When God Laughs quotes

“I’ve watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have surrendered. You have made terms with the enemy. You have made confession that you are tired.

You have flown the white flag of fatigue.

You have nailed up a notice to the effect that life is ebbing down in you. You have run away from life. You have played a trick, shabby trick. You have balked at the game. You refuse to play.

“You see no signs,” I challenged.

“Decay is insidious,” he retorted. “You are rotten ripe.”

I laughed and forgave him for his very deviltry. But he refused to be forgiven.

“And they were right, as far as they went.

Everything is good⁠ ⁠… as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death’s horses; they run in span.

“ ‘And time could only tutor us to eke Our rapture’s warmth with custom’s afterglow.’

It was a cry that began, muffled, in the deeps of sleep, that swiftly rushed upward, like a wail, into passionate belligerence, and that died away and sank down into an inarticulate whine.

It was a bestial cry, as of a soul in torment, filled with infinite protest and pain.

But she did not mind. She was a sad-eyed, tired-faced woman, and she had grown used to this task, which she repeated every day of her life. She got a grip on the bedclothes and tried to strip them down;

He did not answer the rebuke. He was not much of a talker. Also, he ceased his hungry glancing for more.

He was uncomplaining, with a patience that was as terrible as the school in which it had been learned.

He finished his coffee, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and started to rise.

He was the perfect worker. He knew that. He had been told so, often. It was a commonplace, and besides it didn’t seem to mean anything to him any more.

From the perfect worker he had evolved into the perfect machine.

When his work went wrong, it was with him as with the machine, due to faulty material. It would have been as possible for a perfect nail-die to cut imperfect nails as for him to make a mistake.

He glowered silently over his food, finding compensation in the thought that they would soon have to go to work. That would take the edge off of them and make them sedate and dignified—like him.

Thus it was, after the fashion of the human, that Johnny made of himself a yardstick with which to measure the universe.

During the meal, his mother explained in various ways and with infinite repetition that she was trying to do the best she could; so that it was with relief, the scant meal ended, that Johnny shoved back his chair and arose.

His earlier memories lingered with him, but he had no late memories. All days were alike. Yesterday or last year were the same as a thousand years—or a minute. Nothing ever happened. There were no events to mark the march of time.

Time did not march. It stood always still.

It was only the whirling machines that moved, and they moved nowhere—in spite of the fact that they moved faster.

At last the city was behind him, and he was walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human.

It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested, grotesque and terrible.

He passed by a small railroad station and lay down in the grass under a tree. All afternoon he lay there. Sometimes he dozed, with muscles that twitched in his sleep.

He did not believe in the truth of women; but, faithful to his German master, he did not strip from them the airy gauzes that veiled their untruth. He was content to accept them as appearances and to make the best of it.

He was superficial⁠—out of profundity.

“Jack says to be sure to say to you, ‘good swimming,’ ” Mrs. Hemingway wrote in her letter; “and also ‘to bring your fishing duds along.’ ” Mrs. Hemingway wrote other things in the letter.

“Lucky that men an’ women don’t want the same things,” Jim remarked.

“That’s what makes commerce,” Matt agreed; “people wantin’ different things.”

In the middle of the afternoon Jim went out to buy food. While he was gone, Matt cleared the table of the jewels, wrapping them up as before and putting them under the pillow.

He dropped his eyes and plucked again at his sleeve.

“And you are only twenty-six years old,” George said at last. “You poor, feeble old man.”

“Don’t be so sure of that,” Al retorted, with a flash of belligerence.

“I don’t wonder,” was the retort.

“Burnt out like the crater of a volcano. Fervent heat isn’t a circumstance.”

Thereafter they did not speak. When they arrived at the transfer point, George came to himself with a start. He smiled. With fixed gaze that did not see the houses that streamed across his field of vision, he had himself been sunk deep in self-pity.

they were gluttons, eating prodigiously and drinking more prodigiously. A Chinago never knew when an act would please them or arouse a storm of wrath. A Chinago could never tell. What pleased one time, the very next time might provoke an outburst of anger.

There was a curtain behind the eyes of the white devils that screened the backs of their minds from the Chinago’s gaze.

And then, on top of it all, was that terrible efficiency of the white devils, that ability to do things, to make things go, to work results, to bend to their wills all creeping, crawling things, and the powers of the very elements themselves.

For him there would be no declining years, no gardens of tranquillity. Ah Cho philosophized and speculated about life and death. As for himself, he was not perturbed. Twenty years were merely twenty years. By that much was his garden removed from him—that was all.

He was young, and the patience of Asia was in his bones.

He could wait those twenty years, and by that time the heats of his blood would be assuaged and he would be better fitted for that garden of calm delight. He thought of a name for it;

Then he heard the sergeant’s voice in sharp command. Ah Cho closed his eyes hastily. He did not want to see that knife descend. But he felt it—for one great fleeting instant. And in that instant he remembered Cruchot and what Cruchot had said.

But Cruchot was wrong. The knife did not tickle.

That much he knew before he ceased to know.

Rarely did he know his position within half of a degree, except when in sight of land; for sun and stars remained hidden behind the sky, and it was so gloomy that even at the best the horizons were poor for accurate observations.

A gray gloom shrouded the world.

The clouds were gray; the great driving seas were leaden gray; the smoking crests were a gray churning; even the occasional albatrosses were gray, while the snow-flurries were not white, but gray, under the sombre pall of the heavens.

He lighted a cigar and stared before him. He felt the Mary Rogers lift, and heel, and surge along, and knew that she was making nine knots. A smile of satisfaction slowly dawned on his black and hairy face.

Well, anyway, he had made his westing and fooled God.

It was Semper Idem’s recovery which had so fully compensated Doctor Bicknell for the loss of the sailorman.

Lives were to him as nothing, the unpleasant but inevitable incidents of the profession, but cases, ah, cases were everything.

People who knew him were prone to brand him a butcher, but his colleagues were at one in the belief that a bolder and yet a more capable man never stood over the table. He was not an imaginative man.

But, unlike his brethren in other lands, Yi Chin Ho was in jail. Not that he had inadvertently diverted to himself public moneys, but that he had inadvertently diverted too much.

Excess is to be deplored in all things, even in grafting, and Yi Chin Ho’s excess had brought him to most deplorable straits.

Ten thousand strings of cash he owed the Government, and he lay in prison under sentence of death. There was one advantage to the situation—he had plenty of time in which to think. And he thought well. Then called he the jailer to him.

“How much is your head worth?” asked Pak Chung Chang in a thin, small voice.

“A not remarkable head,” said Yi Chin Ho. “An absurdly unremarkable head; but, such is my great foolishness, I value it at nothing less than one hundred thousand strings of cash.”

“So be it,” said Pak Chung Chang, rising to his feet.

This factory was called “Hell’s Bottom” … by the slaves who toiled in it, and I guess they ought to know; and it was situated in Kingsbury, at the other end of the town from Vanderwater’s summer palace. You do not know where Kingsbury is?

There are many things, my brothers, that you do not know, and it is sad. It is because you do not know that you are slaves.

When I have told you this tale, I should like to form a class among you for the learning of written and printed speech.

And the slave said,

“I have been sorry all my life that I was born.”

Roger Vanderwater looked at him closely, and the slave said—

And my message is, brothers, that there is a good time coming, when all will be well in the world and there will be neither masters nor slaves. But first you must prepare for that good time by learning to read.

There is power in the printed word.

And here am I to teach you to read, and as well there are others to see that you get the books when I am gone along upon my way—the history books wherein you will learn about your masters, and learn to become strong even …

Yes,

Youth was the Nemesis. It destroyed the old uns and recked not that, in so doing, it destroyed itself.

It enlarged its arteries and smashed its knuckles, and was in turn destroyed by Youth. For Youth was ever youthful. It was only Age that grew old.

Yes, Youth was the Nemesis. It destroyed the old uns and recked not that, in so doing, it destroyed itself. It enlarged its arteries and smashed its knuckles, and was in turn destroyed by Youth.

For Youth was ever youthful. It was only Age that grew old.

At Castlereagh Street he turned to the left, and three blocks along came to the Gayety. A crowd of young larrikins hanging outside the door made respectful way for him, and he heard one say to another: “That’s ’im! That’s Tom King!”

Sandel wanted to make the pace fast, while King, out of his wisdom, refused to accommodate him. He grinned with a certain wistful pathos in his ring-battered countenance, and went on cherishing his strength with the jealousy of which only Age is capable.

Sandel was Youth, and he threw his strength away with the munificent abandon of Youth.

To King belonged the ring generalship, the wisdom bred of long, aching fights. He watched with cool eyes and head, moving slowly and waiting for Sandel’s froth to foam away.

King’s eyes and right arm flashed in the same instant. It was his first real blow—a hook, with the twisted arch of the arm to make it rigid, and with all the weight of the half-pivoted body behind it.

It was like a sleepy-seeming lion suddenly thrusting out a lightning paw.

Sandel, caught on the side of the jaw, was felled like a bullock. The audience gasped and murmured awestricken applause. The man was not muscle-bound, after all, and he could drive a blow like a trip-hammer.

As he sat in his corner, glancing across at his opponent, the thought came to him that the sum of his wisdom and Sandel’s youth would constitute a world’s champion heavyweight. But that was the trouble.

Sandel would never become a world champion. He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with Youth; and when wisdom was his, Youth would have been spent in buying it.

King took every advantage he knew. He never missed an opportunity to clinch, and in effecting most of the clinches his shoulder drove stiffly into the other’s ribs.

Again and again, by feint of foot and hand and body he continued to inveigle Sandel into leaping back, ducking, or countering.

King rested, but he never permitted Sandel to rest. It was the strategy of Age.

Early in the tenth round King began stopping the other’s rushes with straight lefts to the face, and Sandel, grown wary, responded by drawing the left, then by ducking it and delivering his right in a swinging hook to the side of the head.