In the throat, the male is as vulnerable as the female. Once the sharp points of the shears pierce his skin, puncture the artery, there will be no turning back for either of them.
I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.
He thinks: He could give up. He could admit defeat. But he will not admit defeat. He is still alive.
But this controversy did not involve the corporal who refused to give thought to what his life had become as a case. God did not think of a man as a case. For a case is to be solved – and a man cannot be solved.
Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.
On the Decker bus she often gave up her seat to older passengers or to women with young children, she was nervously alert to the needs or near-needs of other people. It pleased and excited her to see the space she’d occupied taken, the emptiness where she had been so readily filled in.
A man is fearful of lonely in a woman.
Now the broken-off parts of her life, the fragments, bits, puzzle pieces, began to fall into place, to assemble themselves, as invariably they do once we are under the enchantment of Death.
If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine’s age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim stirrings of desire so faint and so sad it was like hearing a telephone ringing and ringing in a distant room you couldn’t hope to get to and if you did the call wouldn’t be for you.
He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year.
I will be the clinician of my own pathology.
Loving Felix she’d acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she’d acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, “truth” was common property.
How alone this was going to be.
The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!
First marriage, and nothing so sweet! You don’t know it at the time.
There is something female about being dead.
But thinking it my duty to stretch the flayed skin of my childhood on some sort of skeleton of convention.
How exhausted I am suddenly! – though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling – almost – exhilarated.
A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn’t time for it all and if he couldn’t do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For such an effort would be like drawing a single breath in the knowledge that you would not draw another. You were fated to suffocate, to die. You were fated to become extinct.
It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.