If you’re a poet, you do something beautiful. I mean you’re supposed to leave something beautiful after you get off the page and everything. The ones you’re talking about don’t leave a single, solitary thing beautiful. All that maybe the slightly better ones do is sort of get inside your head and leave something there, but just because they do, just because they know how to leave something, it doesn’t have to be a poem, for heaven’s sake.
Women kill me. They really do. I don’t mean I’m oversexed or anything like that – although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean.
I never bore people I haven’t known for at least a thousand years.
I hate saying corny things like “traveling incognito.” But when I’m with somebody that’s corny, I always act corny too.
I do not willfully invite any disillusions at this point in my life. I am willing to stay in the dark.
He was the kind of phony that have to give themselves room when they answer somebody’s question.
You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart.
I get lonesome up there,” I told him. “I picked a lousy profession. If I ever write a novel I think I’ll join a choir or something and run to meetings between chapters.
Aunt – Uh – There’s a war on. Uh – I mean you’ve seen it on the newsreels. I mean you’ve heard it on the radio and all, haven’t you?
That’s one nice thing about carrousels, they always play the same songs.
I watched Kenneth’s face like a writer.
The thing he was afraid of, he was afraid somebody’d say something smarter than he had.
Mary Hudson waved to me. I waved back. I couldn’t have stopped myself, even if Id wanted to. Her stickwork aside, she happened to be a girl who knew how to wave to somebody from third base.
It was a terrible school, no matter how you looked at it.
She had a nice voice. A nice telephone voice, mostly. She should’ve carried a goddamn telephone around with her.
Where you girls from? Don’t answer if you don’t feel like it. I don’t want you to strain yourself.
Then something altogether hideous happened. The thought was forced on me that no matter how coolly or sensibly or gracefully I might one day to learn to live my life, I would always at best be a visitor in a garden of enamel urinals and bedpans, with a sightless, wooden dummy-deity standing by in a marked-down rupture truss.
Fortunately, I find that if a situation is funny or risible enough, I tend to bleed less profusely.
The one ugly one, Laverne, wasn’t too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty, was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor.
I never did find out what the hell was the matter. Some girls you practically never find out what’s the matter.