I wonder about people who say they haven’t time to think. For myself, I can double think. I find that weighing vegetables, passing the time of day with customers, fighting or loving Mary, coping with the children – none of these prevents a second and continuing layer of thinking, wondering, conjecturing. Surely this must be true of everyone. Maybe not having time to think is not having the wish to think.
Someone should write an erudite essay on the moral, physical, and esthetic effect of the Model T Ford on the American nation. Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris.
They’s a time of change, an’ when that comes, dyin’ is a piece of all dyin’, and bearin’ is a piece of all bearin’, an’ bearin’ an’ dyin’ is two pieces of the same thing. An’ then things ain’t lonely any more. An’ then a hurt don’t hurt so bad, ’cause it ain’t a lonely hurt no more, Rosasharn. I wisht I could tell you so you’d know, but I can’t.’’ And her voice was so soft, so full of love, that tears crowded into Rose of Sharon’s eyes, and flowed over her eyes and blinded her.
Every night a world created, complete with furniture – friends made and enemies established; a world complete with braggarts and with cowards, with quiet men, with humble men, with kindly men. Every night relationships that make a world, established; and every morning the world torn down like a circus.
Don’t worry yourself, Rosasharn. Take your breath in when you need it, an’ let it go when you need to.
You must know that a Chinese must pay all of his debts on or before our New Year’s day. He starts every year clean. If he does not, he loses face; but not only that – his family loses face. There are no excuses.
Ma put down her head and she fought with a desire to cry.
Cats drip over the fences and slither like syrup over the ground to look for fish heads. Silent.
I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage.
Every kid got a turtle some time or other. Nobody can’t keep a turtle though. They work at it and work at it, and at last one day they get out and away they go – off somewheres. It’s like me.
No. No – only a kind of sinking in the heart. Maybe later I’ll sort it out to hatred. There was no interval from loveliness to horror, you see. I’m confused, confused.
Bought two quarts of beer for breakfast.
No, me, I’m hungry. I’ll work for fifteen. I’ll work for food. The kids. You ought to see them. Little boils, like, comin’ out, an’ they can’t run aroun’. Give ’em some windfall fruit, an’ they bloated up. Me. I’ll work for a little piece of meat. And this was good, for wages went down and prices stayed up. The great owners were glad and they sent out more handbills to bring more people in. And wages went down and prices stayed up. And pretty soon now we’ll have serfs again.
Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man.
The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use.
Says one time he went out in the wilderness to find his own soul, an’ he foun’ he didn’ have no soul that was his’n. Says he foun’ he jus’ got a little piece of a great big soul. Says a wilderness ain’t no good ‘less it was with the rest, an’ was whole.
Tom laughed. “You jus’ a-treadin’ him on?’’ “Sure,’’ said Ma. “Take a man, he can get worried an’ worried, an’ it eats out his liver, an’ purty soon he’ll jus’ lay down and die with his heart et out. But if you can take an’ make ’im mad, why, he’ll be awright. Pa, he didn’ say nothin’, but he’s mad now. He’ll show me now. He’s awright.
If two generous paths branch from the highroad of life and only one can be followed, who is to judge which is best?
But in my little experience the end is never very different in its nature from the means. Damn it, Jim, you can only build a violent thing with violence.
Thank God this man has no message. Thank God he has no will to be remembered, to be believed in.” And, in sudden heresy, “else there might be a new Christ here in the West.