I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz – the Plaza of Heroes – and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.
But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that is what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear.
The code of small towns is simple but encompassing: if many forms of craziness are allowed, many forms of cruelty are ignored. Piggy.
The chain of events, the links in our lives – what leads us where we’re going, the courses we follow to our ends, what we don’t see coming, and what we do – all this can be mysterious, or simply unseen, or even obvious.
It was Owen Meany who taught me that any good book is always in motion – from the general to the specific, from the particular to the whole, and back again. Good reading – and good writing about reading – moves the same way.
She say to tell you you was the nicest,” Muddy told the boy. “She say to tell your dad he a hero, and that you was the nicest.
But I had to keep my hands under the desk – my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law – they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood! I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver “ranting lectures” to them about the United States; some.
Sometimes, when we are labeled, when we are branded, our brand becomes our calling;.
Dr. Larch pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign – wherever Melony went, she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she’ll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.
It had been a startling day for young Copperfield: most of the morning confined in an enema-bag carton; his first attempt at flight; his long fall through the weeds; and then sitting on that dead man’s face.
You should listen to these people, Farrokh,” his father was telling him. “It isn’t necessary for them to be your moral equals in order for you to learn something from them.
Dear God!” the cook cried. “Soon all the wood on Twisted River will be pulpwood – for paper! What about toboggans is worse than paper?” “Books are made from paper!” Ketchum declared. “What role do toboggans play in your son’s education?
Lupe’s language is just a little different,” Juan Diego was saying. “I can understand it.
But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That’s what happens, like it or not.
I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald’s sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her – as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.
Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.
Old Lowji’s nasty remark would haunt Farrokh forever: “Immigrants are immigrants all their lives!” Once someone makes such a negative pronouncement, you might refute it but you never forget it; some ideas are so vividly planted, they become visible objects, actual things.
In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets,” wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud’s. “Here in St. Cloud’s we do without – we just do without.
We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.
It was a deus-ex-machina world!