When we reached the sidewalk, a lovely teen-age girl wearing pink eyelashes asked me for my autograph. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, “but I’m sure you must be somebody.
He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.
In a country that’s in a hurry to make the future, the names attached to the products are an enduring reassurance.
The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language.
I’d been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me. The.
I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman’s cigarette. That’s all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I’m normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman’s cigarette.
The dead have come to take the living. The dead in winding-sheets, the regimented dead on horseback, the skeleton that plays the hurdy-gurdy.
In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.
Baseball’s oh so simple. You tag a man, he’s out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.
Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide.
Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.
Transient pleasures, drastic measures.
Old hospitals with saints’ names are the ones you want to go to if you have cuts and abrasions. They haven’t forgotten how to treat the classic Crusader wounds.
Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let’s call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let’s devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.
There must be a type of weariness that seems a blessing of the earth.
We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.
Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.
It’s a Cadillac all right.” “The Rolls-Royce of automobiles,” Ottum.
Billy couldn’t recall ever having seen a blind man laugh.
There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night.