In 1930, a petite parlorntaid told her parents: "Never get me out or pay ransom for me.
'twill all be past anon O God, If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul, Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransom'd me, Impose some end to my incessant pain; Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd!
Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House majority leader, said on Wednesday, "Sounds a lot like a ransom payment to me".
I say my family doesn't have a lot of money, but they would pay a ransom to get me back.
"You understand," he said to Stan, "that if they have him and they want a ransom, they want me to exchange myself for him, then I'm going to do that, and you guys can't stop me doing it".
Even in "Amazon," where Arulpragasam sings of being "blindfolded under homemade lanterns / somewhere in the Amazon, they're holding me ransom," she also observes, "Palm trees in the wet smells amazing".
You'd have to kidnap most of the neighborhood to make the ransom numbers on me work.
If you're holding me for ransom, my family doesn't have a lot of money.' " "I didn't know his purpose," she said.
"Sometimes my neighbours just turn off the power and hold me to ransom," says Panyaza, staring at a blank television in front of her sofa, the principal possession around which the rest of her small home is organised.
