And always, if he had a little money, a man could get drunk. The hard edges gone, and the warmth. Then there was no loneliness, for a man could people his brain with friends, and he could find his enemies and destroy them.
I’m tired of people who have not been at war who know all about it.
The wedding was in Monterey, a sombre boding ceremony in a little Protestant chapel. The church had so often seen two ripe bodies die by the process of marriage that it seemed to celebrate a mystic double death with its ritual.
One day Samuel strained his back lifting a bale of hay, and it hurt his feelings more than his back, for he could not imagine a life in which Sam Hamilton was not privileged to lift a bale of hay. He felt insulted by his back, almost as he would have been if one of his children had been dishonest.
Dessie’s friends were good and loyal but they were human, and humans love to feel good and they hate to feel bad.
It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do.
You can only fight Fate so far, and when you give in to it you’re very strong; because all of your force flows in one direction.
You are one of the rare people who can separate your observation from your preconception. You see what is, where most people see what they expect.
And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world in never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
Tom’s cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.
In all the mad incongruity, the turgid stultiloquy of life, I felt, at least, securely anchored to myself. Whatever the vacillations of other people, I thought myself terrifically constant. But now, here I am, dragging a frayed line, and my anchor gone.
Tiny emerged on deck some hours later, shaken but smiling. He said that what he had been considering love had turned out to be simple flatulence. He said he wished all his romantic problems could be solved as easily.
When the fair gold morning of April stirred Mary Hawley awake, she turned over to her husband and saw him, little fingers pulling a frog mouth at her.
The one-eyed man watched them go, and then he went through the iron shed to his shack behind. It was dark inside. He felt his way to the mattress on the floor, and he stretched out and cried in his bed, and the cars whizzing by on the highway only strengthened the walls of his loneliness.
Maybe the less you have, the more you are required to boast.
I know this – a man got to do what he got to do, I can’t tell you. I don’t think they’s luck or bad luck. On’y one thing in the worl’ I’m sure of, an’ that’s I’m sure nobody got a right to mess with a fella’s life. He got to do it all hisself, Help im, maybe, but not tell him what to do.
And the girl,′ Lanser continued, ’the girl, Lieutenant, you may rape her, or protect her, or marry her – that is of no importance so long as you shoot her when it is ordered.
He tried not to think what he knew – that war is treachery and hatred, the muddling of incompetent generals, the torture and killing and sickness and tiredness, until at last it is over and nothing has changed except for new weariness and new hatreds.
He has come to be the great man he thought he wanted to be. If this is true, then he is not a man. He is still a little boy and wants the moon.
Can a man think out his life, or must he just tag along?