I mean he’d keep telling you to unify and simplify all the time. Some things you just can’t do that to.
I think he was pretty surprised to hear from me. I once called him a fat-assed phony.
I didn’t feel like it. You really have to be in the mood for that stuff.
The Laughing Man’ was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.
I began writing eight or ten words of my own on a sheet of paper, in very large letters that I could read without any trouble. I did that for over a month, filling a couple of small, dime-store writing tablets. Then suddenly I quit. For no particular reason. Chiefly, I was saddened by my own ignorance, I think. Then, too, I was a little afraid I was going blind. There’s never just one reason for anything. But, anyway, I quit.
Catholics are always trying to find out if you’re Catholic.
I am not constructed for continued absences; I have never claimed to be constructed for them.
Who the Hell is Lane?” he asked. Unmistakably, it was the question of a still very young man who, now and then, is not inclined to admiti that he know the first names of certain people.
And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father. It’s partly true, but it isn’t all true. People always think something’s all true. I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored sometime when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older like I am – I really do – but people never notice it. People never notice anything.
We are required only to keep looking.
I’d rather push a guy out the window or chop his head off with an ax than sock him in the jaw.
By far the majority of the hundred and eighty-finer poems are immeasurably not light- but high-hearted, and can be read by anyone, anywhere, even aloud in rather progressive orphanages on stormy nights, but I wouldn’t unreservedly recommend the last thirty or thirty-five poems to any living soul who hasn’t died at least twice in his lifetime, preferably slowly.
Maybe I consistently hesitated to risk letting the thing we had together deteriorate into a romance.
I remember a little dispersed band of unfamiliar faces that surreptitiously turned around, now and then, to see who was coughing.
A man can’t go along indefinitely carrying around in his pocket a key that doesn’t fit anything.
If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones. I like him ten times as much as the Disciples, that poor bastard.
Her knock started out speaking of her own innocence and beauty, and accidentally ended speaking of the innocence and beauty of all very young girls.
I’m just interested in finding out what the hell goes. I mean do you have to be a goddam bohemian type, or dead, for Chrissake, to be a real poet? What do you want – some bastard with wavy hair?
It makes me so depressed I go crazy.
Non voglio spaventarti, ma non stento affatto a vederti morire nobilmente, in un modo o nell’altro, per una causa indicibilmente ignobile.