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.
The only reason for something to happen in a novel is that it’s the perfect thing to have happen at that time.
Three nights at the Hotel zum Storchen – a decent hotel”, Farrokh explained. “Your room overlooks the Limmat. You can walk in the old town, or to the lake. Have you ever been in Europe?
Technical Sergeant Garp, the late gunner whose familiarity with violent death cannot be exaggerated, served with the Eighth Air Force – the air force that bombed the Continent from England.
Since everything that is moved functions as a sort of instrument of the first mover, if there was no first mover, then whatever things are in motion would be simply instruments. Of course, if an infinite series of movers and things moved were possible, with no first mover, then the whole infinity of movers.
Now and forever,” Juan Diego said, more confidently. He knew this was a promise to himself – to seize every opportunity that looked like the future, from this moment forward.
I shared my grandmother’s distaste for the word rector – it sounded too much like rectum to be taken seriously.
As a self-described Guadalupe girl, Lupe was sensitive to Guadalupe being overshadowed by the “Mary Monster.” Lupe not only meant that Mary was the most dominant of the Catholic Church’s “stable” of virgins; Lupe believed that the Virgin Mary was also “a domineering virgin.