The devolution of American culture takes another great step forward.
I love Richard Yates, his work, and the novel, Revolutionary Road. It’s a devastating novel.
Every time another review comes out I let out a deep breath.
Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.
Mr. Feld was right; life was like baseball, filled with loss and error, with bad hops and wild pitches, a game in which even champions lost almost as often as they won, and even the best hitters were put out seventy percent of the time.
In the immemorial style of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.
My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.
A story begins with this nebulous feeling that’s hard to get a hold of and you’re testing your feelings and assumptions, testing what you believe. They end up turning into keepsakes and mementos –like amber in which a memory gets trapped.
The fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.
I can imagine anything except having no imagination.
That’s the best thing about writing, when you’re in that zone, you’re porous, ready to absorb the solution.
The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart.
Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?
Every generation loses the Messiah it has failed to deserve.
Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.
It struck me that the chief obstacle to marital contentment was this perpetual gulf between the well-founded, commendable pessimism of women and the sheer dumb animal optimism of men, the latter a force more than any other responsible for the lamentable state of the world.
His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.
Nothing is boring exept to people who aren’t really paying attention.
He had no idea of how long his life would one day seem to have gone on; how daily present the absence of love would come to feel. “Just watch me,” he said.
And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.