However he was a very worthy man. He led a joyous cardinal’s life; was wont to make merry with wine from the royal vintage of Challuau; did not detest Richard-la-Gamoise and Thomas-la-Saillarde, gave alms to pretty girls rather than old women and for all those reasons was in great favour with the populace of Paris. He was always went surrounded by a little court of bishops and abbots of high degree, gallant, jovial, and fond of good eating….
Victor Hugo, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame
He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men, but these microbes were endowed with intelligence and will. Men attacked by them became at once mad a furious. But never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered their decisions, their scientific conclusions, their moral convictions so infallible. Whole villages, whole towns and peoples went mad from the infection.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
‘I didn’t do the murder to gain wealth and power and to become a benefactor of mankind. Nonsense! I simply did it; I did the murder for myself alone, and whether I became a benefactor to others, or spent my life like a spider catching men in my web and sucking the life out of them, I couldn’t have cared at that moment…And it was not the money I wanted Sonia, when I did it. It was not so much the money I wanted but something else…I know it all now. I wanted to find out then and quickly; whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man. Whether I can step over barriers or not, whether I dare stoop to pick it up, whether I am a trembling creature or whether I have the right….’
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
‘I divined then, Sonia’ he went on eagerly, ‘that power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up. There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one! I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it all and send it flying to the devil! I…I wanted to have the daring …and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring Sonia. That was the whole cause of it!’
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
THE LIBERATION OF RORY DYLAN STEPHEN: WAS MY LIBERATION A SINGAPOREAN SCAM?
Look at it this way; Melanie Lau smells like a “plant”, unreal, phony, an actor. Yeah, just a dumb dog I am! I can smell rotten and it stinks worse that the late Bobby Fong Jr.’s durian juice.
Lau doesn’t look like a criminal nor does she smell like one. She’s so law abiding she is the type that would be afraid to chew gum on a busy Singaporean street.
Half an hour after arrival at Lau’s I am “liberated by Singaporean police”. So polite and rather bored these Singaporean cops are; why do they accept fresh baked almond cookies from “criminal” Lau? I heard one say, “Sorry but we can’t stay for tea.”
There are more cameras that police.
I am driven to a big white grandiose governmental type building near a cricket pitch and taken to a large room with all sorts of computers and people in suits and ties. There is a big sign “Singapore Government Relations”.
As I later discovered the “liberation raid” was a Singaporean media relations event sanctioned and planned at some level of government; a make the Singaporean government look good or as they say in Singapore…striking fear in the heart of criminals and a manifestation of the power of Southeast Asian efficiency?
Strange or not so strange Bob and Fay on their way from Toronto via Hong Kong to pick me up were prevented for boarding their flight to Singapore for reasons of “national security” compelling them to remain in Hong Kong and deal with Singaporean officials at the Singaporean Embassy there. A planned delay?
I am whisked to the office of the Prime Minister of Singapore a Mr. Wong where there are more cameras. Welcome to a press conference.
I could have started barking and bitten the poor politician, but where would that lead to? Wong did say to me before the press conference Bob and Fay were on their way but delayed just a bit. You are staying with me a few days Wong said to me. I suppose it injected a bit of trust into the situation so why not roll with the punches. No threats to go sniff for landmines in Cambodia!
Frankly, let me say I am pissed off about used. The Fong’s used me and now I feel like the Singaporean government is using me.
I want to jump up and give Bob and Fay lots of kisses. I may be a cute and cuddly puppy but if you have been reading about me so far you know I am a tough assed West Highland Terrier.
I go to a fancy house in a motorcade; the official residence of Mr. Wong. I eat dinner of Singaporean chicken, rice and carrots and chase a ball just once then immediately fall asleep on the lawn.
Perhaps the chief element was that peculiar ‘poor man’s pride’ which compels many poor people to spend their last savings on some traditional special ceremony, simply in order to do ‘like other people’ and not ‘be looked down upon’. It is very probable too, that Katerina Ivanovna longed on this occasion, at the moment when she seemed to be abandoned by everyone, to show those ‘wretched contemptible lodgers’ that she knew ‘how to do things, how to entertain’ and that she had been brought up ‘in a genteel, she might almost say aristocratic colonel’s family’ and had not been meant for sweeping floors and washing the children’s rags at night.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
“I understand it now where the unpleasantness is of being deceived in a legal marriage, but it’s simply a despicable consequence of a despicable position in which both are humiliated. When the deception is open, as in a free marriage, then it does not exist, it’s unthinkable. Your wife will only prove how she respects you by considering you incapable of opposing her happiness and avenging yourself on her for her new husband. Damn it all! I sometimes dream if I were to be married, phoo! I mean if I were to marry, legally or not, it’s just the same, I should present my wife with a lover if she had not found one herself.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
I believe it’s a sort of legal rule-a sort of legal tradition-for all investigating lawyers to begin their attack from afar, with a trivial, or least and irrelevant subject, so as to encourage or, rather, to divert the man they are cross examining, to disarm his caution and then all at once to give him an unexpected knock-down blow with some fatal question. Isn’t that so. It’s a sacred tradition, mentioned, I fancy, in all manuals of art.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
Dounia was simply essential to him, to do without her was unthinkable. For many years he had had voluptuous dreams of marriage, but he had gone on waiting and amassing money. He brooded with relish, in profound secret, over the image of a girl-virtuous, poor ( she must be poor), very young, very poor, of good birth and education, very timid, one who had suffered much and was completely humbled before him, one who would all her life look on him as her saviour, worship him and only him.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Crime and Punishment”.
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