Nothing that befalls anyone is too senseless to have happened.
The vulnerability in that smile was the surprising element- the vulnerability of our record-breaking muscleman faced with all the crudeness it takes to stay alive. The smile’s refusal to recognize, let alone to sanction in himself, the savage obstinacy that seven decades of surviving requires of a man.
When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like the prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she’d once given much thought.
Of course it should not be too surprising to find out that your life story has included an event, something important, that you have known nothing about – your life story is in and of itself something that you know very little about.
You have to enjoy power, have a certain ruthlessness, to accept the beauty and not mourn the fact that it overshadows everything else. As with any exaggerated trait that sets you apart and makes you exceptional – and enviable, and hateable – to accept your beauty, to accept its effect on others, to play with it, to make the best of it, you’re well advised to develop a sense of humor.
Why doesn’t she call the cops and get me shipped off to children’s prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? “Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother.” You’d think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America.
Here in America either it’s Faunia Farley or it’s Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk!
No one with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That’s what you get for a couplet.
Though I’d never forgotten Alan, I hadn’t uttered his name aloud in the many years since he’d died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.
Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult – not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty – nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others. “Did you meet Mr. von Ribbentrop?” Now almost girlishly bashful, she replied, “I danced with Mr. von Ribbentrop.” “Where?
There is no life without patience.
Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.
One price you pay for being taken for a god is the unabated dreaminess of your acolytes.
Not to be rich, not to be famous, not to be mighty, not even to be happy, but to be civilized – that was the dream of his life.
You want monogamy outside marriage and adultery inside marriage.
It is not our high purposes alone that make us moving creatures, but our humble needs and cravings.
But this had happened to me more than once in my life: I had refused to allow convention to determine my conduct, only to learn, after I’d gone my own way, that my bedrock feelings were sometimes more conventional than my sense of unswerving moral imperative.
Politics is the great generalizer and literature the great particularizer, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other – they are in an antagonistic relationship.
Nessuno dei pezzi di musica seria che aveva ascoltato per tutta la vita adulta gli dava la stessa emozione che ora provava ascoltando il vecchio swing: -Quel po’ di stoicismo che ho dentro se ne va, e il desiderio di non morire, di non morire mai, si fa quasi insopportabile.
Simple is never that simple.