There were some very good books in the backseat of the little Volkswagen; good books were the best protection from evil that Pepe had actually held in his hands – you could not hold faith in Jesus in your hands, not in quite the same way you could hold good books.
The way you remember or dream about your loved ones – the ones who are gone – you can’t stop their endings from jumping ahead of the rest of their stories. You don’t get to choose the chronology of what you dream, or the order of events in which you remember someone. In your mind – in your dreams, in your memories – sometimes the story begins with the epilogue.
Flor and Juan Diego and Lupe were the Iowan’s projects; Edward Bonshaw saw them through the eyes of a born reformer, but he did not love them less for looking upon them in this fashion.
What Brother Pepe saw in Edward Bonshaw was a man who looked like he belonged – like a man who had never felt at home, but who’d suddenly found his place in the scheme of things.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
A book feels true when it feels true,” she said to him, impatiently. “A book’s true when you can say, ‘Yeah! That’s just how damn people behave all the time.
It was not out of love that I wanted to meet my father, but out of the darkest curiosity – to be able to recognize, in myself, what evil I might be capable of.
Not every collision course comes as a surprise.
As Garp put it, ‘You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.’ Even if these so-called endings and beginnings are illusions.
A man named Hero washed the press cloths; Meany Hyde told Homer that the man had been a kind of hero, once. ‘That’s all I heard. He’s been comin’ here for years, but he was a hero. Just once,’ Meany added, as if there might be more shame attached to the rarity of the man’s heroism than there was glory to be sung for his moment in the sun.
You can’t protect people, kiddo,” Wally said. “All you can do is love them.
I think you’re being selfish.” “What do you mean, selfish?” Wally asked. “A war is for your country, it’s serving your country!” “To you, it’s an adventure,” Candy said. “That’s what’s selfish about it.
If Garp was going to play lacrosse, Jenny thought, where would he go? Not out, because it’s dark; he’d lose the ball.
They were members of Maine’s very small money class. Their business, as they ridiculously called it, didn’t make a cent, but they didn’t need to make money; they were born rich. Their needless enterprise consisted of taking people to the wilderness and creating for them the sensation that they were lost there; they also took people shooting down rapids in frail rafts or canoes, creating for them the sensation that they would surely be bashed to death before they drowned.
He hadn’t known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to – and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.
We can afford the workers’ compensation, Harry – he’ll watch what he says the time next, won’t he?” Nils would say. “The ‘next time,’ Nils,” Grandpa Harry would gently correct his old friend.
What did you do that for?” the customs guy asked him. “We haven’t been getting along lately,” Jack admitted. “Well, this’ll really help,” the guy said.
Ad majorem Dei gloriam – to the greater glory of God.
I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It’s important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine.
People are like that... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’ And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety – it stands alongside our sameness.