"You see, Malloy, I'm writing a novel about Los Angeles.... It's a fantastic place, you know, Malloy.... It has a Spanish name, with religious Roman Catholic connotations.... And yet, Malloy, consider this: the really fantastic thing about it is that it's the crystallization of the ordinary, cheap ordinary American. The people. The politics. The cults.... And I'm going to put it in a book...."
-- Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara, 1938

"Then you know your body's sent,
Don't care if you don't pay rent,
Sky is high and so am I,
If you're a viper -- a vi-paah."
The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West (1939),
New Directions paperback, 1969, page 162

"Mystery surrounds the death of young actor River Phoenix.... The actor... was declared dead at 1:51 a.m. PT Sunday. Phoenix died about 50 minutes after collapsing in front of the Viper Room, a new club on the Sunset Strip...."
-- Karen Thomas, USA Today, Monday, November 1, 1993

On the night of October 30-31, 1993, also known as Devil's Night, there was a full Hunter's Moon and the Pennsylvania Lottery number was 666.
-- Steven H. Cullinane, 03/20/01

"Do Catholics believe that when you die your soul goes up in the sky? To heaven, if they go to heaven?"
Hope of Heaven, by John O'Hara (1938), Carroll & Graf paperback, 1985, page 162

"My blue dream of being in a basket like a kite held by a rope against the wind.... It's fun to stretch and see the blue heavens spreading once more, spreading azure thighs for adventure."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon (1941), Collier paperback, 1986, page 162

"Most modern men do not believe in hell because they have not been there."
-- Review of Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano (1947), quoted by S. H. Cullinane in a journal note on All Souls' Day (The Day of the Dead), Tuesday, November 2, 1993

"Pardon me. J'adoube."
-- The Consul, as he fastens his fly in Under the Volcano, Signet paperback edition of 1966 -- the Garden of Eden scene, page 162

"My son Michael telephoned me one morning. 'Dad, how would you like to work with Don Henley?'.... He had a song based on a book -- must be a first -- The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil by Andrew Delbanco.... He called the song "The Garden of Allah" after a now-defunct Hollywood hotel...."
-- Kirk Douglas in Climbing the Mountain: My Search for Meaning, Simon & Schuster, 1997

"It is night on the fourth of the curving terraces, high above the sea. The stars are full out, known and unknown. Dante is halfway up the mountain.... It is half through the poem; half the whole is seen and said: hell, where grace is not known but as a punishment; purgatory where grace and punishment are two manners of one fact."
-- Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, Faber and Faber, 1943, page 162

"The artist, like Penelope, weaves and unweaves his image. The crass world of time and space presents the father and the son Nacheinander and Nebeneinander, but the artistic imagination makes them one."
-- Anthony Burgess, Re Joyce, Ballantine paperback, 1966, page 162

"And I was overwhelmed when Michael said to me, 'Dad, you have been a wonderful father.'"
-- Kirk Douglas, Climbing the Mountain, page 162

"Concept (scholastics' verbum mentis) -- theological analogy of Son's procession as Verbum Patris, 111-12"
-- index to Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S.J.,
Yale University Press 1957, second printing 1963, page 162

"The fact that Joyce makes literary capital in Ulysses of the intricacies of Aquinas' argument is hard to explain unless we suppose that he had studied, with something like the same close attention which he ascribes to Stephen, the Sabellian refutation written by 'the bulldog of Aquin.'"
-- Joyce and Aquinas, page 112

"'Ah, quit griping. You let Goo Goo's dog lick your f---ing hand all the time. And that mutt ain't even f---ing Italian. It's a f---ing iresce, a f---ing Irish setter. What's the difference between an Irish dog and a f---ing tizzun?' Louie laughed and shook his head."
-- Nick Tosches, Trinities,
St. Martin's Paperbacks, 1996, page 162

"No entiendo. Sigo trabajando."
Anonymous actor in the recent film "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"

"Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics."
-- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology, 1940

"I look at the name first. The manner of the crime betrayed the touch of Professor Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes; in chess problems, on the contrary, the composer's identity tells us, more or less, what to expect."
-- Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves: The Two-Move Chess Problem Made Easy, 1931, commentary on problem 162

The Mathematical Society of Japan:

"Recently M. F. Atiyah and R. Bott extended the Lefschetz fixed-point theorem.... This extension allows the application of the fixed-point theorem to the problems of various fields of study...."
-- Encyclopedic Dictionary of Mathematics, 1977, "Fixed-Point Theorems," Article 162.

"This was a very pleasant insight."
-- Raoul Bott in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, April 2001

See also Dogma: A Sermon for St. Patrick's Day.

Page created March 20, 2001 shc759. Return to Journal.