Joy

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 Master and Margarita (1966)

  Margarita Nikolaevna dropped on to the chair in front of the hall mirror and burst out laughing. ‘Natasha! You ought to be ashamed,’ Margarita Nikolaevna said, ‘you, a literate, intelligent girl . . . they tell devil knows what lies in the queues, and you go repeating them!’ Natasha flushed deeply and objected with great ardour that, no, they weren’t lying, and that she herself had personally seen today, in a grocer’s on the Arbat, one woman who came into the shop wearing shoes, but as she was paying at the cash register, the shoes disappeared from her feet, and she was left in just her stockings. Eyes popping out, and a hole in her heel! And the shoes were magic ones from that same séance. ‘And she left like that?’ ‘And she left like that!’ Natasha cried, blushing still more from not being believed. ‘And yesterday, Margarita Nikolaevna, the police arrested around a hundred people in the evening. Women from this séance were running down Tverskaya in nothing but their bloomers.’ ‘Well, of course, it’s Darya who told you that,’ said Margarita Nikolaevna. ‘I noticed long ago that she’s a terrible liar.’ The funny conversation ended with a pleasant surprise for Natasha. Margarita Nikolaevna went to the bedroom and came back holding a pair of stockings and a flacon of eau-de-cologne. Telling Natasha that she, too, wanted to perform a trick, Margarita Nikolaevna gave her both the stockings and the bottle, and said her only request was that she not run around on Tverskaya in nothing but stockings and that she not listen to Darya. Having kissed each other, mistress and housemaid parted. Leaning against the comfortable soft back of the trolley-bus seat, Margarita Nikolaevna rode down the Arbat, now thinking her own thoughts, now listening to the whispers of two citizens sitting in front of her. They were exchanging whispers about some nonsense, looking around warily from time to time to make sure no one was listening. The hefty, beefy one with pert, piggish eyes, sitting by the window, was quietly telling his small neighbour that the coffin had to be covered with a black cloth . . . ‘It can’t be!’ the small one whispered, amazed. ‘This is something unheard-of! . . . And what has Zheldybin done?’ Amidst the steady humming of the trolley-bus, words came from the window: ‘Criminal investigation . . . scandal . . . well, outright mysticism! . . .’ From these fragmentary scraps, Margarita Nikolaevna somehow put together something coherent. The citizens were whispering about some dead person (they did not name him) whose head had been stolen from the coffin that morning . . . This was the reason why Zheldybin was now so worried. And the two who were whispering on the trolley-bus also had some connection with the robbed dead man. ‘Will we have time to stop for flowers?’ the small one worried. ‘The cremation is at two, you say?’

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  It was some time before Laura came to herself, but when she did she was delighted to find that we still retained our respective positions within her. On my inquiring whether they felt disposed for a renewal of the combat in a similar manner, they both declared with the most impassioned caresses that nothing would give them greater delight. Telling Frank that as the entrance to both fortresses was now well lubricated, we might venture to carry on the warfare more boldly without the risk of doing any damage. I desired him to keep time with me and thrust his weapon as far in and out as he could at each heave, first alternately with me and then on a given signal both together. At the same time I advised Laura to remain quiet and try what would be the effect of our efforts. The result far surpassed her expectations. When, after heaving alternately for some little time, I gave Frank the signal and we made a simultaneous thrust together, burying both our weapons as far as they would go within the soft yielding flesh, she exclaimed, "Oh, this is exquisite, it could not possibly be more heavenly." We continued this mode of action for some time, alternately changing from one variety to another, while she responded merely by twisting and wriggling her buttocks, and in turn compressing and squeezing the darling object before or behind, which for the moment affected her senses the more powerfully. Gradually, however, she became too much animated to adhere to any settled plan, and she could not refrain from meeting and returning our lusty efforts to promote her enjoyment. This only animated us to fresh exertions in which we were so successful that we were soon rewarded by as overpowering an overflow of bliss as before. As soon as it was over, she insisted on laying us both out at full length on the bed quite naked, bringing our organs of pleasure so close together that she could caress them at the same time, and placing herself upon us so that her mouth came in contact with them. In this position she remained for a long time—kissing, caressing, and sucking the instruments of delight and thanking us in the warmest manner for the excessive joy we had given her until her luscious caresses, exciting us almost to madness, forced us again to allay the irritation produced on our burning weapons by again bringing them into her delightful sheaths.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Azazello thrust his clawed hand into the stove, pulled out a smoking brand, and set fire to the tablecloth. Then he set fire to the stack of old newspapers on the sofa, and next to the manuscripts and the window curtain. The master, already drunk with the impending ride, flung some book from the shelf on to the table, ruffled its pages in the flame of the tablecloth, and the book blazed up merrily. ‘Burn, burn, former life!’ ‘Burn, suffering!’ cried Margarita. The room was already swaying in crimson pillars, and along with the smoke the three ran out of the door, went up the stone steps, and came to the yard. The first thing they saw there was the landlord’s cook sitting on the ground. Beside her lay spilled potatoes and several bunches of onions. The cook’s state was comprehensible. Three black steeds snorted by the shed, twitching, sending up fountains of earth. Margarita mounted first, then Azazello, and last the master. The cook moaned and wanted to raise her hand to make the sign of the cross, but Azazello shouted menacingly from the saddle: ‘I’ll cut your hand off!’ He whistled, and the steeds, breaking through the linden branches, soared up and pierced the low black cloud. Smoke poured at once from the basement window. From below came the weak, pitiful cry of the cook: ‘We’re on fire . . .’ The steeds were already racing over the rooftops of Moscow. ‘I want to bid farewell to the city,’ the master cried to Azazello, who rode at their head. Thunder ate up the end of the master’s phrase. Azazello nodded and sent his horse into a gallop. The dark cloud flew precipitously to meet the fliers, but as yet gave not a sprinkle of rain. They flew over the boulevards, they saw little figures of people scatter, running for shelter from the rain. The first drops were falling. They flew over smoke—all that remained of Griboedov House. They flew over the city which was already being flooded by darkness. Over them lightning flashed. Soon the roofs gave place to greenery. Only then did the rain pour down, transforming the fliers into three huge bubbles in the water.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  “Shit, I didn’t know I called you. Maybe I hit the wrong button. Sorry, ’bout that.” “Girl, stop lying. You hit up the right person, all right. The number showed up on my caller ID several times. No one makes a mistake that much. You gonna tell me your name now?” “Like I said, calling you was an accident. I made a mistake. My name is not perfect, it’s Yani.” “Well, I’m Life. I see you got some sass in your blood, Yani.” “Maybe. And what if I do?” I answered. After a few awkward moments we laughed and joked for hours. Soon, every time Smooth let me down, I began calling Life for my nightly fix. Life stimulated my mind and body with his dreams. He worked at a record shop, but was trying to negotiate and lease his beats to major rap labels, while shopping record deals for independent artists at the same time. Life was passionate about his craft, and I definitely was feeling that. “So why do they call you Life? I thought you were a straight thug when I met you. Is Life your real name?” I asked. “Nah, but life is what I’m all about. My biggest fear is becoming a statistic out here ’cause someone else is playing street games that don’t got nothing to do with me. I used to be in the drug game, but I left hustling a long time ago. I reevaluated a lot of shit after I lost my little brother to a senseless act of violence. That’s when I changed my name to Life. Through me, he lives—he still has life. Yo, my biggest wish is to put my bid in in the music game and have a queen standing right beside me when I make those millions. Shit is pointless if I ain’t got a wife and some kids to love. My dreams and goals are what keep my nose to the grind and help me stay on point. Ya feel me, Yani?” My heart fluttered. Life was so down-to-earth that I felt like I’d known him for ten years. He was about much more than Smooth. It finally hit me that Smooth had no dreams, except chasing dollars and poisoning our people. Smooth had a selfish, shallow streak that didn’t bother me when I was younger. But as I grew older, that shit grew stale. Life had goals and ambition. He never cut me off like Smooth often did when he had to leave to handle his business on the block. Hell, Life even helped me admit that I dabbled in poetry. When I did admit it, he asked me to read him some of my work. I dug in my closet and pulled out an overstuffed binder that Smooth Willie knew existed, but had never cared to inquire about. “Read somethin’ to me, Ma. Got anything wit hotness for me?” Life asked.

• From The Girls (2016)

  Any irritation was softened by Suzanne’s return. She gusted into the kitchen, breathless. “The guy gave Russell the truck,” Suzanne said, her face bright, casting around for an audience. She opened a cabinet, rooting inside. “It was so perfect,” she said, “ ’cause he wanted, like, two hundred bucks. And Russell said, all calm, You should just give it to us.” She laughed, still residually thrilled, and sat up on the counter. Starting to crack her way through a bag of dusty-looking peanuts. “The guy was real angry, at first, that Russell was just asking for it. For free.” Roos was only half listening, picking through the makings of that night’s dinner, but I turned off the faucet, watching Suzanne with my whole body. “And Russell said, Let’s just talk for a minute. Just let me tell you what I’m about.” Suzanne spit a shell back into the bag. “We had some tea with the guy, in his weird log cabin house. For an hour or something. Russell gave him the whole vision, laid it all out. And the guy was real interested in what we were doing out here. Showed Russell his old army pictures. Then he said we could just have the truck.” I wiped my hands on my shorts, her giddiness making me so shy I had to turn away. I finished the dishes to the sound of her snapping open peanut after peanut from her perch on the counter, amassing an unruly pile of damp shells until the bag was gone and she went looking for someone else to tell her story to. —The girls would hang out near the creek because it was cooler, the breeze carrying a chill, though the flies were bad. The rocks capped with algae, the sleepy shade. Russell had come back from town in the new truck, bearing candy bars, comic books whose pages grew limp from our hands. Helen ate her candy immediately and looked around at the rest of us with a seethe of jealousy. Though she’d also come from a wealthy family, we weren’t close. I found her dull except around Russell, when her brattiness took on a directed aim. Preening under his touch like a cat, she acted younger, even than me, stunted in a way that would later seem pathological. “Jesus. Stop staring at me,” Suzanne said, hunching her candy away from Helen. “You already ate yours.” Her shape on the bank next to me, her toes curling into the dirt. Jerking when a mosquito swarmed by her ear. “Just a bite,” Helen whined. “Just the corner.” Roos glanced up from the chambray mess of cloth in her lap. She was mending a work shirt for Guy, her tiny stitches made with absent precision. “You can have some of mine,” Donna said, “if you be quiet.” She picked her way to Helen, her chocolate bar craggy with peanuts. Helen took a bite. When she giggled, her teeth washed with chocolate. “Candy yoga,” she pronounced.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  Further off, as far as the eye could see, there was no sign of habitation or people on the silvered plain. Margarita leaped off the cliff and quickly descended to the water. The water enticed her after her airy race. Casting the broom aside, she ran and threw herself head first into the water. Her light body pierced the water’s surface like an arrow, and the column of water thrown up almost reached the moon. The water turned out to be warm as in a bathhouse, and, emerging from the depths, Margarita swam her fill in the total solitude of night in this river. There was no one near Margarita, but a little further away, behind the bushes, splashing and grunting could be heard—someone was also having a swim there. Margarita ran out on to the bank. Her body was on fire after the swim. She felt no fatigue, and was joyfully capering about on the moist grass. Suddenly she stopped dancing and pricked up her ears. The grunting came closer, and from behind the willow bushes some naked fat man emerged, with a black silk top hat pushed back on his head. His feet were covered with slimy mud, which made it seem that the swimmer was wearing black shoes. Judging by his huffing and hiccuping, he was properly drunk, as was confirmed, incidentally, by the fact that the river suddenly began to smell of cognac. Seeing Margarita, the fat man peered at her and then shouted joyfully: ‘What’s this? Who is it I see? Claudine, it’s you, the never-grieving widow! You’re here, too?’ and he came at her with his greetings. Margarita stepped back and replied with dignity: ‘Go to the devil! What sort of Claudine am I to you? Watch out who you’re talking to,’ and, after a moment’s reflection, she added to her words a long, unprintable oath. All this had a sobering effect on the frivolous fat man. ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed softly and gave a start, ‘magnanimously forgive me, bright Queen Margot! I mistook you for someone else. The cognac’s to blame, curse it!’

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  It is wonderful, however, how soon one recovers from such exhaustion, and in a few minutes they were both as lively as ever and were actively engaged in the mutual contemplation of each other's exquisite charms. This pleasant proceeding was enlivened by an animated discussion regarding the alteration and improvement which each of them discovered the other's beauties had undergone since they had last been submitted to their mutual inspection, and it cannot be doubted that Laura was greatly delighted to witness the change in size of the pretty little champion to which she had given the first lesson. All this, of course, produced the usual effect upon us, and Frank seeing that I was quite ready to renew the combat proposed to resign Laura to me. I fancied, however, that they would like a repetition of their previous engagement, and he was evidently perfectly able to renew it, for, indeed, the wanton boy had been so wound up by the preliminary scene that his former encounter had produced hardly any relaxing effect upon his lovely weapon. I therefore drew him upon the not unwilling Laura, and again guiding the fiery courser into the lists of pleasure, had the satisfaction of seeing them once more commence the amorous encounter, which proceeded to the ordinary happy result, evidently to the great delight of both parties. Frank, revelling in the blissful conjunction of every part of their naked bodies, clasped Laura round the neck and imprinted burning kisses upon her lovely lips, while his rampant steed plunged violently backwards and forwards in the abyss of pleasure and his charming buttocks bounded and quivered with the excess of wanton delight. Greatly interested in watching the delightful encounter, I endeavoured to promote their enjoyment by tickling and playing with them in the most sensitive places, till their excitement reached its height and they both sunk down in the swoon of pleasure. Laura had no sooner recovered a little from the effects of this engagement, than Frank insisted on seeing me perform the same pleasant operation in which he had just been engaged. Nothing loth, I immediately humoured his fancy, getting upon Laura, who was still lying on her back in the bed. The lascivious and not yet exhausted boy had no sooner got us fairly placed and my weapon inserted in Laura's sheath and set to work, than I felt him separate our legs so as to enable him to kneel down between them behind us. Having established his position satisfactorily, he instantly plunged his still rampant champion into my rear, producing in me the most rapturous sensations, which soon caused me in conjunction with Laura to die away in bliss before he was ready to join our sacrifice.

• From Laura Middleton; Her Brother and Her Lover (1890)

  After enjoying the voluptuous sensations of the elastic constriction the nerves of the sheath in which it was plunged exerted upon his throbbing weapon for some minutes, during which his hands roved over my body in nervous agitation, he resumed his delightful exercise, and thrust after thrust of his delicious weapon was driven into me with the most intense enjoyment to both parties. At length, his lusty efforts were rewarded with success, and, from the warm gush within me, I felt that a torrent of bliss must have issued from him, while his nervous frame shook and quivered with blissful agitation and enjoyment as the extasy of delight came over him. He lay for a few minutes bathed in enjoyment, and then raising his head, thanked me most fervently for all the bliss I had conferred on him and expressed his hope that it had been accomplished without much suffering on my part. In answer I gently turned both him and myself on one side, too much delighted with its presence to allow his sword to escape from my scabbard, and made him look at the pillow on which my weapon had rested, and where a plenteous effusion of the balmy liquid plainly attested that I too had shared in the delights of his enjoyment. He expressed his great gratification at this, as he said the sole drawback to his enjoyment had been the fear that it had been attained at my expense. But he said that what he now saw emboldened him to make a new request, and as the difficulty had now been overcome, to ask whether I might be persuaded to allow him still to retain his present quarter and enjoy another victory. I readily agreed. I told him that the sensations produced upon me by the insertion of his weapon in so sensitive a place was so agreeable—that it was so was, indeed, very evident from the powerful manner in which it still affected mine—that he must allow it to remain quietly where it was for a time and let me enjoy the agreeable sensation of its presence there.

• From The Girls (2016)

  For the limits of my carpeted bedroom at home. I shoved my hands in my shorts. This wasn’t bullshit dabbling, like my mother’s afternoon workshops. “I get it,” I said. And I did, and tried to isolate the flutter of solidarity in myself. The dress Suzanne chose for me stank like mouse shit, my nose twitching as I pulled it over my head, but I was happy wearing it—the dress belonged to someone else, and that endorsement released me from the pressure of my own judgments. “Good,” Suzanne said, surveying me. I ascribed more meaning to her pronouncement than I ever had to Connie’s. There was something grudging about Suzanne’s attention, and that made it doubly valued. “Let me braid your hair,” she said. “Come here. It’ll tangle if you dance with it loose.” I sat on the floor in front of Suzanne, her legs on either side of me, and tried to feel comfortable with the closeness, the sudden, guileless intimacy. My parents were not affectionate, and it surprised me that someone could just touch me at any moment, the gift of their hand given as thoughtlessly as a piece of gum. It was an unexplained blessing. Her tangy breath on my neck as she swept my hair to one side. Walking her fingers along my scalp, drawing a straight part. Even the pimples I’d seen on her jaw seemed obliquely beautiful, the rosy flame an inner excess made visible. —Both of us were silent as she braided my hair. I picked up one of the reddish rocks from the floor, lined up beneath the mirror like the eggs of a foreign species. “We lived in the desert for a while,” Suzanne said. “That’s where I got that.” She told me about the Victorian they had rented in San Francisco. How they’d had to leave after Donna had accidentally started a fire in the bedroom. The time spent in Death Valley where they were all so sunburned they couldn’t sleep for days. The remains of a gutted, roofless salt factory in the Yucatán where they’d stayed for six months, the cloudy lagoon where Nico had learned to swim. It was painful to imagine what I had been doing at the same time: drinking the tepid, metallic water from my school’s drinking fountain. Biking to Connie’s house. Reclining in the dentist’s chair, hands politely in my lap, while Dr. Lopes worked in my mouth, his gloves slick with my idiot drool. —The night was warm and the celebration started early. There were maybe forty of us, swarming and massing in the stretch of dirt, hot air gusting over the run of tables, the wavy light from a kerosene lamp. The party seemed much bigger than it actually was. There was an antic quality that distorted my memory, the house looming behind us so everything gained a cinematic flicker.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  I think that the reason why I did not immediately recognize her, said Austerlitz, although despite her fragility she seemed quite unchanged, was my agitated condition, in which I could hardly believe my eyes. So I merely stammered out the sentence I had laboriously learnt by heart the day before: Promirite, prosim, ze Vas obtézuji. Hledam pani Agdtu Austerlitzovou, kterd zde moznd v roce devatendct set tricet osm bydlela. I am looking for a Mrs. Agata Austerlitzova who may have been living here in 1938. With a gesture of alarm, Vera covered her face with both hands, hands which, it flashed through my mind, were endlessly familiar to me, stared at me over her spread fingertips, and very quietly but with what to me was a quite singular clarity spoke these words in French: Jacquot, she said, dis, est-ce que c’est vraiment toi? We embraced, we held each other’s hands, we embraced again, I don’t know how often, before Vera led me through the dark hall into a room where everything was just as it had been almost sixty years ago. The furniture she had inherited in May 1933 together with her great-aunt’s flat, the display cabinet with a masked Meissen china Pulcinello on the left and his beloved Columbine on the right, the glass-fronted bookcase with the fifty-five small volumes of the Comédie humaine bound in

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

  27 experiences of Jesus after his death by his followers in a new mode of existence: As resurrected from the dead and exalted to God’s presence, Jesus is “Lord” and “Christ.” • Paul’s letters provide evidence for the claims made by the first believers, which are all the more startling because they were at odds with believers’ empirical circumstances. o First, believers claimed to have been saved; this salvation is not, in the New Testament, a future or a hoped-for state but a present reality. o Further, they claimed to be saved from negative conditions, such as slavery, law, sin, and death itself. o They believed they had been established in conditions of right- relatedness to God and other humans that could be described in terms of peace, joy, righteousness, and freedom. o They claimed new capacities of speech and action, both external (the working of powerful deeds) and internal (in moral dispositions). o At root, they claimed an experience of ultimate power that came from another and that transformed them. The symbol in the New Testament for this power is the Holy Spirit. The term “spirit” here refers to the medium of this power, which touches humans in their human capacities of knowing and willing. The term “holy” refers to the fact that the power comes from God, the Holy One. • The source for the earliest believers’ claim to empowerment—to being in possession of the Holy Spirit—was the conviction that Christ himself had been empowered by the very power of God. This is the Resurrection (exaltation) of Jesus. This combination— that Jesus had been raised and that believers possessed the Holy Spirit—was the fundamental conviction and experience of the earliest believers and the birth of the Christian religion.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  on hot days through the shadier grounds of the park of Schénborn Palace, we spoke French, and only when we came home late in the afternoon and Vera was making our supper did we revert to Czech, for the discussion of more domestic and childish matters, as it were. In the middle of her account Vera herself, quite involuntarily, had changed from one language to the other, and I, who had not for a moment thought that Czech could mean anything to me, not at the airport or in the state archives, or even while learning by heart the question which would have been of scant use to me addressed to the wrong quarters, now understood almost everything Vera said, like a deaf man whose hearing has been miraculously restored, so that all I wanted to do was close my eyes and listen forever to her polysyllabic flood of words. In the warm season of the year in particular, said Vera, she had always had to move the geraniums on the sill aside as soon as we came back from our daily walk, so that I could take my favorite place on the window seat and look down on the garden with its lilac trees and the low building opposite where the hunchbacked tailor Moravec had his workshop, and while she, so Vera said, cut bread and boiled the kettle, I used to give her a running commentary on whatever Moravec happened to be doing: mending the worn hem of a jacket, rummaging in his button box, or sewing a quilted lining into an overcoat. But I was particularly anxious, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, not to miss the moment when Moravec put down his needle and thread, his big scissors, and the other tools of his trade, cleared the baize-covered table, spread a double sheet of newspaper on it, and laid out on this sheet blackened with print the supper he must have been looking forward to for some time, a supper which varied according to the season and might be curd cheese with chives, a long radish, a few tomatoes with onions, a smoked herring, or boiled potatoes. He’s putting the sleeve dummy in the wardrobe, he’s going out into the kitchen, now he’s bringing in his beer, now he’s sharpening his knife, he’s cutting a slice of sausage, taking a long drink from his glass, wiping the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand—it was in this or some similar fashion, always the same yet always slightly different, that I used to describe the tailor’s supper to her almost every evening, said Vera, and I often had to be reminded not to forget my own bread-and-butter soldiers. As she told me about my curious love of such observation, Vera had risen and opened both the inner and the outer windows to let me look down into the garden next door, where the lilac happened to be in flower, its blossoms so thick and white that in the gathering dusk it looked as if there had been a snowstorm in the middle of spring. And the sweet fragrance wafting up from the walled garden, the waxing moon already in the sky above the rooftops, the sound of church bells ringing down in the city, and the yellow facade of the tailor’s house with its green balcony where Moravec, who as Vera

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  A book sat humpbacked on an armchair. And dinner was set out on the round table, with several bottles standing among the dishes of food. Where all this food and drink came from was known neither to Margarita nor to the master. On waking up they found everything already on the table. Having slept until sunset Saturday, the master and his friend felt themselves thoroughly fortified, and only one thing told of the previous day’s adventure—both had a slight ache in the left temple. But with regard to their minds, there were great changes in both of them, as anyone would have been convinced who was able to eavesdrop on the conversation in the basement. But there was decidedly no one to eavesdrop. That little courtyard was good precisely for being always empty. With each day the greening lindens and the ivy outside the window exuded an ever stronger smell of spring, and the rising breeze carried it into the basement. ‘Pah, the devil!’ exclaimed the master unexpectedly. ‘But, just think, it’s . . .’ he put out his cigarette butt in the ashtray and pressed his head with his hands. ‘No, listen, you’re an intelligent person and have never been crazy . . . are you seriously convinced that we were at Satan’s yesterday?’ ‘Quite seriously,’ Margarita replied. ‘Of course, of course,’ the master said ironically, ‘so now instead of one madman there are two—husband and wife!’ He raised his hands to heaven and cried: ‘No, the devil knows what this is! The devil, the devil . . .’ Instead of answering, Margarita collapsed on the sofa, burst out laughing, waved her bare legs, and only then cried out: ‘Aie, I can’t stand it . . . I can’t! You should see what you look like! . . .’ Having finished laughing, while the master bashfully pulled up his hospital drawers, Margarita became serious. ‘You unwittingly spoke the truth just now,’ she began, ‘the devil knows what it is, and the devil, believe me, will arrange everything!’ Her eyes suddenly flashed, she jumped up and began dancing on the spot, crying out: ‘How happy I am, how happy I am, how happy I am that I struck a bargain with him! Oh, Satan, Satan! . . . You’ll have to live with a witch, my dear!’ Then she rushed to the master, put her arms around his neck, and began kissing his lips, his nose, his cheeks. Strands of unkempt black hair leaped at the master, and his cheeks and forehead burned under the kisses. ‘And you’ve really come to resemble a witch.’ ‘And I don’t deny it,’ answered Margarita, ‘I’m a witch and I’m very glad of it.’ ‘Well, all right,’ said the master, ‘so you’re a witch, very nice, splendid!

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  Truth be told, my plan was to come up to Santa Barbara, get freaked proper by my first good fuck, and then take my ass back to Compton. Things had swung serious though, and I knew Dushawn wasn’t just askin’ shit to be askin’. I told him I needed to think about that. “Take your time, baby. I got plenty a shit to keep me busy ’til you hit me back with your answer. I just need for you to know that I can’t ever come back to Compton. I did some serious dirt before I left.” “You askin’ me to move up here?” “That depends on whatchu got planned.” I felt like my brain was ’bout to bust. Everything had flipped so fast. I told him, “I need to come up here for a few weeks and take a look and see where I fit in. I can’t come up here blind, Dushawn. I gotta be able to take care of myself. I got a business to think about. I mean . . . every couple thinks they gon’ make it forever. Know what I mean?” He said, “If I say forever, I mean forever. Splittin’ up ain’t a option. I want some kids. Don’t you want kids, La La?” That shit blew me away. He was talkin’ marriage and family. I asked him, “Where the ring, fool?” I was just jokin’ but he went to the bedroom and started diggin’ through his suitcase. When he came back, he hit the floor and grabbed my hand. What he slid on my finger was some’m that would make the ladies say, “Oooooh!” It was at least three carats and slangin’ fire all over the room. There was a lotta shit I coulda said, but I kept it short and sweet. I said yes. Me and Dushawn spent our last day together fuckin’ each other’s brains out. We talked about er’ything—friends, family, work, old times, and times ahead. I felt like I was dreamin’. We talked about his moms. I saw her from time to time in the streets, and nothing had changed between us. She turned away when she saw me, just so she didn’t have to speak. Dushawn said, “Don’t worry about her. She’s down there and we’ll be up here.” I said, “That sounds all good and shit right now, but how do you think she’ll feel when she knows we’re gettin’ married?” He said, “She’ll get over it—or she won’t. My pops thinks she will.”

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “Let the dead eat the dead. Let us living ones dance about the rim of the crater, a last expiring dance. But a dance!” “I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  There had been quite a heated discussion with Anna, because Stephen had insisted on riding astride. In this she had shown herself very refractory, falling off every time she tried the side-saddle—quite obvious, of course, this falling off process, but enough to subjugate Anna. And now Stephen would spend long hours at the stables, swaggering largely in corduroy breeches, hobnobbing with Williams, the old stud groom, who had a soft place in his heart for the child. She would say: ‘Come up, horse!’ in the same tone as Williams; or, pretending to a knowledge she was far from possessing: ‘Is that fetlock a bit puffy? It looks to me puffy, supposing we put on a nice wet bandage.’ Then Williams would rub his rough chin as though thinking: ‘Maybe yes—maybe no—’ he would temporize, wisely. She grew to adore the smell of the stables; it was far more enticing than Collins’ perfume—the Erasmic she had used on her afternoons out, and which had once smelt so delicious. And the pony! So strong, so entirely fulfilling, with his round, gentle eyes, and his heart big with courage—he was surely more worthy of worship than Collins, who had treated you badly because of the footman! And yet—and yet—you owed something to Collins, just because you had loved her, though you couldn’t any more. It was dreadfully worrying, all this hard thinking, when you wished to enjoy a new pony! Stephen would stand there rubbing her chin in an almost exact imitation of Williams. She could not produce the same scrabbly sound, but in spite of this drawback the movement would soothe her. Then one morning she had a bright inspiration: ‘Come up, horse!’ she commanded, slapping the pony, ‘Come up, horse, and let me get close to your ear, ’cause I’m going to whisper something dreadfully important.’ Laying her cheek against his firm neck she said softly: ‘You’re not you any more, you’re Collins!’ So Collins was comfortably transmigrated. It was Stephen’s last effort to remember. 2 Came the day when Stephen rode out with her father to a meet, a glorious and memorable day. Side by side the two of them jogged through the gates, and the lodgekeeper’s wife must smile to see Stephen sitting her smart bay pony astride, and looking so comically like Sir Philip. ‘It do be a pity as her isn’t a boy, our young lady,’ she told her husband. It was one of those still, slightly frosty mornings when the landing is tricky on the north side of the hedges; when the smoke from farm chimneys rises straight as a ramrod; when the scent of log fires or of burning brushwood, though left far behind, still persists in the nostrils.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Although I went to Oxford several times a week, most of my life was centered in London. I spent great and vastly enjoyable amounts of time wandering through parks and museums and took long weekends with friends who lived in East Sussex, walking along the downs overlooking the English Channel. I also started riding again. I felt the return of an amazing sense of life and vitality when taking a horse out through the misty mornings of Hyde Park during the cold, late autumn, and even more so galloping pell-mell over the Somerset countryside, through beech woods and across farmlands. I had forgotten what it felt like to be that open to wind and rain and beauty, and I could feel life seeping back into crevices of my body and mind that I had completely written off as dead or dormant. It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life. The chance to escape from the reminders of illness and death, from a hectic life, and from clinical and teaching responsibilities was not unlike my earlier year as an undergraduate in St. Andrews: it gave me a semblance of peace that had eluded me, and a place of my own to heal and mull, but most important to heal. England did not have the Celtic, magical quality of St. Andrews—nothing, I suppose, ever could for me—but it gave me back myself again, gave me back my high hopes of life. And it gave me back my belief in love.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  And so I am talking about rags . . .’ ‘And I’m talking about the same thing!’ the cat exclaimed, and drew back from Margarita just in case, raising his paws to protect his sharp ears, covered with a pink cream. ‘Get out,’ said Woland. ‘I haven’t had coffee yet,’ replied the cat, ‘how can I leave? Can it be, Messire, that on a festive night the guests are divided into two sorts? One of the first, and the other, as that sad skinflint of a barman put it, of second freshness?’ ‘Quiet,’ ordered Woland, and, turning to Margarita, he asked: ‘You are, by all tokens, a person of exceptional kindness? A highly moral person?’ ‘No,’ Margarita replied emphatically, ‘I know that one can only speak frankly with you, and so I will tell you frankly: I am a light-minded person. I asked you for Frieda only because I was careless enough to give her firm hope. She’s waiting, Messire, she believes in my power. And if she’s left disappointed, I’ll be in a terrible position. I’ll have no peace in my life. There’s no help for it, it just happened.’ ‘Ah,’ said Woland, ‘that’s understandable.’ ‘Will you do it?’ Margarita asked quietly. ‘By no means,’ answered Woland. ‘The thing is, dear Queen, that a little confusion has taken place here. Each department must look after its own affairs. I don’t deny our possibilities are rather great, they’re much greater than some not very keen people may think . . .’ ‘Yes, a whole lot greater,’ the cat, obviously proud of these possibilities, put in, unable to restrain himself. ‘Quiet, devil take you!’ Woland said to him, and went on addressing Margarita: ‘But there is simply no sense in doing what ought to be done by another—as I just put it—department. And so, I will not do it, but you will do it yourself.’ ‘And will it be done at my word?’ Azazello gave Margarita an ironic look out of the corner of his blind eye, shook his red head imperceptibly, and snorted. ‘Just do it, what a pain!’ Woland muttered and, turning the globe, began peering into some detail on it, evidently also occupied with something else during his conversation with Margarita. ‘So, Frieda . . .’ prompted Koroviev. ‘Frieda!’ Margarita cried piercingly. The door flew open and a dishevelled, naked woman, now showing no signs of drunkenness, ran into the room with frenzied eyes and stretched her arms out to Margarita, who said majestically: ‘You are forgiven. The handkerchief will no longer be brought to you.’ Frieda’s scream rang out, she fell face down on the floor and prostrated in a cross before Margarita.

• From I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

  I found myself safe and dizzy at the foot of the sycamore tree. Louise had ended on her knees at the other side of the grove. This was surely the time to laugh. We lost but we hadn't lost anything. First we were giggling and crawling drunkenly toward each other and then we were laughing out loud uproariously. We slapped each other on the back and shoulders and laughed some more. We had made a fool or a liar out of something, and didn't that just beat all? In daring to challenge the unknown with me, she became my first friend. We spent tedious hours teaching ourselves the Tut language. You (Yak oh you)

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  “That is, I was born in Poland, but my father is Irish.” ‘So that makes you English?” “Yes,” she said, and she began to giggle again, sheepishly, and with a pretense of being coy. “I suppose you know a nice little hotel where you could take me?” I said this, not because I had any intention of going with her, but just to spare her the usual preliminaries. “Oh, my dear sir,” she said, as though I had made the most grievous error, “I’m sure you don’t mean that! I’m not that kind of a girl. You were joking with me, I can see that. You’re so good… you have such a kind face. I would not dare to speak to a Frenchman as I did to you. They insult you right away. …” She went on in this vein for some time. I wanted to break away from her. But she didn’t want to be left alone. She was afraid—her papers were not in order. Wouldn’t I be good enough to walk her to her hotel? Perhaps I could “lend” her fifteen or twenty francs, to quiet the patron? I walked her to the hotel where she said she was stopping and I put a fifty franc bill in her hand. Either she was very clever, or very innocent—it’s hard to tell sometimes—but, at any rate, she wanted me to wait until she ran to the bistro for change. I told her not to bother. And with that she seized my hand impulsively and raised it to her lips. I was flabbergasted. I felt like giving her every damned thing I had. That touched me, that crazy little gesture. I thought to myself, it’s good to be rich once in a while, just to get a new thrill like that. Just the same, I didn’t lose my head. Fifty francs! That was quite enough to squander on a rainy night. As I walked off she waved to me with that crazy little bonnet which she didn’t know how to wear. It was as though we were old playmates. I felt foolish and giddy. “My dear kind sir… you have such a gentle face… you are so good, etc.” I felt like a saint. When you feel all puffed up inside it isn’t so easy to go to bed right away. You feel as though you ought to atone for such unexpected bursts of goodness. Passing the “Jungle” I caught a glimpse of the dance floor; women with bare backs and ropes of pearls choking them—or so it looked—were wiggling their beautiful bottoms at me. Walked right up to the bar and ordered a coupe of champagne. When the music stopped, a beautiful blonde—she looked like a Norwegian—took a seat right beside me. The place wasn’t as crowded or as gay as it had appeared from outside. There were only a half dozen couples in the place—they must have all been dancing at once.