When he walked outside again, the sky was shining like a nickel and the air was filled with the smell of sugared nuts.
See you in the funny papers,” he said. Jaunty, he reminded himself; always jaunty. In my panache is their hope for salvation.
A bitter, disappointed, and jealous man kills the man he believes to be his wife’s lover, this you consider to be unlikely. A murderous Nazi spy with orders to abduct a parrot, on the other hand –.
It was not what he expected from a foulmouthed flower of bohemia, but he had a feeling there was both more and less to her than that.
If only there were a game whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it’s too late!
He allowed the world to wind him in the final set of chains, and climbed, once and for all, into the cabinet of mysteries that was the life of an ordinary man.
For me the act of marriage has proven, like most of the other disastrous acts of my life, little more than a hedge against any future lack of good material.
And yet in her eyes there was something unreadable, something that did not want to be read, the determined blankness that in predator animals conceals hostile calculation and in prey forms part of an overwhelming effort to seem to have disappeared.
There is one sure means in life of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility and disillusionment. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.
The natural fragrance of her body was a spicy, angry smell like that of fresh pencil shavings.
The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million places where life lives and things happen and creatures come and go.
I thought you seemed like someone who might enjoy backgammon,” said the kid, gravely mistaken.
All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He’s tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption.
Those who make their living flirting with catastrophe develop a faculty of pessimistic imagination, of anticipating the worst, that is often all but indistinguishable from clairvoyance.
Every future we imagine is transformed inexorably into a part of our children’s understanding of their past, of the assumptions their parents and grandparents could not help but make. The Killer Hook.
And, anyway, friendship is different in another language; a foreign friend doesn’t have to understand what you feel, and I don’t expect it. It’s enough if he understands what you just said.
I searched my feelings, an activity never far removed from looking for a dead rat in a spidery crawl space under the house.
I don’t like to lose control of my emotions.
Fathering imposed an obligation that was more than your money, your body, or your time, a presence neither physical nor measurable by clocks: open-ended, eternal, and invisible, like the commitment of gravity to the stars.
Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.