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.
It’s the strange thing about you mystics, how often your little ecstasies wear a skirt.
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.
Somehow Rabbit can’t tear his attention from where the ball should have gone, the little ideal napkin of clipped green pinked with a pretty flag.
Piet wondered what barred him from the ranks of those many blessed who believed nothing. Courage, he supposed. His nerve had cracked when his parents died. To break with a faith requires a moment of courage, and courage is a kind of margin within us, and after his parents’ swift death Piet had no margin. He lived tight against his skin, and his flattish face wore a look of tension. Also, his European sense of order insisted that he place his children in Christendom.
While some of us burned on the edges of life, insatiable and straining to see more deeply in, he sat complacently at the centre and let life come to him – so much of it, evidently, that he could not keep track of his appointments.
We all rather live under wraps, don’t we? We hardly ever really open ourselves to the loveliness around us. Yet there it is, every day, going on and on, whether we look at it or not. Such a splendid waste, isn’t it?
Having suffered under their parents’ rigid marriages and formalized evasions, they sought to substitute an essential fidelity set in a matrix of easy and open companionship among couples. For the forms of the country club they substituted informal membership in a circle of friends and participation in a cycle of parties and games.
Virtue was no longer sought in temple or market place but in the home – one’s own home, and then the homes of one’s friends.
Do you think God wants a waterfall to be a tree?
I think... no, I am positive... that you are the most unattractive man I have ever met in my entire life. You know, in the short time we’ve been together, you have demonstrated EVERY loathsome characteristic of the male personality and even discovered a few new ones. You are physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, you’re morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selfish, stupid, you have no taste, a lousy sense of humor and you smell. You’re not even interesting enough to make me sick.
You can go to the dark side of the moon and back and see nothing more wonderful and strange than the way men and women manage to get together.
Geography! That’s something they teach in the third grade! I never heard of a grownup studying geography.
But the nightmares were accurate enough: we are like a swarm of mosquitoes, crazy with thirst and doomed to be swatted.
He settles back with a small handful of cashews; dry-roasted, they have a little acid sting to them, the tang of poison that he likes.
Yes, well, years. Some die young; some are born old.