Mailer was a poète maudit, attempting (with frequent success) to be accursed and outcast for revealing "certain unsavory aspects of American life," his own included.
I never meant to give up the possibility of a lucrative career in the law just to be an advocate for the accursed and rejected – and to be accursed and rejected myself.
This was bitterly controversial at the time, and those words – "let war be accursed" – suggested a nation that had lost all appetite for war ever after, as the British might also have done.
Jericho was "accursed," Jerusalem "a pauper village".
"Even in death you are accursed," roars the chorus at the end of Bellini's Norma as the sinners are engulfed by flames.
Sometimes the mediator is accursed simply because he is a bearer of bad tidings, who brings the news that some ancient cause for which much blood has been spent is, in the end, unattainable.
Jesus himself set this standard when he declares: You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.
(Matthew 25:41–43) You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.
The foreign powers, when mentioned, were accorded due respect, but the priests were accursed, their behaviour analysed and criticised wherever possible.
As per the legend, the seventh born son or daughter of an Argentinian family would be born accursed, doomed to turn into a deformed mythical werewolf-like creature that'll reveal itself on the child's 13th birthday.
The experience of watching a movie is a total experience that includes everything that the movie brings to mind, and "The Terminator" showed me why I haven't, in the intervening years, rushed to fill in the blanks on the eighties action films that I missed the first time around: there's something accursed in the action-film genre itself.
