Time is so strange and life is twice as strange. The cogs miss, the wheels turn, and lives interlace too early or too late.
It smells boys ulcerating to be men, paining like great unwise wisdom teeth, twenty thousand miles away, summer abed in winter’s night. It feels the aggravation of middle-aged men like myself, who gibber after long-lost August afternoons to no avail.
But what father ever really believes it? He carries no burden, he feels no pain. What man, like woman, lies down in darkness and gets up with child?
And he was gesturing up through the trees above to show them how it was woven across the sky or how the sky was woven into the trees, he wasn‘t sure which. But there it was, he smiled, and the weaving went on, green and blue, if you watched and saw the forest shift its humming loom.
Heredity and environment are funny things. You can’t rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.
There was white in the flesh of his mouth and his cheeks and his hair was white and his eyes had faded, with white in the vague blueness there.
You can’t build a house without nails and wood. If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood.
Tiene que haber algo en los libros, cosas que no podemos imaginar, para que una mujer se deje quemar viva. Tiene que haber algo. Uno no muere por nada.
We lived longer but at a price. We had to be our own children, having none.
How do you knock the soot off the walls inside your soul?
Do you ever read any of the books you burn?” He laughed. “That’s against the law!
We carry our homes in our heads.
So, for thousands of years, you humans have needed kings, priests, philosophers, fine examples to look up to and say, ‘They are good, I wish I could be like them.
When you want to do a thing badly enough you lie to yourself. You say the other people are all wrong. Well, soon after I started killing people I realized they were just fools and I shouldn’t be killing them. But it was too late. I couldn’t go on with it then, so I came up here where I could lie to myself some more and get angry, to build it all up again.
Gardening is the handiest excuse for being a philosopher. Nobody guesses, nobody accuses, nobody knows, but there you are, Plato in the peonies, Socrates force-growing his own hemlock.
Because?′ said the older man. ‘That’s one of the finest reasons in the world. Leaves lots of room for decisions.
In his half-sleep last night he had felt something writing on the insides of his eyelids.
I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?
Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us.
Why, just lying there, Jim, you run so fast. I never saw anyone move so much, just sleeping.