I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.
They knew that a man so hurt and so perplexed may turn in anger, even on people he loves. They left the men alone to figure and to wonder in the dust. After.
Cal considered. “What did my father do to make her leave?” “He loved her with his whole mind and body. He gave her everything he could imagine.
You wouldn’t lay a trap for me?” Lee asked. “My wish isn’t as strong as it once was. I’m afraid I could be talked out of it or, what would be worse, I could be held back just by being needed. Please try not to need me. That’s the worst bait of all to a lonely man.
And by the same token she is hated by the twisted and lascivious sisterhood of married spinsters whose husbands respect the home but don’t like it very much. Dora.
You think it was a sin to let my wife die like that?’’ “Well,’’ said Casy, “for anybody else it was a mistake, but if you think it was a sin – then it’s a sin. A fella builds his own sins right up from the groun’.
Even Juan laughed then. Everyone laughed. And suddenly the bus was not full of strangers. Some chemical association was formed. Norma laughed hysterically. All the tension of the morning came out in her laughter.
The law was designed to save, not to destroy.
Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong.
When a man is finally boxed and he has no choice, he begins to decorate his box. So Hazel, condemned to the presidency, since he could not escape it, began to ornament it. A man can climb high on the steps of responsibility.
Will Hamilton was a very substantial businessman. No one knew exactly how many pies his thumb had explored, but it was known that he was a clever and comparatively rich man.
Alice retired to the background until she was barely visible at all.
He was a stranger to all the world, but he was not lonely.
Caleb and Aaron – now you are people and you have joined the fraternity and you have the right to be damned.
Pre-Cambrian Memory.
It had become his custom, each time he was deserted, to buy a gallon of wine, to stretch out on the comfortably hard bunk and get drunk. Sometimes he cried a little all by himself but it was luxurious stuff and he usually had a wonderful feeling of well-being from it. He would read Rimbaud aloud with a very bad accent, marveling the while at his fluid speech.
A blanket of herring clouds was rolling in from the east.
It’s a thing to see when a boy comes home. It’s a thing to see.
Can you think that whatever made us – would stop trying?
I have thought the difference might be that my Mary knows she will live forever, that she will step from the living into another life as easily as she slips from sleep to wakefulness. She knows this with her whole body, so completely that she does not think of it any more than she thinks to breathe. Thus she has time to sleep, time to rest, time to cease to exist for a little.