Love is not enough to keep us from harm.
An adult man possesses the power to enter your soul. A boy has no power, The power to hurt, maybe, but not the power to enter your soul.
Of all miracles, none is more daunting than normal. To be – to become – normal. This gift seemingly so ordinary is not a gift given to all who seek it.
Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.
Out of obscurity I came. To obscurity I can return.
To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully ‘comprehended’ narrative – this is the greatest happiness of the writer’s life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of ’normality.
In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term – peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.
Popular! In America, what else matters?
As our great American philosopher William James has said, an individual has as many selves as there are individuals whom he knows. There isn’t the slightest hypocrisy in this, but only pragmatic ethics. For not all persons are worthy of our acquaintance, and not all persons require equal time from us. You save your most valuable ‘personality’ for the most valuable persons you know.
A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.
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.