The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they’ll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don’t like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they’ll say he’s conceited. Even smart girls do it.
Wow. Death by books. That would have been some way to go.
We have to live a life that is more revolutionary than that of the revolutionaries.
Did you ever get fed up?′ I said. ‘I mean did you ever get scared that everything was going to go lousy unless you did something?
I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they’re always being perverty when I’m around.
That’s what I liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere swanky for lunch. It mad me so damn sad when I thought about it, their never going anywhere swanky for lunch or anything. I knew it wasn’t too important, but it made me sad anyway.
Lots of time you don’t know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn’t interest you most.
I’ll tell you a terrible secret – Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.
That’s the terrible part. I swear to God I’m a madman.
Everything everybody does is so – I don’t know – not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and – sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you’re conforming just as much as everybody else, only in a different way.
You keep records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them. If you want to Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education, it’s history.
People always think something’s all true.
I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn’t think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.
People always think something’s all true. I don’t give a damn, except that I get bored when people tell me to act my age. Sometimes I act a lot older than I am, I really do. But people never notice. People never notice anything.
I’ve missed you.” The words were no sooner out than she realized that she didn’t mean them at all.
Almost every damn school in the world gets out earlier for Christmas break than the school I go to.
I don’t care if it’s a sad good-by or a bad good-by, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t, you feel even worse.
We’re the tattooed lady, and we’re never going to have a minute’s peace, the rest of our lives, until everybody else is tattooed, too.
A community of seriously hip observers is a scary and depressing thing.
You fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.