A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

The past is consumed in the present and the present is living only because it brings forth the future.

dog-in-the-blanket

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...

His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.

But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began?

And heaven my expectation.

All the dark was cold and strange.

He had to undress and then kneel and say his own prayers and be in bed before the gas was lowered so that he might not go to hell when he died.

It pained him that he did not know well what politics meant and that he did not know where the universe ended. He felt small and weak. When would he be like the fellows in poetry and rhetoric? They had big voices and big boots and they studied trigonometry. That was very far away.

DIEU was the French for God and that was God's name too; and when anyone prayed to God and said DIEU then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying.

What did that mean, to kiss? You put your face up like that to say good night and then his mother put her face down. That was to kiss. His mother put her lips on his cheek; her lips were soft and they wetted his cheek; and they made a tiny little noise: kiss. Why did people do that with their two faces?