Anger

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

  SA: Well, in various places, kids actually led the efforts against the bans. In Boise, Idaho, this young woman actually led the effort. She ended up in a city park distributing copies of True Diary to the public to battle against her own school board. So I’ve gotten letters from all sorts of kids like that who are fighting their own parents. Even last night at my son’s school, there was a man who was a liberal—it’s a very liberal school in a very liberal city—and we were talking about the influence of culture on our children and he advocated getting rid of your television, and I just shook my head. I mean, what a cliché, number one. And also, how censorious. What a censorious impulse. Does that man even recognize his own censorious impulses? That he wants to get rid of the outside world. That he wants to get rid of any image, any idea, any story, any thought that might upset him, that might cause him to have a conversation with his own child. Or, “Oh my God, there’s going to be something on that box I disagree with. Oh my God, I have to stop that.” Book banning punishes the imagination. Book banning punishes dialogue. Book banning turns disagreement into something evil and unwanted. Book banning turns opposing ideas into sins. Book banning is fundamentally religious, regardless of the religion. And I’m a secular warrior for free speech. JW: The book has given you so many opportunities to speak to communities about that, too. SA: Oh yeah, it’s been amazing, and it’s also so cute and quaint. It actually makes me feel so positive about books. That people are still so afraid of books that they’ll ban a book, they’ll keep their kid from reading a book, and yet their kid has an iPhone in their hands, access to every porn site in the world, access to all the porn that has ever been created, and yet they want my book banned because a teenage boy twice mentions masturbation. I think it says some-thing about books still being far more powerful. That the written word is still far more powerful than people think it is. JW: That immersion, that their kids are not just going to see pictures, they’re going to get ideas. SA: Yes, yes, yes. Scary books. Scary books. JW: This was your first YA book. Did it cause you to look at that genre differently? Read differently?

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

  I studied Mother while she walked up the steps of the Breeze Inn in her black bathing suit. She wore an old white shirt of Daddy’s for a coverup. Like a lot of women with great legs, she had a way of tiptoeing along an invisible line, especially on stairs. It made her butt kind of prissy, and I remember that bothered me somehow, too. She was carrying a sketch pad the size of a small card table, like she was planning to draw the fishermen, but I knew with a cold certainty while I stood ankle-deep in that lukewarm water that she was climbing up there to get drunk. Maybe that pissed me off, because all of a sudden, I wheeled around to Lecia and whooshed as much of the Gulf at her as I could move with two cupped hands. She tried to cover her face so her bangs wouldn’t get wet, but she was pretty well soaked. She was giving me the finger for having done this when Daddy stepped out from behind the trunk of the car. But instead of just letting her hand relax, so he wouldn’t see her shooting the bird, she hid the whole hand behind her head, still frozen in the fuck-you position. She stood there like that for way longer than it might have taken her to relax her hand. I can still see Daddy coming down the beach toward us. He had his black swim trunks on, and black basketball Keds. He’d put on a red Lone Star baseball cap and was slipping into his blue work shirt while he came toward us. He had the easy glide of men who labor for an hourly wage, a walk that wastes no effort and refuses to rush. His barrel chest and legs were pale. There was a wide blood-colored scar up one shin where one of Lee Gleason’s quarter horses had thrown Daddy, then dragged him around the corral till six inches of white shinbone was visible on that leg. On the same leg, just above the knee, there was a knot of iron-blue shrapnel bulging under the skin left over from the war. Still, he didn’t limp one bit coming toward us. He had an amused squint on his face. Maybe he even knew that Lecia was hiding that fuck-you finger in back of her neck, and that tickled him. He stood on the packed sand and called to us. “Y’all come on out from there. I want you to look at something.” We followed him up the beach. We passed what looked like the whole roof off a good-sized shed. There were also stinking loads of dead fish, a whole school of mullet all facing one direction and blank-eyed, looking like they’d leapt up all at once and the wave that had carried them had just evaporated before they came down.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  If the IRS doesn’t recognize you, why should we?” As a part of the settlement, Miscavige revealed, the agency agreed to send notices to every country in the world, explaining what Scientology was. “It is very complete and very accurate,” Miscavige said of the government brochure. “How do I know? We wrote it!” Miscavige summed up the mood in the Sports Arena: “The future is ours.” A MONTH AFTER the church’s historic triumph over the IRS in 1993, Rathbun blew. He had come to see Miscavige in a different light during the two years they labored over the tax case. The last six months of the tax case had been particularly arduous. During that period, he slept only about four hours a night. The former athlete was a physical wreck. “ I’m only doing this for LRH,” he told himself, as he and Miscavige ate dinners together night after night in Washington and trudged back to the Four Seasons in Georgetown. “I’m not going to be this guy’s bitch for the rest of my life.” No doubt the stress affected Miscavige as well. On the night of his big victory speech in the Sports Arena, Miscavige showed up for a run-through, but the stage manager, Stefan Castle, was still fiddling with the cues for a complicated laser and pyrotechnic display. According to Castle, Miscavige stormed out into the arena and began to strangle him. Miscavige let him go before any real harm was done, but it was an alarming signal. Amy Scobee, head of the Celebrity Centre at the time, also noted that Miscavige’s personality began to shift immediately after the IRS decision, becoming more aggressive and hostile. At the party at the Celebrity Centre following his speech, Miscavige rudely shoved her aside as he entered. “ You just want to get rid of me,” she remembers him saying. As far as Rathbun was concerned, it didn’t help that Miscavige scarcely acknowledged him in the speech that night. Immediately after the event, reporters from the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times were calling Rathbun to ask about Miscavige’s salary, which had been disclosed in the IRS documents. Miscavige and his wife together were making more than $100,000 a year—not an extraordinary figure by the standards of world religious leaders, but quite a contrast to the $30 a week most of the Sea Org members were earning. Miscavige was outraged by the impertinence of the reporters, and Rathbun felt that he was taking it out on him. This was all coming at a time when he had been postponing a final visit to see his father, who was dying of cancer. The St. Petersburg Times published an editorial demanding that Congress investigate the tax-exemption decision. Rathbun was sent to Florida to turn around the Times editorial board, who were not at all persuaded by his arguments. Miscavige was furious that Rathbun failed to handle the situation.

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

  On a green hill in the background, I drew grave mounds in brown and topped them off with white crosses, each penciled with “R.I.P.” That truth—that death came in a big blind swipe—was gradually taking form in my head, picking up force and gaining motion like its own kind of storm. It was drawing me away from the other kids in a way I didn’t even notice. They still saw the world as some playground smiled over by God. I couldn’t, and their innocence rankled me to the point of fury. When Baptist girls standing next to me on the choir risers got all misty-eyed singing about the purple mountains’ majesty, I would often elbow or jostle them out of nothing but spite. If they turned my way in outrage, I’d make a wide-eyed apology. I couldn’t help myself. Sundays, when Carol Sharp came home from Bible school—her black hair pinched and shining in twin plastic barrettes, her petticoat sticking her pink skirt out sideways—and announced, while I was digging for worms in the flower box, how God had made me from dirt, I said I wasn’t dirt, and I wasn’t God’s Barbie doll either. And why would God set Death loose among us like some wind-up robot destroyer if he loved us so much. Carol was ready for this. “There are some mysteries in life the Lord doesn’t want us to understand,” which serene declaration caused me to turn our garden hose on her full force. Something in me had died when Grandma had, and while I didn’t miss her one iota, I keenly felt the loss of my own trust in the world’s order. Leechfield itself would make you think that way—the landscape, I mean. You needed to watch out for the natural world down there, to defend yourself against it. One fall morning I was crossing a meadow to a sugarcane field with a friend’s family when the bird dogs that had been running alongside the men with rifles turned and went into a hard point right at one little girl’s feet. Somebody’s daddy told us all to freeze still, which we did. He took aim with his Winchester where this four-year-old was standing in her red Keds, scared enough to wet her pants. When he fired, a rattlesnake flew thirty feet up in the still air. It landed with a plop in the weeds, where the dogs fell on it. You might well start toting a rifle or shotgun around after that, for reasons that had nothing to do with other human beings. It’s nature itself, revered in other climates, that’s Leechfield’s best advertisement for firearms. The woods held every species of poisonous snake, spider, and rabid biting creature available in that latitude. Even at the beach, there were signs warning you to stay out of the eelgrass because of the alligators. The Gulf itself was warm as dishwater and brown. There were stingrays and sea snakes under its surface.

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

  “And as man has need of her, you are going to say. At least, so the priests of science assure us. I would force these priests to fulfil the function of these women, who, in their opinion, are necessary to man. I wonder what song they would sing then. Assure man that he needs brandy, tobacco, opium, and he will believe those poisons necessary. It follows that God did not know how to arrange matters properly, since, without asking the opinions of the priests, he has combined things as they are. Man needs, so they have decided, to satisfy his sensual desire, and here this function is disturbed by the birth and the nursing of children. “What, then, is to be done? Why, apply to the priests; they will arrange everything, and they have really discovered a way. When, then, will these rascals with their lies be uncrowned! It is high time. We have had enough of them. People go mad, and shoot each other with revolvers, and always because of that! And how could it be otherwise? “One would say that the animals know that descent continues their race, and that they follow a certain law in regard thereto. Only man does not know this, and is unwilling to know it. He cares only to have as much sensual enjoyment as possible. The king of nature,—man! In the name of his love he kills half the human race. Of woman, who ought to be his aid in the movement of humanity toward liberty, he makes, in the name of his pleasures, not an aid, but an enemy. Who is it that everywhere puts a check upon the progressive movement of humanity? Woman. Why is it so? “For the reason that I have given, and for that reason only.” CHAPTER XIV. “Yes, much worse than the animal is man when he does not live as a man. Thus was I. The horrible part is that I believed, inasmuch as I did not allow myself to be seduced by other women that I was leading an honest family life, that I was a very moral being, and that if we had quarrels, the fault was in my wife, and in her character.

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

  In the mean time, if I may judge from my own experience, none are better paid, or better treated, during their reign, than the mistress of those who, enervate by nature, debaucheries, or age, have the least employment for the sex: sensible that a woman must be satisfied some way, they ply her with a thousand little tender attentions, presents, caresses, confidences, and exhaust their inventions in means and devices to make up for the capital deficiency; and even towards lessening that, what arts, what modes, what refinements of pleasure have they not recourse to, to raise their languid powers, and press nature into the service of their sensuality? But here is their misfortune, that when by a course of teasing, worrying, handling, wanton postures, lascivious motions, they have at length accomplished a flashy enervate enjoyment, they at the same time light up a flame in the object of their passion, that, not having the means themselves to quench, drives her for relief into the next person’s arms, who can finish their work; and thus they become bawds to some favourite, tried and approved of, for a more vigorous and satisfactory execution; for with women, of our turn especially, however well our hearts may be disposed, there is a controlling part, or queen-seat in us, that governs itself by its own maxims of state, amongst which not one is stronger, in practice with it, than, in the matter of is dues, never to accept the will for the deed. Mr. Norbert, who was much in this ungracious case, though he professed to like me extremely, could but seldom consummate the main-joy itself with me, without such a length and variety of preparations, as were at once wearisome and inflammatory. Sometimes he would strip me stark naked on a carpet, by a good fire, when he would contemplate me almost by the hour, disposing me in all the figures and attitudes of body that it was susceptible of being viewed in; kissing me in every part, the most secret and critical one so far from excepted that it received most of that branch of homage. Then his touches were so exquisitely wanton, so luxuriously diffused and penetrative at times, that he had made me perfectly rage with titillating fires, when, after all, and much ado, he had gained a short-lived erection, he would perhaps melt it away in a washy sweat, or a premature abortive effusion, that provokingly mocked my eager desires: or, if carried home, how faultered and unnervous the execution! how insufficient the sprinkle of a few heat-drops to extinguish all the flames he had kindled!

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

  “It is not a question of loving them or of not loving them. They have ruined my life, as they have ruined the lives of thousands of beings before me, and I cannot help connecting the consequence with the cause. I conceive that they desire, like the lawyers and the rest, to make money. I would willingly have given them half of my income—and any one would have done it in my place, understanding what they do—if they had consented not to meddle in my conjugal life, and to keep themselves at a distance. I have compiled no statistics, but I know scores of cases—in reality, they are innumerable—where they have killed, now a child in its mother’s womb, asserting positively that the mother could not give birth to it (when the mother could give birth to it very well), now mothers, under the pretext of a so-called operation. No one has counted these murders, just as no one counted the murders of the Inquisition, because it was supposed that they were committed for the benefit of humanity. Innumerable are the crimes of the doctors! But all these crimes are nothing compared with the materialistic demoralization which they introduce into the world through women. I say nothing of the fact that, if it were to follow their advice,—thanks to the microbe which they see everywhere,—humanity, instead of tending to union, would proceed straight to complete disunion. Everybody, according to their doctrine, should isolate himself, and never remove from his mouth a syringe filled with phenic acid (moreover, they have found out now that it does no good). But I would pass over all these things. The supreme poison is the perversion of people, especially of women. One can no longer say now: ‘You live badly, live better.’ One can no longer say it either to himself or to others, for, if you live badly (say the doctors), the cause is in the nervous system or in something similar, and it is necessary to go to consult them, and they will prescribe for you thirty-five copecks’ worth of remedies to be bought at the drug-store, and you must swallow them. Your condition grows worse? Again to the doctors, and more remedies! An excellent business! “But to return to our subject. I was saying that my wife nursed her children well, that the nursing and the gestation of the children, and the children in general, quieted my tortures of jealousy, but that, on the other hand, they provoked torments of a different sort.” CHAPTER XVI.

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

  “‘You have become absolutely impossible,’ she began, or some such phrase as that regarding my character, trying, as usual, to give me as much pain as possible. ‘After what you have done to my sister (she referred to an incident with her sister, in which, beside myself, I had uttered brutalities; she knew that that tortured me, and tried to touch me in that tender spot) nothing will astonish me.’ “‘Yes, offended, humiliated, and dishonored, and after that to hold me still responsible,’ thought I, and suddenly a rage, such a hatred invaded me as I do not remember to have ever felt before. For the first time I desired to express this hatred physically. I leaped upon her, but at the same moment I understood my condition, and I asked myself whether it would be well for me to abandon myself to my fury. And I answered myself that it would be well, that it would frighten her, and, instead of resisting, I lashed and spurred myself on, and was glad to feel my anger boiling more and more fiercely. “‘Go away, or I will kill you!’ I cried, purposely, with a frightful voice, and I grasped her by the arm. She did not go away. Then I twisted her arm, and pushed her away violently. “‘What is the matter with you? Come to your senses!’ she shrieked. “‘Go away,’ roared I, louder than ever, rolling my eyes wildly. ‘It takes you to put me in such a fury. I do not answer for myself! Go away!’ “In abandoning myself to my anger, I became steeped in it, and I wanted to commit some violent act to show the force of my fury. I felt a terrible desire to beat her, to kill her, but I realized that that could not be, and I restrained myself. I drew back from her, rushed to the table, grasped the paper-weight, and threw it on the floor by her side. I took care to aim a little to one side, and, before she disappeared (I did it so that she could see it), I grasped a candlestick, which I also hurled, and then took down the barometer, continuing to shout: “‘Go away! I do not answer for myself!’

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

  Fate itself would pick Daddy’s present, rather than running the risk that I’d get something half-assed. Mother headed up the aisle toward us. I heard the measured click of her heels, which told me she had the red-ass over this whole undertaking. She announced to the counter lady that the catalogue didn’t say word one about them not shipping stuff till Kennedy was out of office. She said her baby (meaning me) had worked like a field hand getting all those stamps stuck in books. I tugged the elbow of her beige cashmere jacket to slow her down, but she jerked away. It was a rant I’d heard—the Goddamn Lying, Republican Bastards who’d ever thought up the miserable, niggardly business of stamp-licking. The lady misheard the “niggardly” part and herself got steamed, saying she wasn’t colored, she was an Indian, to which Mother replied, “I don’t give a great steaming pile of dogshit what you are—” I somehow herded Mother outside under the forest-green awning. A fine rain had started to fall. Great gray clouds rolled down the mountains. The street was wet and black. I’d left my box of stamps on the counter and would have fried in hot lard before I’d have slid into Mother’s Impala without something in my lap for Daddy, however small and wrong that gift might wind up being. But I knew better than to say it that strong. You couldn’t draw a hard line in front of Mother, ever, could never set down an ultimatum. Doing so only made her bow up—as Daddy always said—like a cut worm. She would spend her last breath calling you a cocksucker before she’d back down. I hedged. I suggested. I finally watched her skitter through the rain on her heels across the wet street to a bar with a red neon sign in the window, the Black Cat. For what seemed like hours I walked the wide chilly aisles of the Redemption Center. The shelves rose all the way up to the twenty-foot steel-beam rafters. Most of the grown-up stuff was inside boxes the color of dirt, so I kept going back to the front desk. But the clerk—dead sure, I guess, that Mother had called her a nigger—wouldn’t let me handle the inventory book hitched to the counter. After a while, the toy aisle drew me. There were Ping-Pong tables and pool tables, an inflatable swimming pool deep enough to go swimming underwater in. I almost blew a batch of stamp books on a plastic toy factory that used a heat and vacuum process to sculpt from small squares of plastic the kind of bright-colored doodads you got out of gum machines for pennies—baby footballs and squatty dolls with loops on the tops of their heads to string them around your neck. The picture on front showed a clean-scrubbed boy and girl about my age operating a roadside toy stand.

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

  “And to surprise them more quickly, I started on tiptoe for the dining-room, not through the parlor, but through the hall and the children’s rooms. In the first room slept the little boy. In the second, the old nurse moved in her bed, and seemed on the point of waking, and I wondered what she would think when she knew all. And pity for myself gave me such a pang that I could not keep the tears back. Not to wake the children, I ran lightly through the hall into my study. I dropped upon the sofa, and sobbed. ‘I, an honest man, I, the son of my parents, who all my life long have dreamed of family happiness, I who have never betrayed! . . . And here my five children, and she embracing a musician because he has red lips! No, she is not a woman! She is a bitch, a dirty bitch! Beside the chamber of the children, whom she had pretended to love all her life! And then to think of what she wrote me! And how do I know? Perhaps it has always been thus. Perhaps all these children, supposed to be mine, are the children of my servants. And if I had arrived to-morrow, she would have come to meet me with her coiffure, with her corsage, her indolent and graceful movements (and I see her attractive and ignoble features), and this jealous animal would have remained forever in my heart, tearing it. What will the old nurse say? And Gregor? And the poor little Lise? She already understands things. And this impudence, this falsehood, this bestial sensuality, that I know so well,’ I said to myself. “I tried to rise. I could not. My heart was beating so violently that I could not hold myself upon my legs. ‘Yes, I shall die of a rush of blood. She will kill me. That is what she wants. What is it to her to kill? But that would be too agreeable to him, and I will not allow him to have this pleasure. “Yes, here I am, and there they are. They are laughing, they. . . . Yes, in spite of the fact that she is no longer in her early youth, he has not disdained her. At any rate, she is by no means ugly, and above all, not dangerous to his dear health, to him. Why did I not stifle her then?’ said I to myself, as I remembered that other scene of the previous week, when I drove her from my study, and broke the furniture.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  “ She was a sweet, innocent thing thrown into chaos,” one of her shipmates recalled. John Brousseau was married to Shelly’s older sister, Clarisse, and one day he proposed that the two couples go fishing. Miscavige had never been. They drove up to Lake Hemet, a glacial lake in the mountains above Gold Base. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was glinting off the water, a mild breeze was blowing, the wildflowers were out, and birds were singing. Everyone was dressed in shorts or jeans. They had brought sandwiches and sodas for a picnic. Brousseau baited the poles with salmon eggs, and then showed the others how to cast. He said to just let the line sink to the bottom and then sit back and wait. Maybe a trout would take a bite. Brousseau recalls looking over at Miscavige five minutes later. He was visibly shaking, his veins were bulging. “ You got to be kidding me!” he said. “This is it? You just sit here and fucking wait?” Brousseau said that was the general idea. “I can’t stand it!” Brousseau remembers Miscavige saying. “I feel like jumping in and grabbing a fish with my fucking hands! Or cramming the hook down their fucking throats!” That was the end of the fishing trip. After Quentin’s suicide and Mary Sue’s prison sentence, the remainder of Hubbard’s family broke apart. His oldest daughter, Diana, had been Hubbard’s main supporter. She and her husband, Jonathan Horwich, lived at Flag Base in the Fort Harrison penthouse in Clearwater, with their daughter, Roanne. As her father became increasingly remote, Diana decided to try her luck as a singer and songwriter. She released a soft-jazz album titled LifeTimes in 1979, using notable Scientologist musicians, including Chick Corea and Stanley Clarke, as backup. The cover features her in a black dress, lips parted, arms crossed, her pale shoulders hunched, and her waist-length red hair stirring in the breeze. Although the album received little notice, Diana decided to leave her husband, and the Sea Org, and marry John Ryan, a public Scientologist who had produced her record. She moved to Los Angeles to dedicate herself to music. Horwich agreed to the divorce, but he refused to part with Roanne, who was two years old at the time. Hubbard strongly supported this decision, but Mary Sue was opposed. She wanted her granddaughter to be nearby, and she began agitating for Diana to gain custody. Several missions were sent to bargain with Diana, but she was unmoved. Finally, Jesse Prince got the assignment. “ It was a do or die mission,” he recalled. If he didn’t succeed in gaining clear custody of Roanne for Horwich, he would be sent back to the RPF. For whatever reason, Diana signed the release he put in front of her. Hubbard was thrilled. He rewarded Prince with a leather coat, a gold chain, some cash, and an M14 assault rifle. Suzette, Diana’s younger sister, was increasingly disaffected.

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

  And he can’t hardly breathe.” I slid out of the covers and pulled on a hooded sweatshirt. Her hair was silky white, a glow in the dark room. “Won’t let you?” I said. The concept of permission as applied to Mother was foreign. She answered with a tired sigh. I took the sloshing vaporizer, which was the old hot-steam type she’d used for our croup as kids. Daddy was sitting on the edge of that oceanic bed in his boxer shorts barking out a dry cough. His head hung down between his broad shoulders like a wounded bull’s. On his right thigh was a plum-colored bump where he’d caught some shrapnel during the war. “Daddy?” I said, and he roared up for me to get the fuck out, which assault seemed to blast all available oxygen from the room. Maybe my hair flew back in cartoon astonishment. Then he wound down again into a gasping cough. He’d never talked to me that way, and I froze in it. After a while he seemed to forget I was standing there. He lay back down. He wasn’t exactly coughing, but his breathing had a jagged gasp in the middle of it. When I started nosing around behind the dresser for an electrical outlet, he roared up again. “What you want in here?” More coughs, the tendons on his neck stood out in sharp relief. I turned on the dresser lamp. The room was icebox cold, but he was in a flop sweat, his face bright with fever. The bedclothes held moist wrinkles where he’d been resting. I told him I was fixing to plug the vaporizer in. A bead of sweat hung from his nose. He wiped it with the back of his hand and squinted my way. “Your mother sent you in here, didn’t she?” Then he started a rant against her the likes of which I’d never heard. She was the most selfish person he’d ever known. She’d ruined everybody she ever touched. Including me and my sister. We weren’t nothing. Lecia with her Phi Beta Kappa in physics. Me with my MFA—Mother-Fucking Asshole’s what that stood for. Where he got the wind for all this, I can’t guess. His voice came out in a guttural rasp, like the possessed kid in that exorcist movie. Daddy railed down to his last breath: I couldn’t master my own rosy red ass, he said. Thermometers had degrees, he said. I still didn’t know my butt from a hole in the ground. I was crying by then. Once coughing had shut him up again, I started groping along the baseboard for an outlet. The lamp cord got jostled in the process, so the room plunged to black. He didn’t say anything. When I plugged the vaporizer in, a chubby road of steam started puffing right in my face. It smelled of menthol chest rub. He waved his ropy arm in the mist.

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

  He just looked at me and whistled. I was mad. If these dang Indians had been this organized when I went to school here, maybe I would have had more reasons to stay. That thought made me laugh. So I laughed. And my laughter was the only sound in the gym. And then I noticed that the only Indian who hadn’t turned his back on me was Rowdy. He was standing on the other end of the court. He passed a basketball around his back, around his back, around his back, like a clock. And he glared at me. He wanted to play. He didn’t want to turn his back on me. He wanted to kill me, face-to-face. That made me laugh some more. And then Coach started laughing with me. And so did my teammates. And we kept laughing as we walked into the locker room to get ready for the game. Once inside the locker room, I almost passed out. I slumped against a locker. I felt dizzy and weak. And then I cried, and felt ashamed of my tears. But Coach knew exactly what to say. “It’s okay,” Coach said to me, but he was talking to the whole team. “If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad, Arnold, get mad.” And so I got mad. And I was still mad and crying when we ran out for warm-ups. And I was still mad when the game started. I was on the bench. I didn’t think I was going to play much. I was only a freshman. But halfway through the first quarter, with the score tied at 10, Coach sent me in. And as I ran onto the court, somebody in the crowd threw a quarter at me. AND HIT ME IN THE FRICKING FOREHEAD! They drew blood. I was bleeding. So I couldn’t play. Bleeding and angry, I glared at the crowd. They taunted me as I walked into the locker room. I bled alone, until Eugene, my dad’s best friend, walked in. He had just become an EMT for the tribal clinic. “Let me look at that,” he said, and poked at my wound. “You still got your motorcycle?” I asked. “Nah, I wrecked that thing,” he said, and dabbed antiseptic on my cut. “How does this feel?” “It hurts.” “Ah, it’s nothing,” he said. “Maybe three stitches. I’ll drive you to Spokane to get it fixed up.” “Do you hate me, too?” I asked Eugene. “No, man, you’re cool,” he said. “Good,” I said. “It’s too bad you didn’t get to play,” Eugene said. “Your dad says you’re getting pretty good.” “Not as good as you,” I said. Eugene was a legend. People say he could have played in college, but people also say Eugene couldn’t read. You can’t read, you can’t ball. “You’ll get them next time,” Eugene said.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  It has been remarked that as the Soviet Union finally disintegrated in 1991, it left the Russian Orthodox Church as ‘arguably the most “Soviet” of all institutions’ remaining in Russia. [41] One remarkable symptom was that the FSB, the Russian intelligence service that had rather seamlessly succeeded the Soviet KGB, lovingly restored a Moscow parish church for its own use. In 2002 the Church of the Holy Wisdom was reconsecrated with full Orthodox pomp by no less a figure than Patriarch Aleksii, who amid the festivities presented the FSB’s Director, Nikolai Patrushev, with an icon of his name-saint Nikolai. [42] In 1999 President Boris Yeltsin nominated as his successor a little-known St Petersburg politician and former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin. It was a decade before Putin decided to weaponize sex as part of his consolidation of power, reversing a direction set by Yeltsin’s regime. Yeltsin had repealed Stalin’s criminalization of male homosexuality in 1993 as part of dismantling Soviet-era legislation, and gay activism had become increasingly visible in public, at least in Moscow or St Petersburg. Increasingly, conservative–nationalist political groups seized on this issue in their anger at the Western humiliation of the Soviet Union and the chaos of post-Soviet Russia. A debate on sex in the Duma (Parliament) in 2002 was nevertheless significant for what it failed to achieve: a restoration of Stalin’s law on male homosexuality, not to mention a ban on lesbianism and even fines for masturbation, all decisively voted down. [43] At this stage President Putin showed little support for such moves, evidently cautious about openly repudiating the assumptions about human rights that governed social change in the European Union and the West generally. Conservatives nevertheless learned from their defeat. They would have to be more precise in their campaigns for what they increasingly called ‘traditional sexuality’, a new coinage to describe a new idea. This meant turning the focus on homosexuality. Official support came in the wake of the world economic crisis of 2008–9, which had ended the domestic economic growth that had made Putin popular despite the obvious corruption of his regime. Twenty eleven brought a sudden surge in new legislation across the Russian Federation banning ‘gay propaganda’ aimed at minors. It is not clear how far Putin orchestrated this, but at the end of the year, he suffered a personal humiliation when attending a wrestling match in Moscow at which he was mocked by the spectators (of course, overwhelmingly male). That was a particular trauma for a leader whose public propaganda already cultivated his bare-chested macho outdoor image, though in the West that might have been labelled as rather camp. [44] In 2012, Putin quietly backed one of his associated Duma politicians, Elena Mizulina, in drawing up blanket legislation against ‘non-traditional sexual relations’. Its passage was surrounded by much denunciation of paedophilia, silently eliding that with homosexuality in general, and adding strident concerns that sexual deviancy had a part in contemporary Russia’s striking demographic decline.

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

  So, weak and poor and scared, I let them call me names while I tried to figure out what to do. And it might have continued that way if Roger the Giant hadn’t taken it too far. It was lunchtime and I was standing outside by the weird sculpture that was supposed to be an Indian. I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn’t have a telescope, so I was just an idiot. Roger the Giant and his gang of giants strutted over to me. “Hey, Chief,” Roger said. It seemed like he was seven feet tall and three hundred pounds. He was a farm boy who carried squealing pigs around like they were already thin slices of bacon. I stared at Roger and tried to look tough. I read once that you can scare away a charging bear if you wave your arms and look big. But I figured I’d just look like a terrified idiot having an arm seizure. “Hey, Chief,” Roger said. “You want to hear a joke?” “Sure,” I said. “Did you know that Indians are living proof that niggers fuck buffalo?” I felt like Roger had kicked me in the face. That was the most racist thing I’d ever heard in my life. Roger and his friends were laughing like crazy. I hated them. And I knew I had to do something big. I couldn’t let them get away with that shit. I wasn’t just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo. So I punched Roger in the face. He wasn’t laughing when he landed on his ass. And he wasn’t laughing when his nose bled like red fireworks. I struck some fake karate pose because I figured Roger’s gang was going to attack me for bloodying their leader. But they just stared at me. They were shocked. “You punched me,” Roger said. His voice was thick with blood. “I can’t believe you punched me.” He sounded insulted. He sounded like his poor little feelings had been hurt. I couldn’t believe it. He acted like he was the one who’d been wronged. “You’re an animal,” he said. I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target. “You meet me after school right here,” I said. “Why?” he asked. I couldn’t believe he was so stupid. “Because we’re going to finish this fight.” “You’re crazy,” Roger said. He got to his feet and walked away. His gang stared at me like I was a serial killer, and then they followed their leader. I was absolutely confused.

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

  “What love?” said the lady. “The ordinary love of husband and wife.” “And how, then, can ordinary love consecrate marriage?” continued the nervous gentleman, still excited, and with a displeased air. He seemed to wish to say something disagreeable to the lady. She felt it, and began to grow agitated. “How? Why, very simply,” said she. The nervous gentleman seized the word as it left her lips. “No, not simply.” “Madam says,” interceded the lawyer indicating his companion, “that marriage should be first the result of an attachment, of a love, if you will, and that, when love exists, and in that case only, marriage represents something sacred. But every marriage which is not based on a natural attachment, on love, has in it nothing that is morally obligatory. Is not that the idea that you intended to convey?” he asked the lady. The lady, with a nod of her head, expressed her approval of this translation of her thoughts. “Then,” resumed the lawyer, continuing his remarks. But the nervous gentleman, evidently scarcely able to contain himself, without allowing the lawyer to finish, asked: “Yes, sir. But what are we to understand by this love that alone consecrates marriage?” “Everybody knows what love is,” said the lady. “But I don’t know, and I should like to know how you define it.” “How? It is very simple,” said the lady. And she seemed thoughtful, and then said: “Love . . . love . . . is a preference for one man or one woman to the exclusion of all others. . . .” “A preference for how long? . . . For a month, two days, or half an hour?” said the nervous gentleman, with special irritation. “No, permit me, you evidently are not talking of the same thing.” “Yes, I am talking absolutely of the same thing. Of the preference for one man or one woman to the exclusion of all others. But I ask: a preference for how long?” “For how long? For a long time, for a life-time sometimes.” “But that happens only in novels. In life, never. In life this preference for one to the exclusion of all others lasts in rare cases several years, oftener several months, or even weeks, days, hours. . . .” “Oh, sir. Oh, no, no, permit me,” said all three of us at the same time. The clerk himself uttered a monosyllable of disapproval. “Yes, I know,” he said, shouting louder than all of us; “you are talking of what is believed to exist, and I am talking of what is. Every man feels what you call love toward each pretty woman he sees, and very little toward his wife. That is the origin of the proverb,—and it is a true one,—‘Another’s wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.’”

• From Manhunt (2022)

  Karin gave her a long, opaque look. “Is it something we should celebrate, ma’am?” Ramona flopped down into one of the Shaws’ stupid modernist chairs, as expensive-looking as they were uncomfortable, and bit back a hiss of pain as she banged her cut elbow on one of its metal arms. “Don’t,” she spat as Karin started toward her. “If you spend one more second fussing over me I swear to Christ I’ll put a bullet in your kneecap.” That’s good. Scream at your staff. Piss your whole future away over some stoner eunuch who didn’t even love you. Karin stood silent, eyes downcast, face flushed. Ramona forced herself to take a steadying breath. “Anything else?” “There’s someone from the Screw here to see you.” “She can have five minutes,” Ramona snapped. “But if she’s here about the farms, you can tell her to fuck off. They’re ours now.” Karin left. For a minute Ramona sat stewing in the bad smell of her own temper tantrum and watched the bright sodium flare of arc cutters take Hyannis apart at the joints. How the fuck had that thing got so far up on the shore? It must have been going like hell when it ran aground, swarming with changed men, the handful of women in the crew either dead or barricaded in a single cabin while the massive engines thundered and the deck rolled beneath their feet. Maybe they’d prayed. She heard footsteps in the front hall. In the window a woman’s reflection swam out of the dark mouth. Slim and lanky, sandy hair around her shoulders and in soft, feathery bangs creeping uncut toward dark eyes. Fran flashed a nervous smile. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said quietly. “But I really think we should talk.” “Thanks for coming,” said Rachel, hopping aside to let Beth in through the lighthouse door. The air inside was damp and cool, morning light slanting in through high, narrow windows above. Shadows lay heavy on the older woman’s lined and wind-burned face and the wrinkles in her unwashed linen pants, tied off just under the stump of her right leg. She moved quickly on her crutches. “Dr. Varma said you might be able to give us a hand with a little programming problem.” The lighthouse’s ground floor was a rat’s nest of cables and scavenged electronics in various states of assembly. On the far wall, in a chair under the rusted spiral stair, Persephone sat hunched in front of a trio of mismatched monitors surrounded by computer towers. Somewhere out of sight a generator whined.

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

  He just looked at me and whistled. I was mad. If these dang Indians had been this organized when I went to school here, maybe I would have had more reasons to stay. That thought made me laugh. So I laughed. And my laughter was the only sound in the gym. And then I noticed that the only Indian who hadn’t turned his back on me was Rowdy. He was standing on the other end of the court. He passed a basketball around his back, around his back, around his back, like a clock. And he glared at me. He wanted to play. He didn’t want to turn his back on me. He wanted to kill me, face-to-face. That made me laugh some more. And then Coach started laughing with me. And so did my teammates. And we kept laughing as we walked into the locker room to get ready for the game. Once inside the locker room, I almost passed out. I slumped against a locker. I felt dizzy and weak. And then I cried, and felt ashamed of my tears. But Coach knew exactly what to say. “It’s okay,” Coach said to me, but he was talking to the whole team. “If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad, Arnold, get mad.” And so I got mad. And I was still mad and crying when we ran out for warm-ups. And I was still mad when the game started. I was on the bench. I didn’t think I was going to play much. I was only a freshman. But halfway through the first quarter, with the score tied at 10, Coach sent me in. And as I ran onto the court, somebody in the crowd threw a quarter at me. AND HIT ME IN THE FRICKING FOREHEAD! They drew blood. I was bleeding. So I couldn’t play. Bleeding and angry, I glared at the crowd. They taunted me as I walked into the locker room. I bled alone, until Eugene, my dad’s best friend, walked in. He had just become an EMT for the tribal clinic. “Let me look at that,” he said, and poked at my wound. “You still got your motorcycle?” I asked. “Nah, I wrecked that thing,” he said, and dabbed antiseptic on my cut. “How does this feel?” “It hurts.” “Ah, it’s nothing,” he said. “Maybe three stitches. I’ll drive you to Spokane to get it fixed up.” “Do you hate me, too?” I asked Eugene. “No, man, you’re cool,” he said. “Good,” I said. “It’s too bad you didn’t get to play,” Eugene said. “Your dad says you’re getting pretty good.” “Not as good as you,” I said. Eugene was a legend. People say he could have played in college, but people also say Eugene couldn’t read. You can’t read, you can’t ball. “You’ll get them next time,” Eugene said.

• From Going Clear (2013)

  Twenty years later, the church was $1 billion in arrears, with only $125 million in reserves. The founder had placed Scientology’s head on the executioner’s block. The war between the church and the IRS had already gone on for more than two decades, with both sides waging a campaign of intimidation and espionage. Miscavige accused the Criminal Investigation Division of the IRS of engaging in surveillance of church leaders, wiretaps, and illegal opening of the church’s mail. Now the church upped the ante by besieging the IRS with 200 lawsuits on the part of the church and more than 2,300 suits on behalf of individual parishioners in every jurisdiction in the country, overwhelming government lawyers, running up fantastic expenses, and causing an immense amount of havoc inside the IRS. Miscavige boasted that the entire legal budget of the federal agency was exhausted: “ They didn’t even have money to attend the annual American Bar Association conference of lawyers—which they were supposed to speak at!” The church ran ads against the agency, using the images of beloved celebrities (who were not Scientologists) such as John Wayne and Willie Nelson, who had been audited by the IRS. “ All of America Loved Lucy,” one ad said, over an iconic photo of Lucille Ball, “except the IRS.” A ten-thousand-dollar reward was offered to potential whistle-blowers to expose IRS abuses. Private investigators dug into the private lives of IRS officials, going so far as to attend seminars and pose as IRS workers, to see who had a drinking problem or might be cheating on a spouse. Stories based on these investigations were promoted by a phony news bureau the church established, and also published in the church’s Freedom magazine, which Scientologists passed out for free on the steps of the IRS headquarters in Washington. The hatred on both sides for the other was intense. It seemed bizarre that a rather small organization could overmatch the US government, but the harassment campaign was having an effect. Some government workers were getting anonymous calls in the middle of the night, or finding that their pets had disappeared. Whether or not these events were part of the Scientology onslaught, they added to the paranoia many in the agency were feeling. Both the church and the IRS faced the challenge of addressing the question of what, exactly, constituted a religion in the eyes of the American government. On the church’s side was a body of scholars who had arisen in defense of what were called “new religious movements,” such as the Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, and of course the Church of Scientology. The term was employed to replace the word “ cult,” because these academics found no reliable way of distinguishing a cult from a religion. They believe that new religious movements are persecuted and ridiculed simply because they are recent and seem exotic. Often, such experts are paid to testify in court on behalf of these organizations.

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

  This synod met at Ephesus, in August, 449, and consisted of one hundred and thirty-five bishops. It occupies a notorious place in the chronique scandaleuse of church history. Dioscurus presided, with brutal violence, protected by monks and an armed soldiery; while Flavian and his friends hardly dared open their lips, and Theodoret was entirely excluded. When an explanation from Eusebius of Dorylaeum, who had been the accuser of Eutyches at the council of Constantinople, was presented, many voices exclaimed: "Let Eusebius be burnt; let him be burnt alive. As he has cut Christ in two, so let him be cut in two."1611 The council affirmed the orthodoxy and sanctity of Eutyches, who defended himself in person; adopted the twelve anathematisms of Cyril; condemned dyophysitism as a heresy, and deposed and excommunicated its advocates, including Theodoret, Flavian, and Leo. The three Roman delegates (the bishops Julius and Renatus, and the deacon Hilarus) dared not even read before the council the epistle addressed to it by Leo,1612 and departed secretly, that they might not be compelled to subscribe its decisions.1613 Flavian was so grossly maltreated by furious monks that he died of his wounds a few days later, in banishment, having first appealed to a new council. In his stead the deacon Anatolius, a friend and agent of Dioscurus, was chosen patriarch of Constantinople. He, however, afterwards went over to the orthodox party, and effaced the infamy of his elevation by his exquisite Greek hymns. The conduct of these unpriestly priests was throughout so arbitrary and tyrannical, that the second council of Ephesus has ever since been branded with the name of the "Council of Robbers."1614 "Nothing," Neander justly observes,1615 "could be more contradictory to the spirit of the gospel than the fanatical zeal of the dominant party in this council for dogmatical formulas, in which they fancied they had Christ, who is spirit and life, although in temper and act they denied Him." Dioscurus, for example, dismissed a charge of unchastity and other vices against a bishop, with the remark: "If you have an accusation against his orthodoxy, we will receive it; but we have not come together to pass judgment concerning unchastity."1616 Thus fanatical zeal for doctrinal formulas outweighed all interests of morality, as if, as Theodoret remarks, Christ had merely prescribed a system of doctrine, and had not given also rules of life. § 141. The Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon, A.D. 451. Comp. the Acta Concilii, together with the previous and subsequent epistolary correspondence, in Mansi (tom. vii.), Harduin (tom. ii.), and Fuchs, and the sketches of Evagrius: H. E. l. ii. c. 4; among later historians: Walch; Schröckh; Neander; Hefele, l.c. The latter, ii. 392, gives the literature in detail. Thus the party of Dioscurus, by means of the court of the weak Theodosius II., succeeded in subjugating the Eastern church, which now-looked to the Western for help.