
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
Source: The Big Sleep (1939)
first line.
Vapor (1999)
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
Source: The Big Sleep (1939)
The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: A stupor and a sort of shame overwhelmed me as I heard that man trying to extract the utmost entertainment possible from the dark happenings that had been torturing me for a month.
I thought of that great voice, now silenced, which had said so clearly and forcefully that the writers of to-day imitate the caricaturists.
I, who had penetrated into the heart of humanity and returned again, found nothing human in this jiggling caricature! It was so superficial that it was a lie.
He said in front of me — of me the awful witness:
"It is man stripped of all outward appearances that I want people to see. Others are fiction, I am the truth."
“Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime.”
Source: Goodbye to All That (1929), Ch.16 On being in the trenches in France in 1915.
Context: Having now been in the trenches for five months, I had passed my prime. For the first three weeks, an officer was of little use in the front line... Between three weeks and four weeks he was at his best, unless he happened to have any particular bad shock or sequence of shocks. Then his usefulness gradually declined as neurasthenia developed. At six months he was still more or less all right; but by nine or ten months, unless he had been given a few weeks' rest on a technical course, or in hospital, he usually became a drag on the other company officers. After a year or fifteen months he was often worse than useless.
“I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can”
Song lyrics, The Essential Bob Dylan (2000), Things Have Changed (recorded 1999)
To Dr. G. M. Gilbert, after receiving the death sentence, quoted in "Nuremberg Diary" by G. M. Gilbert - History - 1995