Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.
It frightens him to think of her this way. It makes her seem, in terms of love, so vast.
He tries to picture how it will end, with an empty baseball field, a dark factory, and then over a brook in a dirt road, he doesn’t know. He pictures a huge vacant field of cinders and his heart goes hollow.
Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably – he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words – misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own.
With his white collar he forges god’s name on every word he speaks.
He doesn’t blame people for many sin, but he does hate uncoordination, the root of all evil, as he feels it, for without coordination there can be no order, no connecting.
Her hair had been going gray as long as he could remember; she bundled it behind in a bun held with hairpins that he frequently found on the floor when he lived boyishly close to the carpet.
His insides are beginning to feel sickly. The pain of the world is a crater all these syrups and pills a thousandfold would fail to fill.
That’s why we love disaster, Harry sees it, puts us back in touch with guilt and sends us crawling back to God.
Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility.
I warned you, he says, I warned you, Harry, but youth is deaf. Youth is careless.
Inspiration arrives as a packet of material to be delivered.