Lennie said quietly, “It ain’t no lie. We’re gonna do it. Gonna get a little place an’ live on the fatta the lan’.
Do you take pride in you hurt?” Samuel asked. “Does it make you seem large and tragic?” I don’t know.” Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as an audience.
But you can’t start. Only a baby can start. You and me – why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that’s us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us. We can’t start again.
You stay out here a little while, an’ if you smell any roses, you come let me smell, too.
We don’t take a trip. A trip takes us.
Fella says today, ‘Depression is over. I seen a jackrabbit, an’ they wasn’t nobody after him.′ An’ another fella says, ‘That aint the reason. Can’t afford to kill jackrabbits no more. Catch ‘em and milk ‘em an’ turn ’em loose. One you seen prob’ly gone dry.
At one point, as Samuel urges Adam to raise his boys well regardless of the blood that might be in them, Adam tells him, “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” Samuel replies, “No, but you can make a very fast pig.
It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us.
Nearly everybody has his box of secret pain, shared with no one.
The flies have conquered the flypaper.
It is a fact verified and recorded in many histories that soul capable of the greatest good is also capable of the greatest evil. Who is there more impious than backsliding priest? Who more carnal than a recent virgin? This, however, may be a matter of appearance.
The story was gradually taking shape. Pilon liked it this way. It ruined a story to have it all come out quickly. The good story lay in half-told things which must be filled in out of the hearer’s own experience.
And, as with all retold tales that are in people’s hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in between anywhere.
When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Other people? They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, but it’s much better too.
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie.
But to find where you are going, you must know where you are, and I didn’t.
A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy – that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.
Abra was ready ere I called her name. And though I called another, Abra came.
Let’s get it over and the door closed shut on it! Let’s close it like a book and go on reading! New chapter, new life.
And in his dream, Coyotito was reading from a book as large as a house, with letters as big as dogs, and the words galloped and played on the book.