Why, emotionally, is a man of his type reciprocally connected to a woman of her type? The usual reason: their flaws fit.
And who’s next, Mr. and Mrs. America, now that the Bill of Rights is no longer the law of the land and the racial haters are running the show.
Remorse, predictably, was the form taken by her distress, the merciless whipping that is self-condemnation, as if in times as bizarre as these there were a right way and a wrong way that would have been clear to somebody else, as if in confronting such predicaments the hand of stupidity is ever far from guiding anyone.
Hypergamy. Do you know what it is?” “Never heard of it.” “Bedding women of a superior social class. Desire based on a superior social class.
Without an old country link and a strangling church like the Italians, or the Irish, or the Poles, without generations of the American forebears to bind you to American life, or blind you by your loyalties to its deformities, you could read whatever you wanted and write however and whatever you pleased. Alienated? Just another way to say ‘set free.’ A Jew set free from Jews – yet only by steadily maintaining self-consciousness as a Jew. That was the thrilling paradoxical kicker.
There had to be forces outside. The prayer went, “Lead me not in temptation.” If people were not led by others, why was the famous prayer that it was?
I have found in my life that I often phone one person when I expect myself, or others expect me, to be phoning someone else; it is what the telephone company calls displacement.
I saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.
Why is the smallest thing I do for pleasure immediately illicit – while the rest of the world rolls laughing in the mud! Pig? She ought to see the charges and complaints that are filed in my office in a single morning: what people do to one another, out of greed and hatred! For dough! For power! For spite! For nothing!
I’m the only one who gives her a whole can of tuna for lunch, and I’m not talking dreck, either. I’m talking Chicken of the Sea, Alex.
That was how he got there, seeking asylum, hounded – the forlorn reason for a straight arrow so assertively uxorious, so intensely and spotlessly monogamous, hurling himself at such an extraordinary moment into a situation he would have thought he hated, the shameful fiasco of being untrue.
One has periods of ghastliness. And then long periods of sort of quiet and love.
Tu pleci, in timp ce altii, nu prea multi, raman pe loc, continuand sa faca ceea ce au facut dintotdeauna, iar cand te intorci, te minunezi ca-i vezi tot acolo si pe moment te simti usurat fiindca exista cineva care-si petrece intreaga viata in acelasi locsor, neavand deloc chef sa plece.
In America everything goes and nothing matters, while in Europe nothing goes and everything matters.
Even when she was dressed up she didn’t look like a chosen person.
What I wanted was the tiniest thing in the world: to be like everyone else.
Fear unmans us. Fear degrades us. Fostering less fear – that’s your job and mine.
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.