She was a little given to rehearsing things in her mind, and having imaginary triumphs over people who had upset her in one way and another.
New York is not even a city, it’s a congerie of rotten villages.
Tomorrow night, if I come back, there’ll be kisses. Lovely ones, Frank. Not drunken kisses. Kisses with dreams in them. Kisses that come from life, not death.
A lot of novelists start late – Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you’re young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can’t be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don’t know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.
We only have two kinds of weather in California, magnificent and unusual.
Mildred sat quite still, and when she heard Veda drive off she was consumed by a fury so cold that it almost seemed as though she felt nothing at all. It didn’t occur to her that she was acting less like a mother than like a lover who had unexpectedly discovered an act of faithlessness, and avenged it.
As I say, they don’t teach it at the academy, but you learn it on the job: not every man’s death is a crime.
He was enthusiastic about everything, but when she came in with the pie he grew positively lyrical.
She has something in her that I thought I had, and now I find I haven’t. Pride, or whatever it is. Nothing on earth could make Veda do what I’m going to do.
Just you and me and the road. Just a couple of tramps, just a couple of gypsies, that’s it, but we’ll be together.
Suppose you did get a job as a saleswoman? What would you get for it? No matter how they figure it up, when you’re selling goods you get paid on commission, because it stands to reason if you weren’t making commission they wouldn’t pay you. But who’s buying any goods? You’d have just stood around some store, all day long, waiting for the chance to make a living, and not making it. People eat, though, even now. You’ll have something coming in.
Yes, it was rape, but only technical, brother, only technical. Above the waist, maybe she was worried about the sacrilegio, but from the waist down she wanted me, bad. There couldn’t be any doubt about that.
The water, the surf, the colors on the shore. You think they make the beauty of the tropical sea, aye, lad? They do not. ‘Tis the knowledge of what lurks below the surface of it, that awful-looking thing, as you call it, that carries death with every move that it makes. So it is, so it is with all beauty.
Don’t you know? After she’s been Mr. Hannen’s candy kid? The one that was going to New York and play the pyanner so they’d all be hollering for her? You think she’s going to see them people now, and just be Veda? Not her. She’s the queen, or she don’t play. She ain’t giving no party, and you ain’t either.” “I’ve simply got to do something.” “Can’t you leave her alone?
Veda stalked out, and Mildred grimly arranged the tray, wondering why Veda could put her so easily on the defensive, and hurt her so.
She may have found a little more than peace. There was something unnatural, a little unhealthy, about the way she inhaled Veda’s smell as she dedicated the rest of her life to this child who had been spared, as she resolved that the restaurant must open today, as advertised, and that it must not fail.
It was a long time before Mildred could bring herself to send Veda to bed. She wanted to keep her there, to warm herself in this sunny, carefree friendliness that had never been there before. When the time finally came, she took Veda in herself, and helped her undress, and put her in bed, and held her tight for a moment, still ecstatic at the miracle that had come to pass.
Mildred, who had listened to this eulogy as one might listen to soul-nourishing organ music, came to herself with a start, and murmured: “She’s a wonderful girl.” “No – is a wonderful singer.
Though she was only eleven she was something to look at twice.
Her hair, which was a coppery red, and her eyes, which were light blue like her mother’s, were all the more vivid by contrast with the scramble of freckles and sunburn which formed her complexion.