If you were writing poetry it was somewhat safer to be a woman than a man.
I think that this is minor. Things will happen in your life – things will probably happen in your life – that will make this seem minor. Other things you’ll be able to feel guilty about.
Life is always so full. Getting and spending we lay waste to our powers. Why do we let ourselves be so busy and miss doing things we should have, or would have, liked to do?
She would lean her head against the back pillow of the sofa, thinking that she lay in his arms. You would not think that she’d remember his face but it would spring up in detail, the face of a creased and rather tired-looking, satirical, indoor sort of man. Nor was his body lacking, it was presented as reasonably worn but competent, and uniquely desirable.
Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” Then.
Anecdotes don’t make good stories. Dig down so far that what finally comes out is not even what you thought it was about.
If this were fiction, as I said, it would be too much, but it is true.
This was the great difference between disappointing him and disappointing somebody like my mother, or even my aunts. Masculine self-centeredness made him restful to be with.
Love is not for the undepilated.
But when she was finished running away, when she just went on, what would she put in his place?
Captain Tervitt had been a real captain, for many years, on the lake boats. Now he had a job as a special constable. He stopped the cars to let the children cross the street in front of the school and kept them from sledding down the side street in winter. He blew his whistle and held up one big hand, which looked like a clown’s hand, in a white glove. He was still tall and straight and broad-shouldered, though old and white-haired. Cars would do what he said, and the children, too.
You remember your history?” He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, “Not altogether.
How can you get your finger on it, feel that life beating? It was more a torment than a comfort to think about this, because I couldn’t get hold of it at all. I.
Jackson of course knew that books existed because people sat down and wrote them. They didn’t just appear out of the blue. But why, was the question. There were books already in existence, plenty of them. Two of which he had to read at school. A Tale of Two Cities and Huckleberry Finn, each of them with language that wore you down though in different ways. And that was understandable. They were written in the past.
She sat with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face as if she’d been given a present she knew she would like, even if she hadn’t got the wrapping off it yet.
Time had been filled, reliably, agreeably, they had not been left adrift, and for this they were truly embarrassingly grateful.
My mother had a habit of hanging onto – even treasuring – the foibles of my distant infantile state.
I know how you love this place,” he says to me, apologetically yet with satisfaction. And I don’t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself I loved here – some self that I have finished with, and none too soon.
A hero worn out by his struggle, one who had sacrificed his youth – that was how he might present himself, not without effect. And it was true, in a way. He was physically brave, he had ideals, he was born a peasant and knew what it was to be despised. And she too, just now, had been despising him.
Also there were people going round in such clumsy ways, stopping and starting, and hordes of schoolchildren like the ones I used to keep in order. Why so many of them and so idiotic with their yelps and yells and the redundancy, the sheer un-necessity of their existence, Everywhere an insult in your face. As the shops and their signs were an insult, and the noise of the cars with their stops and starts. Everywhere the proclaiming, this is life. As if we needed, more of life.