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 Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Sad! no, bored! I had to go getting summonses for two poachers I caught, and oh well, I don't like people." He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger in his voice. "Do you hate being a gamekeeper?" she asked. "Being a gamekeeper, no! So long as I'm left alone. But when I have to go messing around at the police station, and various other places, and waiting for a lot of fools to attend to me ... oh well, I get mad ..." and he smiled, with a certain faint humour. "Couldn't you be really independent?" she asked. "Me? I suppose I could, if you mean manage to exist on my pension. I could! But I've got to work, or I should die. That is, I've got to have something that keeps me occupied. And I'm not in a good enough temper to work for myself. It's got to be a sort of job for somebody else, or I should throw it up in a month, out of bad temper. So altogether I'm very well off here, especially lately...." He laughed at her again, with mocking humour. "But why are you in a bad temper?" she asked. "Do you mean you are _always_ in a bad temper?" "Pretty well," he said, laughing. "I don't quite digest my bile." "But what bile?" she said. "Bile!" he said. "Don't you know what that is?" She was silent, and disappointed. He was taking no notice of her. "I'm going away for a while next month," she said. "You are! Where to?" "Venice." "Venice! With Sir Clifford? For how long?" "For a month or so," she replied. "Clifford won't go." "He'll stay here?" he asked. "Yes! He hates to travel as he is." "Ay, poor devil!" he said, with sympathy. There was a pause. "You won't forget me when I'm gone, will you?" she asked. Again he lifted his eyes and looked full at her. "Forget?" he said. "You know nobody forgets. It's not a question of memory." She wanted to say: "What then?" but she didn't. Instead, she said in a mute kind of voice: "I told Clifford I might have a child." Now he really looked at her, intense and searching. "You did?" he said at last. "And what did he say?" "Oh, he wouldn't mind. He'd be glad, really, so long as it seemed to be his." She dared not look up at him. He was silent a long time, then he gazed again on her face. "No mention of _me_, of course?" he said. "No. No mention of you," she said. "No, he'd hardly swallow me as a substitute breeder.--Then where are you supposed to be getting the child?" "I might have a love affair in Venice," she said. "You might," he replied slowly. "So that's why you're going?" "Not to have the love affair," she said, looking up at him, pleading. "Just the appearance of one," he said.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Days later, your mother and I packed you into the car, drove down to Washington, left you with your aunt Kamilah, and went to the service for Prince at Rankin Chapel on Howard’s campus, where I’d once sat amazed at the parade of activists and intellectuals—Joseph Lowery, Cornel West, Calvin Butts—who preached at that pulpit. I must have seen a great number of old friends there, though I cannot recall precisely who. What I remember is all the people who spoke of Prince’s religious zeal, his abiding belief that Jesus was with him. I remember watching the president of the university stand and weep. I remember Dr. Mable Jones, Prince’s mother, speaking of her son’s death as a call to move from her comfortable suburban life into activism. I heard several people ask for forgiveness for the officer who’d shot Prince Jones down. I only vaguely recall my impressions of all this. But I know that I have always felt great distance from the grieving rituals of my people, and I must have felt it powerfully then. The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some inchoate form, I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth. At this moment the phrase “police reform” has come into vogue, and the actions of our publicly appointed guardians have attracted attention presidential and pedestrian. You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country’s criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority. The abuses that have followed from these policies—the sprawling carceral state, the random detention of black people, the torture of suspects—are the product of democratic will. And so to challenge the police is to challenge the American people who send them into the ghettos armed with the same self-generated fears that compelled the people who think they are white to flee the cities and into the Dream. The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  I write you in your fifteenth year. I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. And you have seen men in the same uniforms pummel Marlene Pinnock, someone’s grandmother, on the side of a road. And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy. Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. Resent the people trying to entrap your body and it can be destroyed. Turn into a dark stairwell and your body can be destroyed. The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions. And destruction is merely the superlative form of a dominion whose prerogatives include friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations. All of this is common to black people. And all of this is old for black people. No one is held responsible. There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn. It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through tongue and ears pruned away. “Some disobedience,” wrote a Southern mistress. “Much idleness, sullenness, slovenliness….Used the rod.” It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d…with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Alex rubbed her face and velvety scalp all over the front of Tyre’s jacket, trying to calm down. Finally she pulled away enough to get a good look at her. Tyre was wearing a red-leather leotard with her trademark long crotch zipper under black chaps made of glove leather. Over that she wore a black-leather jacket with long, red fringes that swirled around her whenever she moved. Her high-heeled boots came up to her knees, and the tops turned down to reveal scarlet cuffs. Tyre moved one of her long, rhinestone earrings out of the way and put the receiver up to her ear. “Drive around for a while,” she told Michael. If she remembered correctly, today the chauffeur was wearing Marine Corps dress blues. Too bad Roxanne couldn’t get a gander at that. “We need some time to get acquainted. I’ll call you when you should deliver the goods.” Then she told Alex, “It won’t hurt to let Roxanne stew for a little while. Give her a chance to get into the spirit of the thing. Now come and meet your partners in sex crime.” But EZ didn’t wait to be introduced. “So you need a little help with an uppity slave?” she yelled at Alex. Alex frowned. “I wouldn’t put it that way,” she said carefully. “How would you put it?” “Up your ass!” Alex snarled. “Whoa—now, wait a minute! Where’s all this hostility at? Didn’t mean to, uh, demean your competence—you know? Really, man, let’s change the subject. How’s the weather up there where you hang out? Got a wild hair up your ass or maybe just up your nose?” “Shit, EZ,” Kay grumbled, “you got a big smart fuckin’ mouth, you know that, girl?” “Aw, Kay—“ “Just shut up, now, or I swear I’ll handcuff you to this bar and you’ll spend all night gettin’ other people’s beers and lightin’ their Virginia Slims. Alex don’t need any help from us, schmuck. She’s givin’ us a crack at something good, that’s all. Chance to fraternize with the competition. Keep your edge on. Thought we might learn a few new tricks, ain’t that right?” Alex was relaxing visibly under Kay’s carnival con-artist patter. “Something like that,” she admitted. “Tyre, would you like a drink?” “Yes,” she said. Alex picked up a shot-glass. “Sherry,” she specified. Alex put the glass down. “Yo, bro, lemme behind the board. Next round is on me. I need a brewski anyways,” said EZ, and scooted around to play bartender. Kay co-opted the stool at the far end of the bar, pulled a Whitman Sampler box full of sinsemilla buds out of her bag, and began rolling one-handed joints out of the shake.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  As a matter of fact, he was tired. This evening had tired him. He would rather have been with his technical books, or his pit manager, or listening-in to the radio. Mrs. Bolton came in with two glasses of malted milk: for Clifford, to make him sleep, and for Connie to fatten her again. It was a regular night-cap she had introduced. Connie was glad to go, when she had drunk her glass, and thankful she needn't help Clifford to bed. She took his glass and put it on the tray, then took the tray, to leave it outside. "Good night Clifford! _Do_ sleep well! The Racine gets into one like a dream. Good night!" She had drifted to the door. She was going without kissing him good night. He watched her with sharp, cold eyes. So! She did not even kiss him good night, after he had spent an evening reading to her. Such depths of callousness in her! Even if the kiss was but a formality, it was on such formalities that life depends. She was a bolshevik, really. Her instincts were bolshevistic! He gazed coldly and angrily at the door whence she had gone. Anger! And again the dread of the night came on him. He was a network of nerves, and when he was not braced up to work, and so full of energy: or when he was not listening-in, and so utterly neuter: then he was haunted by anxiety and a sense of dangerous impending void. He was afraid. And Connie could keep the fear off him, if she would. But it was obvious she wouldn't, she wouldn't. She was callous, cold and callous to all that he did for her. He gave up his life for her, and she was callous to him. She only wanted her own way. "The lady loves her will." Now it was a baby she was obsessed by. Just so that it should be her own, all her own, and not his! Clifford was so healthy, considering. He looked so well and ruddy, in the face, his shoulders were broad and strong, his chest deep, he had put on flesh. And yet, at the same time, he was afraid of death. A terrible hollow seemed to menace him somewhere, somehow, a void, and into this void his energy would collapse. Energyless, he felt at times he was dead, really dead. So his rather prominent pale eyes had a queer look, furtive, and yet a little cruel, so cold: and at the same time, almost impudent. It was a very odd look, this look of impudence: as if he were triumphing over life in spite of life. "Who knoweth the mysteries of the will--for it can triumph even against the angels--"

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  It does not matter that the “intentions” of individual educators were noble. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, “intend” for you is secondary. Our world is physical. Learn to play defense—ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body. Very few Americans will directly proclaim that they are in favor of black people being left to the streets. But a very large number of Americans will do all they can to preserve the Dream. No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction. But a great number of educators spoke of “personal responsibility” in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility. The point of this language of “intention” and “personal responsibility” is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. “Good intention” is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty. Some things were clear to me: The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design. But what exactly was the design? And why? I must know. I must get out…but into what? I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world, one beyond the gripping fear that undergirded the Dream.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days. I still had my journalism. My response was, in this moment, to write. I was lucky I had even that. Most of us are forced to drink our travesties straight and smile about it. I wrote about the history of the Prince George’s County police. Nothing had ever felt so essential to me. Here is what I knew at the outset: The officer who killed Prince Jones was black. The politicians who empowered this officer to kill were black. Many of the black politicians, many of them twice as good, seemed unconcerned. How could this be? It was like I was back at Moorland again, called by great mysteries. But by then I didn’t need any call slips; the Internet had bloomed into an instrument of research. That must strike you as novel. For all of your life, whenever you’ve had a question you have been able to type that question out on a keyboard, watch it appear in a rectangular space bordered by a corporate logo, and within seconds revel in the flood of potential answers. But I still remember when typewriters were useful, the dawn of the Commodore 64, and days when a song you loved would have its moment on the radio and then disappear into the nothing. I must have gone five years without hearing the Mary Jane Girls sing “All Night Long.” For a young man like me, the invention of the Internet was the invention of space travel.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "Nay!" he said. "I wanted to have my pleasure and satisfaction of a woman, and I never got it: because I could never get my pleasure and satisfaction of _her_ unless she got hers of me at the same time. And it never happened. It takes two." "But you never believed in your women. You don't even believe really in me," she said. "I don't know what believing in a woman means." "That's it, you see!" She still was curled on his lap. But his spirit was grey and absent, he was not there for her. And everything she said drove him further. "But what _do_ you believe in?" she insisted. "I don't know." "Nothing, like all the men I've ever known," she said. They were both silent. Then he roused himself and said: "Yes, I do believe in something. I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It's all this cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy." "But you don't fuck me cold-heartedly," she protested. "I don't want to fuck you at all. My heart's as cold as cold potatoes just now." "Oh!" she said, kissing him mockingly. "Let's have them _sautées_." He laughed, and sat erect. "It's a fact!" he said. "Any thing for a bit of warm-heartedness. But the women don't like it. Even you don't really like it. You like good, sharp, piercing cold-hearted fucking, and then pretending it's all sugar. Where's your tenderness for me? You're as suspicious of me as a cat is of a dog. I tell you it takes two even to be tender and warm-hearted. You love fucking all right: but you want it to be called something grand and mysterious, just to flatter your own self-importance. Your own self-importance is more to you, fifty times more, than any man, or being together with a man." "But that's what I'd say of you. Your own self-importance is everything to you." "Ay! Very well then!" he said, moving as if he wanted to rise. "Let's keep apart then. I'd rather die than do any more cold-hearted fucking." She slid away from him, and he stood up. "And do you think _I_ want it?" she said. "I hope you don't," he replied. "But anyhow, you go to bed an' I'll sleep down here." She looked at him. He was pale, his brows were sullen, he was as distant in recoil as the cold pole. Men were all alike. "I can't go home till morning," she said. "No! Go to bed. It's a quarter to one." "I certainly won't," she said. He went across and picked up his boots. "Then I'll go out!" he said. He began to put on his boots. She stared at him. "Wait!" she faltered. "Wait! What's come between us?"

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  What part of it is about a need to survive and bring herself back to life, and what part is attached to death and destruction? In what way is her present life a reflection of the lives of the women who came before and an attempt to heal not only herself, but also her wounded mother and her dying grandmother? Infidelity is destructive in the sense that it always causes damage to a relationship, even if that damage is at first invisible. But people have affairs not only because they want to destroy or get out of their relationships; paradoxically, infidelity is sometimes an effort to stay in a marriage. Cheating is often a way to balance power in the relationship or to fulfill needs that are not met. In many cases, while the affair is a sexual acting out and an indirect way to express negative feelings like hostility and anger, it is also a way to protect the marriage from those feelings while maintaining a status quo within the relationship. Through sex, feelings that are not allowed in the relationship itself, particularly aggression, find their expression. It is not unusual for people to describe sex outside the marriage as more aggressive, and sex in the marriage as more gentle and “civilized.” As partners unconsciously protect each other from aggression, they numb the relationship. When there is no room for aggression, there is usually no sex either. The same dialectic tension between life and death exists in sexual desire and especially in long-term relationships. In his book Can Love Last?, American psychoanalyst Stephen A. Mitchell discusses the clash between adventure and security in sexual life. Mitchell emphasizes that romance, vitality, and sexuality are factors that make one’s life not only worth living but also worth cultivating and savoring. Romance, he suggests, has a great deal to do with an existential excitement about being alive. Over time, sexual romance easily degrades into something much less enlivening or maybe even deadening, because it thrives on danger, mystery, and adventure, not the safety and familiarity of a long-term relationship. Can we continue to desire the people we feel most safe with? Mitchell asks. He suggests that it is the delicate balance between security and danger, the familiar and the novel, that is the secret for long-term love. In her innovative book Mating in Captivity, psychotherapist Esther Perel elaborates on that paradox of domesticity and sexual desire and works to help couples open a playful space for adventure and therefore sexual excitement in their relationships. Perel further develops those themes and others to examine the complexity of infidelity. A psychoanalytic investigation is a complex and nuanced journey into one’s delicate heart. Danger and security, destruction and construction, life and death, and the plight of multiple generations appear, in different ways, in each and every one of those journeys. During our first session together, Eve doesn’t take off her sunglasses.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I wish I could stop thinking. I mean, it’s clear that she hates her father so much and I feel bad for him,” he continues. “She wrote on Instagram that she wishes he were dead. I guess I understand that part. I used to wish my father were dead.” “That makes sense,” I say, carefully stepping into his childhood. While most kids are afraid of losing their parents, I’ve often heard patients describe that as children they wished for their parents’ death. The parent is the one the child depends on for survival; that wish usually surfaces when the parent is the one threatening the child’s physical or emotional being. The wish helps the child feel less helpless as she imagines she can make the parent disappear. It expresses the child’s pain as well as rage—two feelings that are fused and confused. The child simultaneously feels helpless and is overwhelmed with anger that she can’t process. Abused children often have difficulty regulating feelings. Love and hate intermingle: the people you love are also those you hate. I notice that Guy becomes flooded with emotions. He needs to take a break. “It’s sick,” Guy says. “It pisses me off.” He suddenly stands up. “Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom,” he says. “I’ll be right back.” He comes back a few minutes later, smiling. “Did you notice that I said ‘piss’ and then went to pee?” he jokes. “You see, I know how to therapize myself.” He is conveying that I have taught him something, but also that he is not dependent on me, that he can do it on his own. The ability to master and control his life is crucial. It’s the only way he feels safe, and he needs to make sure that he is in control in our sessions as well. I’m again aware that it’s Guy, not me, who ends each session. When he feels overwhelmed, rather than turning to me for comfort, he withdraws. “I needed to be alone for a moment, to calm down,” he says. I know that there is something about jury duty that awakens his childhood trauma. “As a child, I spent hours in the bathroom. My father used to lock my brother and me in there every time he got angry, which was all the time. He would lock us in there for hours, and I learned to sit on the floor and wait. And I thought to myself, I hate this man. I wish he were dead.” Guy doesn’t look at me. “You know,” he says, “sometimes, when my friends came over and we made noise, I would suddenly hear him calling my name. I knew he was angry and that he was going to lock me in the bathroom again. I had no choice.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  Well, this is one woman who doesn’t feel that these law enforcement officials are making my life safer. It may seem odd for me to include information about specific cases in a book introduction since it will quickly become dated. But this anti-S/M moral panic is not being covered in a systematic, comprehensive way in the gay press or other progressive publications. Gayle Rubin has given a series of lectures about these disturbing events at several S/M and leather conferences, but it appears that nobody outside of the sexual minority that is under attack knows what is going on—or cares. The same anti-censorship forces that mustered to protest the dangerous biases of the Meese Commission have not called any press conferences, written any articles, or issued any public statements to denounce this witch-hunt. It would please me to be wrong about this, but I get the impression that most anti-censorship feminists are just relieved that it’s “only” S/M material, which they never approved of anyway, which is being threatened. When they attacked the Meese Commission or criticized obscenity legislation authored by anti-porn activists, these women were repeatedly characterized by their opponents as sadomasochists, supporters of child abuse, advocates of rape, pimps, fascists, etc. They resented being associated with what they think of as the sexual lunatic fringe. I don’t think many of them will have the guts to risk getting smeared again by trying to arouse some public indignation over gross violations of S/M people’s First Amendment rights and right to privacy. But somebody needs to say that this is censorship, that it is not okay, that we cannot afford to ignore it. It seems that the sex debate in the women’s movement is right back where it started—the only people who dare criticize anti-porn crusades are perverts, because we are the ones most at risk and we are the ones with nothing to lose. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual back in Women’s Studies and the ACLU. The written word—thus far—receives protection under the First Amendment in this country, even if the words are about “violent” sex. But in the rest of the English language market—England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand—no such protection applies. It may be very difficult for a citizen of any Commonwealth country to buy a copy of this book. And we should remember that censorship is not always a matter of state intervention. It can be a matter of which books are ordered by a bookstore, in what quantities, and how they are displayed; which books are reviewed (and how); what your friends’ reactions are when they see you own a particular work; how far publishers dare go with their next book. Which brings us back to the question I asked earlier. If somebody does not want you to read this book, why is that? Because it goes beyond customary limits of candor? In other words, because it is a little too honest? What are they afraid of?

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time for the rest of the day. The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet place. "It's a very great pity it's such an ugly situation all round," said Hilda. "I had a lot o' fun out of it," said he. "I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until you were both free to marry and have children." "The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark," said he. "I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable." "But then you don't have to bear more than a small corner of it, do you?" said he. "If you'd been in her own class." "Or if I'd been in a cage at the Zoo." There was silence. "I think," said Hilda, "it will be best if she names quite another man as co-respondent, and you stay out of it altogether." "But I thought I'd put my foot right in." "I mean, in the divorce proceeding." He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan scheme to him. "I don't follow," he said. "We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as co-respondent, so that your name need not appear," said Hilda. "You mean a man?" "Of course!" "But she's got no other?" He looked in wonder at Connie. "No, no!" she said hastily. "Only that old friendship, quite simple, no love." "Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he's had nothing out of you?" "Some men are chivalrous and don't only count what they get out of a woman," said Hilda. "One for me, eh? But who's the johnny?" "A friend whom we've known since we were children in Scotland, an artist." "Duncan Forbes!" he said at once, for Connie had talked of him. "And how would you shift the blame on to him?" "They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his apartment." "Seems to me a lot of fuss for nothing," he said. "What else do you suggest?" said Hilda. "If your name appears, you will get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person to be mixed up with." "All that!" he said grimly. There was a long silence. "We could go right away," he said. "There is no right away for Connie," said Hilda. "Clifford is too well known." Again the silence of pure frustration. "The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced. So how are you both going about it?" He was silent for a long time. "How are _you_ going about it for us?" he said.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  They parted most genially, and Mellors laughed inwardly all the time for the rest of the day. The following day he had lunch with Connie and Hilda, at some discreet place. "It's a very great pity it's such an ugly situation all round," said Hilda. "I had a lot o' fun out of it," said he. "I think you might have avoided putting children into the world until you were both free to marry and have children." "The Lord blew a bit too soon on the spark," said he. "I think the Lord had nothing to do with it. Of course, Connie has enough money to keep you both, but the situation is unbearable." "But then you don't have to bear more than a small corner of it, do you?" said he. "If you'd been in her own class." "Or if I'd been in a cage at the Zoo." There was silence. "I think," said Hilda, "it will be best if she names quite another man as co-respondent, and you stay out of it altogether." "But I thought I'd put my foot right in." "I mean, in the divorce proceeding." He gazed at her in wonder. Connie had not dared mention the Duncan scheme to him. "I don't follow," he said. "We have a friend who would probably agree to be named as co-respondent, so that your name need not appear," said Hilda. "You mean a man?" "Of course!" "But she's got no other?" He looked in wonder at Connie. "No, no!" she said hastily. "Only that old friendship, quite simple, no love." "Then why should the fellow take the blame? If he's had nothing out of you?" "Some men are chivalrous and don't only count what they get out of a woman," said Hilda. "One for me, eh? But who's the johnny?" "A friend whom we've known since we were children in Scotland, an artist." "Duncan Forbes!" he said at once, for Connie had talked of him. "And how would you shift the blame on to him?" "They could stay together in some hotel, or she could even stay in his apartment." "Seems to me a lot of fuss for nothing," he said. "What else do you suggest?" said Hilda. "If your name appears, you will get no divorce from your wife, who is apparently quite an impossible person to be mixed up with." "All that!" he said grimly. There was a long silence. "We could go right away," he said. "There is no right away for Connie," said Hilda. "Clifford is too well known." Again the silence of pure frustration. "The world is what it is. If you want to live together without being persecuted, you will have to marry. To marry, you both have to be divorced. So how are you both going about it?" He was silent for a long time. "How are _you_ going about it for us?" he said.

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  Rutherford B. Hayes moved into the Oval Office in 1877 through the end of Grover Cleveland’s term in 1897, each successive American president increased pressure on the Mormon Church to forsake polygamy and submit to the laws of the land. John Taylor, who replaced Brigham as the Saints’ president, prophet, seer, and revelator, refused to cede an inch to the government in Washington; if anything, he was even less acquiescent than the Old Boss had been. Taylor had believed passionately in Joseph Smith and his doctrines ever since their first encounter, when Joseph had grasped Taylor’s hand and caused “an electric current” to race up his arm. On that bleak afternoon when Joseph was shot dead in the Carthage jail, Taylor had been within arm’s reach of the prophet, and had been gravely wounded himself. The truest of true believers, Taylor was not about to compromise the most sacred principles of the Kingdom of God to appease the church’s Gentile oppressors. “God will lay his hand upon this nation,” Taylor proclaimed in 1879. “There will be more bloodshed, more ruin, more devastation than ever they have seen before. . . . We do not want them to force upon us that institution of monogamy called the social evil.” A year later Taylor’s recalcitrance and rage had only intensified. “W[hen] they enact tyrannical laws, forbidding us the free exercise of our religion, we cannot submit,” he pronounced, on January 4, 1880, during a Sunday assembly in Great Salt Lake City. God is greater than the United States, and when the Government conflicts with heaven we will be ranged under the banner of heaven and against the Government. The United States says we cannot marry more than one wife. God says different. . . . Polygamy is a divine institution. It has been handed down direct from God. The United States cannot abolish it. No nation on earth can prevent it, nor all the nations of the earth combined; these are my sentiments and all of you who sympathize with me in this position will raise your right hands. I defy the United States; I will obey God. Every right hand in the vast Assembly Hall instantly shot heavenward. Taylor was a man of the highest integrity who had devoted his life completely to the

• From Under the Banner of Heaven (2003)

  But those who have heeded him shall shortly be exposed by their folly, for [neither] My name nor My church shall be mocked longer, for it shall shortly be cleansed and purged and tried in the fire, that all those who profess to know Me, and know Me not, will be exposed. The pamphlet further warned that God had dispatched Onias to “cleanse My house of its filthiness” and put the institutions of Mormondom back on the road to righteousness. God had revealed, I shall endow [Onias] with My Spirit, and the wicked he shall expose, and they shall not stand, and they shall gnash their teeth in anger, and their anger shall eat them up. For I am the Lord God Almighty, and My words shall not be mocked. . . . And what a great noise and commotion they shall make when they fall. . . . And My servant [Onias] who is held in derision, I shall place in him My Spirit, and he shall be as a fire that devoureth; and the words that he shall write and speak shall expose many and cause many to fall, for they repent not. By sending this pamphlet to the leaders of the LDS Church, Onias intended to give them the opportunity to make a choice: confess their errors and turn over control of the church to the Lord’s chosen prophet, the “one mighty and strong,” or face God’s wrath. To a detached observer this seems like an act of astonishing naïveté and hubris on Onias’s part, but the pamphlet’s text resonated with tremendous power for the Lafferty brothers. It had the ring of long-denied truth. They believed they had found, in Onias, a crucial ally in their struggle to restore the church of Joseph Smith to righteousness and prepare the earth for the Second Coming of Christ. Onias was no less enamored of the Laffertys, and what they could do to advance his ambitions for the School of the Prophets. Applying the full brunt of their prodigious energy, the Lafferty brothers dived headlong into the tedious chore of printing, folding, and collating more than fifteen thousand of Onias’s pamphlets, then addressing and mailing them to LDS leaders around the country. “It was like a miracle to us,” Onias says, “for what would have taken us several

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  And I need to have her tied up so she can’t get away. You want her to come, don’t you? Well, I suspect that’ll make her come real good.” “Oh? Yeah, you’re probably right. She’s just a slut, but she’s a masochistic slut. Fix her the way you want her.” She was too tired to fight. Mike rolled her onto her stomach and slapped leather restraints on each wrist, then manacled her hands to the iron rails at the head of the bed. He also fastened restraints around each ankle, had her draw her legs up until she was kneeling, then fastened them at the sides of the bed. Then he reached under her and clamped her nipples into gleaming silver jaws. If she didn’t keep her ass in the air and her shoulders arched, she would be lying on the clamps. He knelt behind her and ran his hands over her body once, twice. Then he used his nails. She twisted, but could not get away from him or close her legs. Every time she moved, she brought her slippery, vulnerable folds into contact with his jutting cock. He leaned over her and played with her tits, sending jolts of pain through her nipples, made her tell him how much it hurt and how wet it made her cunt. He slapped her ass with the flat of his hand until it began to glow and burn again. His hand fell with more and more weight. Bottoms, she thought, are so much meaner than tops. They have no sense of pacing. She screamed as much because he was making her angry as because it hurt a lot, but she doubted that he cared as long as he knew he was hurting her. Unlike Joe, he went into her in one vicious thrust, and she screamed. Tears sprang into her eyes. His long, skinny cock was stretching her in a very different way. It was much easier for her cunt to open wider than it was for it to become deeper. He was not waiting for her to open up, and she would be damned if she would ask him. She did not want to come with him. Her vagina was a little sore, but his attitude bothered her more.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  "I don't know. She sort of kept her will ready against me, always, always: her ghastly female will: her freedom! A woman's ghastly freedom that ends in the most beastly bullying! Oh, she always kept her freedom against me, like vitriol in my face." "But she's not free of you even now. Does she still love you?" "No, no! If she's not free of me, it's because she's got that mad rage, she must try to bully me." "But she must have loved you." "No! Well in specks, she did. She was drawn to me. And I think even that she hated. She loved me in moments. But she always took it back, and started bullying. Her deepest desire was to bully me, and there was no altering her. Her _will_ was wrong, from the first." "But perhaps she felt you didn't really love her, and she wanted to make you." "My God, it was bloody making." "But you didn't really love her, did you? You did her that wrong." "How could I? I began to. I began to love her. But somehow, she always ripped me up. No, don't let's talk of it. It was a doom, that was. And she was a doomed woman. This last time, I'd have shot her like I shoot a stoat, if I'd but been allowed: a raving, doomed thing in the shape of a woman! If only I could have shot her, and ended the whole misery! It ought to be allowed. When a woman gets absolutely possessed by her own will, her own will set against everything, then it's fearful, and she should be shot at last." "And shouldn't men be shot at last, if they get possessed by their own will?" "Ay!--the same! But I must get free of her, or she'll be at me again. I wanted to tell you. I must get a divorce if I possibly can. So we must be careful. We mustn't really be seen together, you and I. I never, _never_ could stand it if she came down on me and you." Connie pondered this. "Then we can't be together?" she said. "Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in September, then till March." "But the baby will probably be born at the end of February," she said. He was silent. "I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead," he said. "It's not being very tender to them," she said. "Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can't live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them." "But you wouldn't do it," she said. "I would though! and with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I'd shoot them."

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  EZ fumed. For Anne-Marie, this was the last straw. The ritualistic etiquette of S/M; the titles, forms of salutation, provocation, and response— each varying with one’s level of experience, role, and specialty—were her first love. “That is highly irrelevant, you pipsqueak, you popinjay, you buffoon,” she cried. “Did you ask any of us for our permission before proceeding to insult and harry us? Those unfortunate few who behave as badly as you have given their consent to be taken in hand and punished severely. You are worse than the most loutish male submissive I ever had to put up with before I met Tyre and came to work at the Calyx. For shame, for shame.” Instead of using wrist and ankle cuffs, Joy threw a couple of half hitches around EZ’s waist and the horse, which made it impossible for her to rear up off of it. By now, Anne-Marie had fetched one of her canes and was rolling up her sleeves. Alex heard Roxanne say, “Oh, shit, she’s in real trouble now.” Kay yanked EZ’s Levis down and slammed her fists once into the exposed buttocks before stepping away, shaking her head in disgust, and gesturing that Anne-Marie could do what she would. The cane was a yellow blur. Alex had stopped plying her cat and stood watching in open-mouthed astonishment. Roxanne was screaming in sympathy. There was a reason why she treated Anne-Marie with impeccable courtesy. The British are practically the inventors of imperialism, and it doesn’t do to forget that beneath the grand style of Victoria’s Empire there was brute force and a great appetite for wielding it. EZ screamed for a long time before she made any coherent sound, which was Kay’s name. “Fuck ya,” Kay said stubbornly. “Hope she cuts you in half, you dumbshit, badboy bitch, you.” Apparently, EZ felt this was not an impossibility, because her screams trebled in volume and range. But her ordeal continued until the cane broke. Anne-Marie felt it split and lowered her arm at once. The edges would be sharp as razors. “Let that be a lesson to you,” she advised the distraught victim, and stalked to the bar to throw the ruined and bloody implement away. “Fuck her,” Kay told Michael, uncapping one of the cans of Crisco she had stashed by the horse when the evening was still young. “Why don’t you just shove that big fat cock of yours up her ass, the same place I got my fist up the night I made the mistake of drag gin’ this snot-nosed case of arrested development home to cure a hangover.

• From Macho Sluts (1988)

  The whore in turn gives nothing away, laughs at him while she keeps her secrets and pockets his cash. In this country, machismo is a survival mechanism by which minority men try to preserve their self-esteem and their culture. In the best sense of the word, it describes a person who is outnumbered, misunderstood, and outlawed who nevertheless strives to preserve a sense of pride and honor. Someone who has machismo insists on his right to dignity, and defends himself and what belongs to him even if it is a hopeless cause, even if he will be punished for making the attempt. Women are not supposed to have machismo, to be macho, but then, we’re not supposed to be sluts, either. And without machismo, a slut is just a commodity. In the midst of theoretical discussions, it’s important to remember that the state has power to take action against obscenity, and does not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value; appeals to prurient interests; goes substantially beyond customary limits of candor in description or representation of such matters; and depicts or describes in a patently offensive way, explicit sexual conduct of a specifically defined nature—that book is obscene, and it is contraband. Reading this won’t make you an outlaw (it’s not that easy, sweetheart), but if you enjoy it, you might think about why the law is trying to get in between you and your prurient interests. I’m afraid that the opprobrium of right-wing, pro-censorship feminists is not the worst thing that will confront this book. We are in the middle of a crackdown on porn, especially S/M porn. For my birthday this year, I took a trip to Times Square to watch some loops in the peep show booths at my favorite porn store. This store used to feature a great diversity of material, and was always friendly to women. But all their S/M stuff was gone from the peep shows and the magazine racks. They had moved all their kinky magazines and videos to just one store, to protect the rest of them if that one got busted. If I wanted to look at an S/M movie now, I would have to buy the whole tape. I checked out several other adult bookstores on Times Square. Most of them were not selling any S/M material. I was very upset, but not because this meant I would be cut off from a primary source of arousal. The typical commercial S/M flick or magazine does not turn me on. Most of it is made by people who think S/M is weird and sick, and just want to make some easy money off the leather freaks.