And since we don’t just forget things because they don’t matter but also forget things because they matter too much because each of us remembers and forgets in a pattern whose labyrinthine windings are an identification mark no less distinctive than a fingerprint’s, it’s no wonder that the shards of reality one person will cherish as a biography can seem to someone else who, say, happened to have eaten some ten thousand dinners at the very same kitchen table, to be a willful excursion into mythomania.
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I read the two sentences over and turn them both around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste.
The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget about being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.
That can happen when people die, the argument with them drops away and people so flawed while they were drawing breath that at times they were all but unbearable now assert themselves in the most appealing way, and what was least to your liking the day before yesterday becomes in the limousine behind the hearse a cause not only for sympathetic amusement but for admiration.
And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds.
You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.
I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself.
Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime’s minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?
Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.
He’d tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.
How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you’d loved since you were a boy?
If anybody asks, ‘Can you do this job? Can you handle it?’ you tell ‘em ‘Absolutely.’ By the time they find out that you can’t, you’ll have already learned, and the job’ll be yours. And who knows, it might just turn out to be the opportunity of a lifetime.
Look, everything the Communists say about capitalism is true, and everything the capitalists say about Communism is true. The difference is, our system works because it’s based on the truth about people’s selfishness, and theirs doesn’t because it’s based on a fairy tale about people’s brotherhood. It’s such a crazy fairy tale they’ve got to take people and put them in Siberia in order to get them to believe it.
Others? He dares to call us others? He’s the other. The one who looks most American – and he’s the one who is least American! The man is unfit. He shouldn’t be there. He shouldn’t be there, and it’s as simple as that!
The goal was to have goals, the aim to have aims. This edict came entangled often in hysteria, the embattled hysteria of those whom experience had taught how little antagonism it takes to wreck a life beyond repair.
The loveliest fairy tale of childhood is that everything happens in order.
It’s no picnic up there in the egosphere.
Because you happen to be a writer doesn’t mean you have to deny yourself the ordinary human pleasure of being praised and applauded.
How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.” Though.
I am not impressed by the White House!” my father cried, hammering on the table to shut her up after she’d said “the White House” for the fifteenth time. “I am only impressed by who lives there. And the person who lives there is a Nazi.