Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.
First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.
People don’t pay attention to ninety percent of what they see.
Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead.
I was struck by something rather obvious – namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.
Mr. Dial grinned. His small teeth, his wide-set eyes and his bulging forehead – plus his habit of looking at the class in profile, rather than straight on – gave him the slight aspect of an unfriendly dolphin.
It was better never to have been born – never to have wanted anything, never to have hoped for anything.
Picasso says. ‘Bad artists copy, good artists steal.
Buffalo is a long way from New York City; but apart from a dreamlike, feverish stop in Syracuse, where I walked and watered Popper and bought us a couple of cheese danishes because there wasn’t anything else – I managed to sleep almost the whole way, through Batavia and Rochester and Syracuse and Binghamton, with my cheek against the window and cold air coming through at the crack, the vibration taking me back to Wind, Sand and Stars and a lonely cockpit high above the desert.
Even if you don’t like Poe – he invented the detective story. And science fiction. In essence, he invented a huge part of the twentieth century.
Well, she doesn’t have anything to do with it, Richard, you’re just like that guy in ‘Dragnet’ that always wants the facts.
I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story.
Her death the dividing mark: Before and After. And though it’s a bleak thing to admit all these years later, still I’ve never met anyone who made me feel loved the way she did. Everything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary – I.
The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn.
A sunstruck instant that existed now and forever.
One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation.
At first I thought they were playing to an.
That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.
I remember a story I read once, a soldier, was it at Shiloh? He was talking to me but not with his whole attention. Gettysburg? a soldier so mad with shock that he started burying birds and squirrels on the battlefield. You had lot of little things killed too, in the crossfire, little animals. Many tiny graves. p128.
All of a sudden, images from every crime movie I’d ever seen began to pop into my mind – the windowless room, the harsh lights and narrow hallways, images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived.