. But her mother, who “scrubbed floors and hired out as cook,” became the driving force behind her educational effort. She was the first black woman graduate of the University of Bellevue Medical Center—there were four in this year’s graduating class—and the first to in 1926 intern at the then predominantly white Harlem Hospital. The hospital is now mostly black, and five of the thirty interns are black women. Now eighty-one and somewhat incapacitated by an operation last year which caused her to give up her position as a doctor for day care centers with the Department of Health, Dr. Chinn spends most of her days writing her memoirs in her apartment on the western edge of Harlem—not far from where she conducted most of her medical practice. Dr. Chinn said that one of the first obstacles she had to overcome was the attitude of blacks toward her. Once a black woman patient wept when she approached because, as Dr.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  As there is no remedy to sexual politics in marriage, Lucy very logically doesn’t marry. But it is also impossible for a Victorian novel to recommend a woman not marry. So Paul suffers a quiet sea burial. Had Brontë’s heroine “adjusted” herself to society, compromised, and gone under, we should never have heard from her. Had Bronte herself not grown up in a house of half-mad sisters with a domestic tyrant for father, no “prospects,” as marital security was referred to, and with only the confines of governessing and celibacy staring at her from the future, her chief release the group fantasy of “Angria,” that collective dream these strange siblings played all their lives, composing stories about a never-never land where women could rule, exercise power, govern the state, declare night and day, death and life-then we would never have heard from Charlotte either.188 Had that been the case, we might never have known what a resurrected soul wished to tell upon emerging from several millennia of subordination. Literary criticism of the Brontës has been a long game of masculine prejudice wherein the player either proves they can’t write and are hopeless primitives, whereupon the critic sets himself up like a schoolmaster to edit their stuff and point out where they went wrong, or converts them into case histories from the wilds. occasionally prefacing his moves with a few pseudo-sympathetic remarks about the windy house On the moors, or old maidhood, following with an attack on every truth the novels contain, waged by anxious pedants who fear Charlotte might “castrate” them or Emily “unman” them with her passion. There is bitterness and anger in Villette—and rightly so. One finds a good deal of it in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, too. To label it neurotic is to mistake symptom for cause in the hope of protecting oneself from what could be upsetting. What should surprise us is not Lucy’s wry annoyance, but her affection and compassion-even her wit. Villette is one of the wittier novels in English and one of the rare witty books in an age which specialized in sentimental comedy. What is most satisfying of all is the astonishing degree of consciousness one finds in the work, the justice of its analysis, the fairness of its observations, the generous degree of self-criticism. Although occasionally flawed with mawkish nonsense (there is a creditable amount of Victorian syrup in Villette), it is nevertheless one of the most interesting books of the period and, as an expression of revolutionary sensibility, a work of some importance.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  Then a neck exquisitely turned, graved behind and on the sides with fais hair, playing freely in natural ringlets, connected his head to a body of the most perfect form, and of the most vigorous contexture, in which all the strength of manhood was concealed, and softened to appearance by the delicacy of his complexion, the smoothness of his skin, and the plumpness of his flesh. The platform of his snow white bosom, that was laid out in a manly proportion, presented, on the vermilion summit of each pap, the idea of a rose about to blow. Nor did his shirt hinder me from observing the symmetry of his limbs, that exactness of shape, in the fall of it towards the loins, where the waist ends and the rounding swell of the hips commences; where the skin, sleek, smooth, and dazzling white, burnishes on; the stretch-over firm, plump, ripe flesh, that crimped’ and ran into dimples at the least pressure, or that the touch could not rest upon, but slid over on the surface of the most polished ivory. His thighs, finely fashioned, and with a florid glossy roundness, gradually tapering away to the knees, seemed pillars worthy to support that beauteous frame at the bottom of which I could not, without some remains of terror, some tender emotions too, fix my eyes on that terrible machine, which had, not long before, with such fury broke into, torn, and almost ruined those soft, tender parts of mine, that had not yet done smarting with the effects of its rage; but behold it now! crest fallen, reclining its half-caped vermilion head over one of his thighs, quiet, pliant, and to all appearances incapable of the mischiefs and cruelty it had committed.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  She didn’t even tell our parents or grandmother or me before she left. She called Mom from St. Ignatius, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and said, “Hey, Mom, I’m a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever.” How weird is that? It’s almost romantic. And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. [image "An illustration of a book cover of ‘The Stranger from Montana’ by an unknown author. An excerpt from the book is included." file=image_rsrc4SF.jpg] Well, a lot scared. She was trying to live out her dream. We should have all been delirious that she’d moved out of the basement. We’d been trying to get her out of there for years. Of course, my mother and father would have been happy if she’d just gotten a part-time job at the post office or trading post, and maybe just moved into an upstairs bedroom in our house. But I just kept thinking that my sister’s spirit hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana. How cool! I felt inspired. Of course, my parents and grandmother were in shock. They thought my sister and I were going absolutely crazy. But I thought we were being warriors, you know? And a warrior isn’t afraid of confrontation. So I went to school the next day and walked right up to Gordy the Genius White Boy. “Gordy,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” “I don’t have time,” he said. “Mr. Orcutt and I have to debug some PCs. Don’t you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague.” Wow, and people thought I was a freak. “I much prefer Macs, don’t you?” he asked. “They’re so poetic.” This guy was in love with computers. I wondered if he was secretly writing a romance about a skinny, white boy genius who was having sex with a half-breed Apple computer. “Computers are computers,” I said. “One or the other, it’s all the same.” Gordy sighed. “So, Mr. Spirit,” he said. “Are you going to bore me with your tautologies all day or are you going to actually say something?” Tautologies? What the heck were tautologies? I couldn’t ask Gordy because then he’d know I was an illiterate Indian idiot. “You don’t know what a tautology is, do you?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” I said. “Really, I do. Completely, I do.” “You’re lying.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” “How can you tell?” “Because your eyes dilated, your breathing rate increased a little bit, and you started to sweat.”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  As a high school English teacher, I find that one of my most critical challenges is selecting reading material that both captivates and instructs my students. I’m always reminding myself that most of my students are not future English teachers; they won’t all adore parsing literature because it’s a fun puzzle, or simply love reading for reading’s sake. Many of them view English class as an exercise in endurance—and for some, survival. Assigned books are so often the lima beans of the high school experience, to be suffered or dodged. Sometimes, however, a novel comes along that flaunts the label “selected text.” It instructs students while captivating them. They cannot put it down. They come to class each morning ready to talk about the “crazy stuff” that happened in the book last night. They read too fast and finish before the due date. Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is this book, the unicorn of assigned reading: a book every kid wants to read. Why? I asked a few students who recently read The Diary, as we call it. “It’s relatable to kids and stuff they’ve gone through.” “It’s funny, so it keeps you reading. Even the sad parts are funny.” “It gives us a chance to talk about stereotypes.” “It was so good—this is the only book I’ve ever read.” That final comment is a reprise of a line I hear every year, sometimes more than once per year. You may wonder, how do students make it to high school without ever having read a book? Despite the best intentions and efforts of all these students’ elementary, middle, and high school teachers, librarians, parents, and others, these students have never found a love for reading. They’ve not felt the connection to a character that compelled them to reach for that book again. They haven’t found a story line that warrants giving up outside time, or social time, or video-game time for reading time. The Diary, by stark contrast, does all of that and more: It opens an avenue for students to talk to each other about literature and about heavy themes handled with a light touch. The savvy teacher elicits and unpacks these themes, never skimming over the crucial features of the text that allow readers to move past the surface comedy and spectatorship that propel us through the plot. These themes—themes of adolescence, racism, loss, family, redemption, friendship, and prejudice—touch nearly every aspect of this text. The book opens up an American experience with nuance, humanity, and honesty, one about American Indians, who are nearly always invisible in contemporary American culture.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  According to Daddy, who broke horses for Uncle Lee in the summer of 1931, Uncle Lee and Annie stopped talking that very year, after they got into a fight about how much money she spent on sugar. Annie Gleason saddled up an old mule they kept to keep the horses calm and rode all the way into Anhuac, Texas, with her boots dragging in the dust. She bought a fifty-pound sack of sugar, turned the mule around, and rode straight back and into the barn where Daddy and Uncle Lee were just nailing the last square-head nail into a quarter horse’s shoe. Still mounted on the mule, Annie slid a jackknife from her apron pocket and, staring straight at Uncle Lee, she raised it up and jammed it down into the burlap bag strapped across the mule’s backside. The sugar poured out of the sack, Daddy said, like a liquid. We’re bass fishing with Cooter and Shug and Ben Bederman at the time I remember him telling it. We’re in Ben’s big fiberglass motorboat, which is way nicer than the little flat-bottomed rentals we’re used to. We each have a floatable red Coca-Cola cushion to sit on. I don’t know how old I am, but I haven’t yet outgrown the concept of fishing with Daddy, which must have happened when I was about eleven. I don’t even know yet that such concepts can be outgrown. All I know is that Cooter’s cigar smoke stinks to heaven. I jerk the banana-yellow lure across the surface of the water so its tiny propellers whir and stop, whir and stop. What in God’s name could a bass under water think that thing is, scooting along? I prefer a plastic worm sunk down in the bottom silt, but Ben has bossed me into this gadget. “And so what’d Uncle Lee do?” Cooter asked. Sometimes I think the Liars’ Club lets Cooter come along just because he always asks the next question. He’s never caught a fish the others didn’t make him throw back. “Do?” Daddy cocked his head sideways. “Ain’t nothing he could do. He just shakes his head and says, ‘You silly sumbitch,’ and that’s the last they ever spoke. Them three words.” “Tell how they split up the house, Daddy.” “This goes on,” Daddy says, “more than ten years.” He roots around in the cooler for a beer. “First they leave notes around the house. Grocery lists, that sort of thing. But pretty soon they leave off with that too. Then something funny happens. It’s like Lee knows what Annie wants before she even wants it. And viceyversa. Say she needs some lard or some such thing. In walks Lee with just-bought lard. Or he wakes up hungry for biscuits, and she’s got the jar lid pressed into the dough already.” Shug makes a mmh-mmh-mmh sound that says the wonders never cease. “Not a goddamn peep between them,” Daddy says. “Sleep in the same bed. Eat out the same pot.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  He was, as I afterwards learned in the course of the intimacy which this little accident gave birth to, an old bachelor, turned of sixty, but of a fresh vigorous complexion, insomuch that he scarce marked five and forty, having never racked his constitution by permitting his desires to over-tax his ability. As to his birth and conditions, his parents, honest and failed mechanics, had, by the best traces he could get of them, left him an infant orphan on the parish; so that it was from a charity-school, that, by honesty and industry, he made his way into a merchant’s counting house, from whence, being sent to a house in Cadiz, he there, by his talents and activity, acquired not only a fortune, but an immense one, with which he returned to his native country; where he could not, however, fish out so much as one single relation out of the obscurity he was born in. Taking then a taste for refinement, and pleased to enjoy life, like a mistress in the dark, he flowed his days in all the ease of opulence, without the least parade of it; and, rather studying the concealment than the shew of a fortune, looked down on a world he perfectly knew himself, to his wish, unknown and unmarked by. But, as I propose to devote a letter entirely to the pleasure of retracing to you all the particulars of my acquaintance with this ever, to me, memorable friend, I shall, in this, transiently touch on no more than may serve, as mortar, to cement, or form the connection of my history, and to obviate your surprise that one of my blood and relish of life, should count a gallant of three score such a catch.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  “Captain Pearse,” he said, his speech clear for the first time in weeks. And Pearse said at ease, Sergeant Karr. Then they were both wiping the wet off their faces, holding each other like a pair of frail old ghosts. Pearse sat on Daddy’s bed well into the evening, paging through old pictures. Once again, Daddy’s war talk came out clear. The effort tired him, though. He finally dozed off while the colonel was still peeling the foil top off some pudding. By phone, I heard the colonel’s fine tenor voice. “Your daddy turned down a battlefield commission after the Bulge,” he told me. “He didn’t like the idea of drinking at the officers’ club. Anybody above the rank of sergeant was what he called a poodle. ” After I hung up, Pearse drank black coffee from Mother’s bone-china cups till the small hours. He told her more war stories we’d never heard. Daddy was wounded twice, for instance. Once, a German soldier stuck a bayonet through his forearm, leaving a scar I’d seen a thousand times and never once asked about. Another time, a bridge they’d mined blew early and buried Daddy so completely in rubble that Pearse presumed him dead. They hadn’t even bothered digging for him. But a few days later, Daddy came riding up the road in another fellow’s Jeep. He had a big bandage wrapped around his head, and a grin a yard wide. In fact, Pearse thought the old head wound might have led to Daddy’s stroke. If so, the army might help us with some of our costs. Pearse had testified in a few cases like that, and both times the family got help. That’s how I wound up in Mother’s attic. We needed army medical records proving Daddy was head-injured in combat. I’d put off climbing up there for weeks, claiming I needed a good rain to cool things off. In truth, the attic scared me. An attic in East Texas is especially bad. The hot damp in such places accrues over years; all manner of organism can breed. Cardboard gets dappled with green mildew in patterns that put you in mind of chrysanthemums on antique wallpaper. You can hear roaches scuttle through papers in an East Texas attic, can practically feel their threadlike antennae reaching coward you all whispery. Plus you face the slight danger of stumbling across a snake. The summer before, Lecia’s attic had been infested with them. We’d heard thumps on the ceiling one night. Something heavy was falling from the inside attic rafters, without the scuttling sounds afterwards that a raccoon or rodent would make. Armed with flashlight, she was supposed to poke her head up there, scout around, and report back so she could let her exterminator know what he was in for. The fluffy pink insulation showed no small-animal scat, only what looked like old nylon stockings somebody had peeled off and strewn around.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  I’ve thought about these things. And maybe I haven’t done enough thinking, but I’ve done enough to know that it’s better to live in Reardan than in Wellpinit. Maybe only slightly better. But from where I’m standing, slightly better is about the size of the Grand Canyon. And, hey, do you want to know the very best thing about Reardan? It’s Penelope, of course. And maybe Gordy. And do you want to know what the very best thing was about Wellpinit? My grandmother. She was amazing. She was the most amazing person in the world. Do you want to know the very best thing about my grandmother? She was tolerant. And I know that’s a hilarious thing to say about your grandmother. I mean, when people compliment their grandmothers, especially their Indian grandmothers, they usually say things like, “My grandmother is so wise” and “My grandmother is so kind” and “My grandmother has seen everything.” And, yeah, my grandmother was smart and kind and had traveled to about 100 different Indian reservations, but that had nothing to do with her greatness. My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated. Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones. Gay people were seen as magical, too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives! My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians. “Jeez,” she said. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who’s going to pick up all the dirty socks?” Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance. Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person. But not my grandmother. She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know? She always approached each new person and each new experience the exact same way. Whenever we went to Spokane, my grandmother would talk to anybody, even the homeless people, even the homeless guys who were talking to invisible people. My grandmother would start talking to the invisible people, too. Why would she do that? “Well,” she said, “how can I be sure there aren’t invisible people in the world? Scientists didn’t believe in the mountain gorilla for hundreds of years. And now look. So if scientists can be wrong, then all of us can be wrong. I mean, what if all of those invisible people ARE scientists? Think about that one.” So I thought about that one:

• From The History of Christianity: From the Disciples to the Dawn of the Reformation (2012)

  117 o The monks presented an alternative culture, based not on wealth but poverty, not on power but weakness, not on prestige but lowliness. o In their communal life, they saw themselves as “New Testament Christians” living the “apostolic life” described by the Acts of the Apostles. o In a real sense, the impulse that drove the Reformation of the 16 th century was active already in early monasticism: a return to simplicity, poverty, the imitation of Jesus, and the trusting faith of the heart. Evagrius of Pontus and Palladius • The appeal of the monastic life even for the wealthy and sophisticated can be seen in the figures of Evagrius of Pontus and Palladius. • Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) was born Christian and was educated in Constantinople. After an inappropriate love relationship when in priestly orders, he fled to Jerusalem and joined a monastery of Rufinus and Melania. He spent most of his life in the desert in Nitria. A disciple of Origen, his writings (the Praktikos and the Gnostic Chapters) had a great influence on later spirituality. • Palladius (c. 364–420/30) was born in Galatia. As a young man, he traveled extensively in Egypt among the monks, collecting stories in the manner of an ethnographer. He later became bishop of Heliopolis in Bithynia. In his Lausiac History, he presents a vivid picture of the cultural complexity represented by Egyptian monasticism. o Palladius is an example of a well-established figure in society who “goes on pilgrimage” to visit the monks of Egypt and Palestine, collecting stories and sayings and seeking a simplicity and nobility of life not available in the cities.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  It’s Penelope, of course. And maybe Gordy. And do you want to know what the very best thing was about Wellpinit? My grandmother. She was amazing. She was the most amazing person in the world. Do you want to know the very best thing about my grandmother? She was tolerant. And I know that’s a hilarious thing to say about your grandmother. I mean, when people compliment their grandmothers, especially their Indian grandmothers, they usually say things like, “My grandmother is so wise” and “My grandmother is so kind” and “My grandmother has seen everything.” And, yeah, my grandmother was smart and kind and had traveled to about 100 different Indian reservations, but that had nothing to do with her greatness. My grandmother’s greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated. Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones. Gay people were seen as magical, too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives! My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians. “Jeez,” she said. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who’s going to pick up all the dirty socks?” Of course, ever since white people showed up and brought along their Christianity and their fears of eccentricity, Indians have gradually lost all of their tolerance. Indians can be just as judgmental and hateful as any white person. But not my grandmother. She still hung on to that old-time Indian spirit, you know? She always approached each new person and each new experience the exact same way. Whenever we went to Spokane, my grandmother would talk to anybody, even the homeless people, even the homeless guys who were talking to invisible people. My grandmother would start talking to the invisible people, too. Why would she do that? “Well,” she said, “how can I be sure there aren’t invisible people in the world? Scientists didn’t believe in the mountain gorilla for hundreds of years. And now look. So if scientists can be wrong, then all of us can be wrong. I mean, what if all of those invisible people ARE scientists? Think about that one.” So I thought about that one: After I decided to go to Reardan, I felt like an invisible mountain gorilla scientist. My grandmother was the only one who thought it was a 100 percent good idea. “Think of all the new people you’re going to meet,” she said. “That’s the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people. I wish I could go with you. It’s such an exciting idea.”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  SA: True Diary coincided with this rise in young adult literature. I mean, Harry Potter was a kids’ book. When you look back at the chronology of Harry Potter, I don’t think there’s ever been a more dramatic example of somebody getting better, getting so much better as a writer in the public eye, like the dramatic increase. The first couple of Harry Potter books are very much children’s books, but as they went on, as the kids got older, and as J. K. Rowling got more experience, the books became…I mean, they’re biblical. Holy crap, they’re biblical. I’m going to argue right here that I think the Harry Potter books and the movies combined are more important in American culture than any other book or any other TV show, any other cultural phenomenon. I think they have more spiritual power, I think they have more political power, more everything. The first one came out in 1998, which is incredible when you think about Harry Potter. But my career and my thoughts about young adult were right in the middle of all that and so when young adult literature exploded—The Hunger Games; John Green; Thirteen Reasons Why, which is like the massive thing on Netflix right now—I accidentally became part of this amazing new phenomenon, the young adult book being a universally praised and admired genre. It remains the bestselling genre. If you want to sell books as a writer, write young adult. JW: And it seems like another boundary or border was crossed, because adult readers, of course, came along, but it also said kids can handle six hundred pages, they can handle dialogue about masturbation. It also stopped underestimating the fifteen-year-old reader, the thirteen-year-old reader. SA: It stopped being condescending. It really is a form of political rebellion. Young readers becoming political rebels by insisting on their own genre. When The Outsiders was published, nobody thought about it as being young adult. When The Catcher in the Rye was published, nobody thought about it as being young adult. Lord the Flies, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn…when we talk about so many of the great books of our past, they would be classified as young adult now. And that would be a great thing. We all became writers because of something we read when we were twelve. And I get to be that guy. It’s awesome. [image "An illustration of an artist poking their nose with the back of a paintbrush." file=image_rsrc4TT.jpg] Interview with Ellen ForneyHow long have you been drawing comics?

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  She didn’t even tell our parents or grandmother or me before she left. She called Mom from St. Ignatius, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reservation, and said, “Hey, Mom, I’m a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever.” How weird is that? It’s almost romantic. And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. [image "An illustration of a book cover of ‘The Stranger from Montana’ by an unknown author. An excerpt from the book is included." file=image_rsrc4SF.jpg] Well, a lot scared. She was trying to live out her dream. We should have all been delirious that she’d moved out of the basement. We’d been trying to get her out of there for years. Of course, my mother and father would have been happy if she’d just gotten a part-time job at the post office or trading post, and maybe just moved into an upstairs bedroom in our house. But I just kept thinking that my sister’s spirit hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana. How cool! I felt inspired. Of course, my parents and grandmother were in shock. They thought my sister and I were going absolutely crazy. But I thought we were being warriors, you know? And a warrior isn’t afraid of confrontation. So I went to school the next day and walked right up to Gordy the Genius White Boy. “Gordy,” I said. “I need to talk to you.” “I don’t have time,” he said. “Mr. Orcutt and I have to debug some PCs. Don’t you hate PCs? They are sickly and fragile and vulnerable to viruses. PCs are like French people living during the bubonic plague.” Wow, and people thought I was a freak. “I much prefer Macs, don’t you?” he asked. “They’re so poetic.” This guy was in love with computers. I wondered if he was secretly writing a romance about a skinny, white boy genius who was having sex with a half-breed Apple computer. “Computers are computers,” I said. “One or the other, it’s all the same.” Gordy sighed. “So, Mr. Spirit,” he said. “Are you going to bore me with your tautologies all day or are you going to actually say something?” Tautologies? What the heck were tautologies? I couldn’t ask Gordy because then he’d know I was an illiterate Indian idiot. “You don’t know what a tautology is, do you?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” I said. “Really, I do. Completely, I do.” “You’re lying.” “No, I’m not.” “Yes, you are.” “How can you tell?” “Because your eyes dilated, your breathing rate increased a little bit, and you started to sweat.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Calvin’s moral power extended over all the Reformed Churches, and over several nationalities—Swiss, French, German, Polish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Dutch, English, Scotch, and American. His religious influence upon the Anglo-Saxon race in both continents is greater than that of any native Englishman, and continues to this day.1228 Calvin and France. Calvin never entered French soil after his settlement in Geneva, and was not even a citizen of the Republic till 1559; but his heart was still in France. From the time he wrote that eloquent letter to Francis the First, in dedicating to him his Institutes, he followed the Protestant movement with the liveliest interest. He was the head of the French Reformation and consulted at every step. He was called as pastor to the first Protestant church in Paris, but declined. He gave to the Huguenots their creed and form of government. The Gallican Confession of 1559, also called the Confession of Rochelle, was, in its first draft, his work, and his pupil Antoine de la Roche Chandieu (also called Sadeel) brought it into its present enlarged shape, in which it was presented by Beza to Charles IX. at the Colloquy at Poissy, 1561, and signed at the Synod of La Rochelle, 1571, by the Queen Jeanne d’Albret of Navarre; her son, Prince Henry of Navarre (Henry IV.); Prince Condé; Prince Louis, Count of Nassau; Admiral Coligny; Chatillon; several nobles, and all the preachers present.1229 The history of French Protestantism down to 1564 is largely identified with Calvin’s name. He induced the Swiss Cantons and the princes of the Smalkaldian League to intercede for the persecuted Huguenots. He sent messengers and letters of comfort to the prisoners. "The reverence," says one of his biographers, "with which his name was mentioned, the boundless confidence reposed in his person, the enthusiasm of the disciples who hastened to him, or came from him, surpasses all the usual experience of men. Congregations appealed to him for preachers; princes and noblemen for decisive counsel in political complications; those in doubt for instruction; the persecuted for protection; the martyrs for exhortation and encouragement in cheerful suffering and dying. And as the eye of a father watches over his children, Calvin watched with untiring care of love over all these relations in their manifold ramifications, and sought to be the same to the great community of his brethren in France what he was to the little Republic at home."1230

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  A Note from Sherman AlexieOkay, so you just finished reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve read it. Maybe it’s the hundredth. In any case, thank you for paying attention to my story. Thanks to all of you who’ve paid attention to this book over the last ten years. This novel is a decade old! That seems impossible, right? Time is a trickster. So I guess this Tenth Anniversary Edition of True Diary is like a birthday celebration. And this afterword is like a birthday song. That’s cool. But it should be something bigger than that, as well. I think I should use this afterword to tell you something new about True Diary and some of the people and places and events and ideas that inspired me to write it. Okay? So here we go. The hero of this book is Arnold Spirit Jr. The other hero of this book is Rowdy. I didn’t write Rowdy as a hero. I never intended him to be heroic. But he was not supposed to be a villain, either. He was meant to be a messy and contradictory human: bitter and funny, loyal and angry, loving and vindictive. He was Arnold’s best friend, but he was also going to become Arnold’s worst enemy. And yes, there would be reconciliation, but it would be complicated and competitive. Is there such a thing as antagonistic forgiveness? I don’t know if that happens in real life, but I tried to write it into this novel. After all, if you turn back to the first page and read this book again, then you will discover that Rowdy never really stops being a jerk. How did this jerk become so lovable? I had never thought of Rowdy as being lovable. I never even gave him a last name. At least, I don’t think I gave him a last name. I haven’t read True Diary in a while. I am sure that I have forgotten certain details. There’s also another thing: I had surgery to remove a benign brain tumor in December 2015, and that successful operation also removed some of my long-term memories. In any case, what kind of character doesn’t get a last name? What kind of character is given a violent name? A violent dude! How could I have predicted that a violent character would become the subject of fascination and affection? “Is Rowdy real?” readers have asked me thousands of times in the decade since True Diary was published. It is often the first question in any classroom, bookstore, or university lecture hall. Reporters ask me if Rowdy is based on a real person. I have received hundreds of letters from fans begging me to confirm that Rowdy is real. And the answer is “Yes, Rowdy is real.”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  We need some new blood.” “Thanks, man,” I said. I couldn’t believe he was so nice. He was, well, he was POLITE! How many great football players are polite? And kind? And generous like that? It was amazing. “Hey, listen,” I said. “The reason I was getting sick in there is—” I thought about telling him the whole truth, but I just couldn’t. “I bet you’re just sick with love,” Roger said. “No, well, yeah, maybe,” I said. “But the thing is, my stomach is all messed up because I, er, forgot my wallet. I left my money at home, man.” “Dude!” Roger said. “Man, don’t sweat it. You should have said something earlier. I got you covered.” He opened his wallet and handed me forty bucks. Holy, holy. What kind of kid can just hand over forty bucks like that? “I’ll pay you back, man,” I said. “Whenever, man, just have a good time, all right?” He slapped me on the back again. He was always slapping me on the back. We walked back to the table together, finished our food, and Roger drove me back to the school. I told them my dad was going to pick me up outside the gym. “Dude,” Roger said. “It’s three in the morning.” “It’s okay,” I said. “My dad works the swing shift. He’s coming here straight from work.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, everything is cool.” “I’ll bring Penultimate home safely, man.” “Cool.” So Penelope and I got out of the car so we could have a private good-bye. She had laser eyes. “Roger told me he lent you some money,” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “I forgot my wallet.” Her laser eyes grew hotter. “Arnold?” “Yeah?” “Can I ask you something big?” “Yeah, I guess.” “Are you poor?” I couldn’t lie to her anymore. “Yes,” I said. “I’m poor.” I figured she was going to march out of my life right then. But she didn’t. Instead she kissed me. On the cheek. I guess poor guys don’t get kissed on the lips. I was going to yell at her for being shallow. But then I realized that she was being my friend. Being a really good friend, in fact. She was concerned about me. I’d been thinking about her breasts and she’d been thinking about my whole life. I was the shallow one. “Roger was the one who guessed you were poor,” she said. “Oh, great, now he’s going to tell everybody.” “He’s not going to tell anybody. Roger likes you. He’s a great guy. He’s like my big brother. He can be your friend, too.” That sounded pretty good to me. I needed friends more than I needed my lust-filled dreams. “Is your Dad really coming to pick you up?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “Are you telling the truth?” “No,” I said. “How will you get home?” she asked. “Most nights, I walk home.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Title : The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner) Author: Alexie, Sherman [image "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie, Little, Brown and Company, New York, Boston" file=image_rsrc4RF.jpg] [image "Book cover of ‘The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian’ by Sherman Alexie, featuring two small illustrated figures one holding a gun and the other holding a spear." file=image_rsrc4RG.jpg] Begin Reading Table of Contents Copyright Page For Wellpinit and Reardan, my hometowns Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more. [image "Two circles containing the white letters L and B, representing Little Brown and Company." file=image_rsrc4RH.jpg] Foreword“I was born with water on the brain.” The opening line from a masterful work by a genius storyteller. The other night I thought I’d try reading this book out loud to my nine-year-old son. The copy we have is worn and dog-eared, a first edition bought only a few days after it was published in 2007. At the time I didn’t yet have a son, and my daughter was still very young. I had bought Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian for myself, having already, before it was published, heard how amazing it was. With that opening line, Alexie brought me into the world of Junior—struggling artist, ballplayer, survivor of two very different kinds of education. And inside Junior’s world, I was awakened to life on the reservation—meeting people and finding myself in situations I had never imagined. Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop, who has written extensively about the importance of children’s literature, talks about how books can be both mirrors and windows—mirrors in which readers can see themselves on the pages of literature and thereby know their existence in the world is valid and true, and windows into worlds they might never have imagined. This book is a window into Junior’s world—a window Alexie pulls the curtains back from and lovingly invites us into. But it is also a mirror for the many First Nations people who have not seen themselves in literature. It is hard to read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and not find a part of yourself in its pages. The other night, as my son and I ascended the stairs to his bedroom, I grabbed the book off the shelf—“Let’s just try it,” I said. My son, holding a comic book, said, “No.” Flatly. “Yes,” I said. “We’re going to give it a try.” I knew at once he’d love Junior and Rowdy and the many people he’d meet on the reservation. With that first line, my boy was hooked, the way I had been many years ago. The way my now-teenage daughter had been two summers ago, when she closed the book and exclaimed, “This book is so good, I cannot believe it was assigned.”

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  There were still the requisite lineaments, still the same vivid vermillion and bloom reigning in his face; but now the roses were more fully blown; the tan of his travels, and a beard somewhat more distinguishable, had, at the expense of no more delicacy than what he could well spare, given it an air of becoming manliness and maturity, that symmetrized nobly with that air of distinction and empire with which nature had stamped it, in a rare mixture with the sweetness of it; still nothing had he lost of that smooth plumpness of flesh, which, glowing with freshness, blooms florid to the eye, and delicious to the touch; then his shoulders were grown more square, his shape more formed, more portly, but still free and airy. In short, his figure showed riper, greater, and perfecter to the experienced eye, than in his tender youth; and now he was not much more than two and twenty. In this interval, however, I picked out of the broken, often pleasingly interrupted account of himself, that he was, at that instant, actually on his road to London, in not a very paramount plight or condition, having been wrecked on the Irish coast for which he had prematurely embarked, and lost the little all he had brought with him from the South Seas: so that he had not till after great shifts and hardships, in the company of his fellow- traveller, the captain, got so far on his journey; that so it was (having heard of his father’s death and circumstances,) he had now the world to begin again, on a new account: a situation, which he assured me, in a vein of sincerity, that flowing from his heart, penetrated mine, gave him to farther pain, than that he had not his power to make me as happy as he could wish. My fortune, you will please to observe, I had not entered upon any overture of, reserving, to feast myself with the surprise of it to him, in calmer instants.