You can never get the smell of smoke out. Like the smell of failure in life.
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.
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.
The Englishman is under no constitutional obligation to believe that all men are created equal. The American agony is therefore scarcely intelligible, like a saint’s self-flagellation viewed by an atheist.
There are some women that don’t do it for some men. That’s why they turn out so many models.
Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots – places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.
On the single strand of wire strung to bring our house electricity, grackles and starlings neatly punctuated an invisible sentence.
We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold.
We shed skins in life, to keep living.
Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life.
She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted...
Standing amid the tan, excited post-Christmas crowd at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, Rabbit Angstrom has a funny sudden feeling that what he has come to meet, what’s floating in unseen about to land, is not his son Nelson and daughter-in-law Pru and their two children but something more ominous and intimately his: his own death, shaped vaguely like an airplane.
What’s beauty if it’s not, in the end, true? Beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
Though old himself, he disliked old men.
His gray suit makes him seem extra vulnerable, in the way of children placed in unaccustomed clothes for ceremonies they don’t understand.
And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?
We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe.
The brontosaurus had thirty-ton body and a two-ounce brain. The anatosaurus had two thousand teeth. Triceratops had a helmet of filled bone seven feet long. Tyrannosaurus rex had tiny arms and teeth like six-inch razors and it was elected President. It ate everything – dead meat, living meat, old bones –.
He wants to feel good, he always used to feel good at every turning of the year, every vacation or end of vacation, every new sheet on the calendar: but his adult life has proved to have no seasons, only changes of weather, and the older he gets, the less weather interests him. The house next to his old house still has the FOR SALE sign up. He tries his front door.