Then she rubbed the cat’s fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.
Fear is intense self-awareness.
What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.
The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat.
It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon.
Too much engenders too much.
How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing?
When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.
For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set.
You don’t know the connection? You don’t know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?
The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations.
I feel like an overwritten paragraph.
The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be. But.
Rain turned to sleet, sleet to snow.
He had ambitions on my behalf and more or less at my expense. This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.
This is the custom among men who have failed to be heroes; their sons must prove that the seed was not impoverished.
When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.
You don’t think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you’re thinking.
Is cyberspace a thing within the world or is it the other way around? Which contains the other, and how can you tell for sure?
In the countryside he heard horns and drums and followed the sound to a temple of granite and marble set in a compound that included shrines and incense stalls, people squatting against the walls, beggars, touts, flower-sellers, those who watch over your shoes for a couple of weightless coins.