The mosquitos were gone from the porch, and surely when they abandoned the conflict the war with Time was really done, there was nothing for it but that humans also forsake the battleground.
The blows of his heart might jar him loose, crash him down, but he was glad to hear them, know himself alive.
So long as the vast population doesn’t wander about quoting the Magna Charta and the Constitution, it’s all right.
She went away, and the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered after her like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I heard her say, faintly, “We’ve got to try, anyway.
Meet him in the air?” Tom snorted, “good grief, talk about horrible directions to nowhere.
I started traveling. My luggage was snowed under blizzards of travel stickers. I have been alone in Paris, alone in Vienna, alone in London, and all in all, it is very much like being alone in Green Town, Illinois. It is, in essence, being alone. Oh, you have plenty of time to think, improve your manners, sharpen your conversations. But I sometimes think I could easily trade a verb tense or a curtsy for some company that would stay over for a thirty-year weekend.
Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain.
They felt lonely. They felt so alone, they wanted to cry.
Enemies come, too, from opinions and thoughts. In five seconds you’ve made an enemy for life. Life’s so short enemies must be made quickly.
We need to make progress. Otherwise we’re waiting for news in a world where there is no longer any news.
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.
I’m not a brave person; I’m an angry person on occasion.
He had once been a wanderer of libraries and a lover of the finest literature in history. But when real life diminished him, when friends died, when a love failed, when there were too many deaths and accidents surrounding him, he discovered that his faith in books had failed because they could not help him when he needed the help. Turning on them, he lit a match.
A red neon sign flickered dimly, buzzed like a dying insect, as they passed.
The good writers touch life. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her.
Those are not my friends, the ones who got me to tear the strips apart and so tear my own life down the middle; they are my enemies.
Then I went in and shot the televisor, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little, but myself always going back, going back, hoping and waiting.
Els amics no perdonen, obliden.
Look for bees,” said Father. “Bees hang around grapes like boys around kitchens, Doug?
They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlor was so empty and gray-looking.