An army post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but then they happen over and over again.
Then when he had washed the ashtray and the glass he brought out a pistol from his pocket and put a bullet in his chest.
It looks to me like everything has just walked off and left me.
Being mad is no good. Nothing we can do is any good. That’s the way it seems to me. All we can do is go around telling the truth.
Frances wanted the whole world to die.
German lieder is creepy music. That’s why I specialize in it.
Afterward the Captain was to tell himself that in this one instant he knew everything. Actually, in a moment when a great but unknown shock is expected, the mind instinctively prepares itself by abandoning momentarily the faculty of surprise. In that vulnerable instant a kaleidoscope of half-guessed possibilities project themselves, and when the disaster has defined itself there is the feeling of having understood beforehand in some supernatural way.
Man does not make these natural resources – man only develops them, only uses them for work... How can a man own ground and space and sunlight and rain for crops?
She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning. It was as though his head were the prow of a boat and the sounds were water that broke on him and then flowed past. He felt he had to look behind to find the words already said.
Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself – and he never asked anybody else to read to him.
He fluttered his eyelids, so that they were like pale, trapped moths in his sockets.
Aber die Erinnerung kommt nie von vorne auf einen zu – sie kommt seitlich um die Ecke.
This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.
A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness.
They are all very busy people. In fact they are so busy that it will be hard for you to picture them. I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest.
The others all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.
You see, it’s like I’m two people. One of me is an educated man. I been in some of the biggest libraries in the country. I read. I read all the time. I read books that tell the pure honest truth. Over there in my suitcase I have books by Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen and such writers as them. I read them over and over, and the more I study the madder I get.
Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom?
The eyes of his friend were moist and dark, and in them he saw the little rectangled pictures of himself that he had watched a thousand times.