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W Quotes

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All W Quotes

“We anchored just off the mouth of the Ozama River in about 30 feet of water and used the running boat to land liberty parties. Since Trujillo was extremely anti-communist, everything else he did was forgiven by the United States. It was our policy at the time to maintain a friendship with Latin American dictators, as long as they are anti-communistic. Regardless of our political friendship with the Dominican Republic, we were warned not to get into trouble since it could create a serious international problem. From our vantage point at the anchorage, we could see the newly acquired Presidential yacht Angelita alongside the wharf paralleling the Ozama River. The vessel was built in Kiel, Germany, in 1931 as the Hussar II and at the time was the largest private yacht afloat. The Angelita had a strange look since she was designed to be a four-masted sail ship, but lacked masts, when she was previously converted to a weather ship for the U.S. Coast Guard and later the U.S. Navy. The name had already been changed from USS Sea Cloud to Trujillo’s daughter’s name when I saw her, but it would still take a few more years before her conversion would be complete although she should have remained a sail ship…. The good news is that after the ship stayed in port for eight years, Hartmut Paschburg and a group of Hamburg associates purchased her. Changing her name back to the Sea Cloud, she underwent extensive repairs and revisions at the Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft, the same Hamburg shipyard where she was originally built. This time she became a luxury sailing cruising ship outfitted to accommodate sixty-four passengers and a crew of sixty. The Sea Cloud set sail on her first cruise in 1979 and has been described by the Berlitz Complete Guide to Cruising & Cruise Ships as "the most romantic sailing ship afloat! In 2011, the Sea Cloud underwent additional renovations at the MWB-Werft in Bremerhaven. She is still in operation….”

“We and you ought not to pull on the ends of a rope which you have tied the knots of war. Because the more the two of us pull, the tighter the knot will be tied. And then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction. For such is the logic of war. If people do not display wisdom, they will clash like blind moles and then mutual annihilation will commence.”

“We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NEWTOPIA. Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NEWTOPIA. NEWTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. NEWTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic. All people of NEWTOPIA are ambassadors of the country. As two ambassadors of NEWTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.”

“We applied a very simple principle: Recognize the facts. Abortion is old as the world. Gay marriage, please - it's older than the world. We had Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, please. To say it's modern, come on, it's older than we are. It's an objective reality that it exists. For us, not legalizing it would be to torture people needlessly.”

“We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people - the poets, the mystics, the explorers - were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark.”

Author:Jenny Offill

“We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.”