Simon Vouet, “Eight Satyrs Admiring the Anamorphosis of an Elephant” (c.1625), red chalk, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt (image via Web Gallery of Art)
The eighth person attending Donald Trump, Jr.,’s meeting in Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, has been identified as Ike Kaveladze.
According to The Washington Post: “A native of the Soviet republic of Georgia who came to the United States in 1991, Kaveladze was the subject nearly two decades ago of a congressional inquiry into Russian money laundering in U.S. banks, although he was never charged with a crime and [his attorney, Scott] Balber said there was never any sign of wrongdoing by Kaveladze. […] But [Carl] Levin, who at the time was the senior Democrat on a Senate investigations subcommittee and retired in 2014, issued a statement Tuesday calling Kaveladze a ‘poster child’ of the practice of using shell companies to launder funds and that the inquiry helped spark reforms.”
Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells “stop!”, goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over. Fourth rule: only two guys to a fight. Fifth rule: one fight at a time, fellas. Sixth rule: the fights are bare knuckle. No shirt, no shoes, no weapons. Seventh rule: fights will go on as long as they have to. And the eighth and final rule: if this is your first time at Fight Club, you have to fight.
―Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
I am always interested in why young people become writers, and from talking with many I have concluded that most do not want to be writers working eight and ten hours a day and accomplishing little; they want to have been writers, garnering the rewards of having completed a best-seller. They aspire to the rewards of writing but not to the travail.
—James A. Michener
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.
—Elie Wiesel
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.
—Robert Frost
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.—Wallace Stevens, from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
All virtues come down to courage, at the sharp end of the sword. But courage must be tempered by prudence. Courage wasted by misdirection is the most heart-breaking of all tragedies. If there is an eighth deadly sin, it ought to be stupidity, by which all virtues run out into dry sands. Yet…where does prudence end and cowardice begin? That’s a very good damn question!
—Lois McMaster Bujold, The Spirit Ring
Fall down seven times, stand up eight.
—Japanese Proverb
Sleep is an eight-hour peep show of infantile erotica.
—J.G. Ballard
I go down to my little hut, where it’s tight and dark and warm, and within minutes I can go back to being six or seven or eight again.
—Roald Dahl
If you think something is boring, try doing it for two minutes. If you still think it’s boring, try it for four. If you still think it’s boring, try it for eight, then sixteen, then thirty-two, and so on and so forth. Soon enough you’ll find that it’s really not boring at all.
—John Cage
When you are eight years old, nothing is any of your business.
—Lenny Bruce
America, we are better than these last eight years. We are a better country than this.
—Barack Obama, Nomination Acceptance Speech, August 28, 2008
