The soul needs something extra, a place outside matter where it can stand. The Bible – think of it as the primer of a language whereby we can talk to one another about what matters to us most. It is our starting point, not the end point.
The eddies his breath set in motion were destroying the smoke sculptures I was erecting. The pipestem was warm on my lower lip and I thought of lip cancer. I often think about how I will die, what disease or surgical procedure will have me in its tarantula grip, what indifferent hospital wall and weary night nurse will witness my last breath, my last second, the impossibly fine point to which my life will have been sharpened.
The assurance from the dictionary had melted in the night.
Walking toward the light. None of us lives in the light; we can only walk toward it, with the eyes and legs God has given us.
Being a great writer is not the same as writing great.
She went through some motions of housekeeping. Why was there nothing to sleep in but beds that had to be remade, nothing to eat from but dishes that had to be washed?
Those born rich are harder to please than those born poor.
The army was kept in as good state of fitness as the funds would allow.
There’s no medical expense can break us now. They called LBJ every name in the book but believe me he did a lot of good for the little man. Wherever he went wrong, it was his big heart betrayed him. These pretty boys in the sky right now, Nixon’ll hog the credit but it was the Democrats put ’em there, it’s been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don’t do a thing for the little man.
They found themselves involved willy-nilly in a futile but urgent search for the truth.
That’s the genius of the capitalist system: Either you’re rich, or you want to be, or you think you ought to be.
Who’ll hold families together, if everybody has to live? Living is a compromise, between doing what you want and doing what other people want.
Television was soon to eclipse print’s inky cloud with its magnetic flare of electrons, pulling millions from their reading chairs to the viewing couch.
Just middle-aged. Ideas used to grab me too. It’s not that you get better ideas, the old ones just get tired. After a while you see that even dollars and cents are just an idea. Finally the only thing that masters is putting some turds in the toilet bowl once a day. They stay real, somehow. Somebody came up to me and said, ‘I’m God,’ I’d say, ‘Show me your badge.
A writer of fiction, a professional liar, is paradoxically obsessed with what is true.
All these prohibitions old people think up. I think people should be free to do what they want unless it’s hurting someone else.
As the six, in file, passed into the poorhouse proper they clicked off glances of disdain with industrial precision.
Music affected him as women’s talking did, when there was no interceding in it. He was an instructor, not a listener.
They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father’s opinion and even into those of our grandfathers.
Inside, upstairs, where the planes are met, the spaces are long and low and lined in tasteful felt gray like that cocky stewardess’s cap and filled with the kind of music you become aware of only when the elevator stops or when the dentist stops drilling. Plucked strings, no vocals, music that’s used to being ignored, a kind of carpet in the air, to cover up a silence that might remind you of death.