The chairman of the state board of medical examiners was a retired physician who thought that President Teddy Roosevelt was the only other man in the world besides himself who had not been made from a banana.
What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television’s dominance of our culture – for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime – and of all holy-seeming innocents – that televisions achieves its deplorable greatness.
At that moment, everyone walks on the sky. Maybe all great decisions are made without a net,” The Wonder herself had told him. “There comes a time, in every life, when you must let go.
Unlike Alice, Garp was a real writer – not because he wrote more beautifully than she wrote but because he knew what every artist should know: 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. Garp did not write faster than anyone else, or more; he simply always worked with the idea of completion in mind.
There was no solution,” Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “but the universal solution that life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day – that is forget oneself.
This mannerism of what he’d seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people – because, surely, Wally was nice – would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At. St. Cloud’s, criticism was plainer – and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.
In every life,” Dolores had said, “I think there’s always a moment when you must decide where you belong.
Small towns may revile you, but they have to keep you-they can’t turn you away.
May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.
Many of Juan Diego’s demons had been his childhood companions-he knew them so well, they were as familiar as friends.
Juan Diego lived there, in the past – reliving, in his imagination, the losses that had marked him.
Real life is too sloppy a model for good fiction,” Juan Diego had said.
Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice – dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he’d so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without noticing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?
Homer and Candy passed by the empty and brightly lit dispensary; they peeked into Nurse Angela’s empty office. Homer knew better than to peek into the delivery room when the light was on. From the dormitory, they could hear Dr. Larch’s reading voice. Although Candy held tightly to his hand, Homer was inclined to hurry – in order not to miss the bedtime story.
The student and the teacher had contrasting ideas about the sentence, which was: “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
It’s long been a point of mine that the freedom of religion, which this country alleges to support, works two ways. We’re not only free to practice the religion of our choice, we should be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
Sometimes it is the only worthwhile product you can salvage from a day: what you make to eat. With writing, I find, you can have all the right ingredients, give plenty of time and care, and still get nothing. Also true of love.
It’s as if you’ve been shot in the heart, Bill, but you’re unaware of the hole or the loss of blood. I doubt you even heard the shot!
Jenny Fields discovered that you got more respect from shocking other people than you got from trying to live your own life with a little privacy.
He was asleep – he was still dreaming – though his lips were moving. No one heard him; no one hears a writer who’s writing in his sleep.