Was she not so simple and free of ulterior motives as she looked? Well, neither was I.
We took the coal-and-ice dealers into taverns and drank beer and swapped talk, in those sleepy and dark with heat joints where the very flies crept rather than flew, seeming doped by the urinal camphors and malt sourness, and from the heated emptiness and woodblock-knocking of the baseball broadcast that gave only more constriction to the unlocatable, undiagnosed wrong.
I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world.
You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.
IT TAKES SOME OF US a long time to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure. How long it takes depends on how swiftly the social sugars dissolve. But when at last they do dissolve there’s a different taste in your mouth, bringing different news which registers with dark astonishment and fills your eyes. And this different news is that from vast existence in some way you rise up and at any moment you may go back. Any moment; the very next, maybe.
My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it’s filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and motheaten fur.
Would never understand what women want. What do they want? They breath salad and drink human blood.
He knew he would think better clearer thoughts after bathing in the sea. His mother had believed in the good effects of bathing, but she had died so young.
And where was that day? Past and dead. Whose humiliating memories were these? His and not his father’s. What had he to think back on that he could call good? Very, very little. You had to forgive. First, to forgive yourself, and then, general forgiveness.
Some people, if they didn’t make it hard for themselves, might fall asleep,” said Mintouchian. “Even the Son of Man made it hard so He would have enough in common with our race to be its God.
Just because your soul is being torn to pieces doesn’t mean that you stop analyzing the phenomena.
If you could arrange to avoid that routine job-world, you were an intellectual or an artist. Too restless, tremorous, agitated, too mad to sit at a desk eight hours a day, you needed an institution – a higher institution.
As the wicked flee when none pursueth, so does the middle-class wrestle when none contendeth. They cried out for freedom, it came down on them in a flood. Nothing remains but a few floating timbers of psychotherapy.
No school without spectacular eccentrics and crazy hearts is worth attending.
The earth was a grave: our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned: a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, “Enough!” The planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement.
People forget how sensational the things are that they do. They don’t see it on themselves. It blends into the background of their daily life.
Seashores are good for madmen – provided they’re not too mad.
To accept too many favors from Ramona was dangerous. He might have to pay with his freedom. Of course he didn’t need that freedom now; he needed a rest. Still, after resting, he might want his freedom again. He wasn’t sure of that, either. But it was a possibility.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul!
My balance comes from instability.