That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.
But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color – blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut – but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye.
What fire dies when you feed it?
Knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress.
You’re supposed to be strong enough to exert some control over how much you want to hide, and you’re so desperate to feel some kind of control that you settle for the appearance of control.
She regarded the things that were important to me as her enemy, not realizing that they were, in fact, the “me” she seemed so jealously to covet.
What you do is you hide your deep need to hide, and you do this out of the need to appear to other people as if you have the strength not to care how you appear to others.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.
The sky is low and gray and loose and seems to hang. There’s something baggy about the sky.
Life is essentially one long search for an ashtray.
He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see.
The music’s still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.
One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for.
You’ll stop worrying what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.
Imagine the day after the Berlin Wall came down if everybody in East Germany was plump and comfortable-looking and dressed in Caribbean pastels, and you’ll have a pretty good idea what the Fort Lauderdale Airport terminal looks like today.
The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.
He imagined that the clock’s second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate...
His eyes were holes in the world.
He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question.
There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.