It seemed necessary for him to lift one shoulder in order to put his hand into his jacket pocket.
He had on a double-breasted suit of the type then known as the pillbox; it was chalk-striped, pink on blue; the trousers hugged his ankles.
She was a bathing beauty – short, the usual breasts, hips, and smooth thighs.
He was the obscure failure of an aggressive and powerful clan.
You’re very sympathetic, even the young girls feel that. You’d make a good provider. But they go more for the other types.
Even in a few minutes’ conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say?
Dr. Adler surrendered his arm to the masseur, who was using wintergreen oil.
But the Jews feel that the world was created for each and every one of us, and when you destroy a human life you destroy an entire world – the world as it existed for that person.
But on the way to the wedding I saw it was a mistake. I tried to get out of the car at a stoplight in my wedding dress, but he caught me and pulled me back. He punched me in the eye,” she said, “and it was a good thing I had a veil because the eye turned black, and I cried all the way through the ceremony. Also, my mother is dead.
The elderly ladies were rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue hair rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewelry, and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age.
This is the way of the weak; quiet and fair.
He was here to give aid, to clarify and move, and to make certain if he could that the greatness of humankind would not entirely evaporate in bourgeois well-being, et cetera. There was nothing of the average in Ravelstein’s life. He did not accept dullness and boredom. Nor was depression tolerated.
It was the middle-class female solidarity, defending a nice girl from charges of calculation and viciousness. Nice girls marry for love. But should they fall out of love, they must be free to love another. No decent husband will oppose the heart.
We had an enormous sunset, a smashing of gaudy colours, apocalyptic reds and purples such as must have appeared on the punished bodies of great saints, blues heavy and rich. I woke Iva, and we watched it, hand in hand. Her hand was cool and sweet. I had a slight fever.
But then why shouldn’t he write the dead? He lived with them as much as with the living – perhaps more; and besides, his letters to the living were increasingly mental, and anyway, to the Unconscious, what was death? Dreams did not recognize it.
Because of unhappiness, at a certain age, the brain starts to die back.
I know how long – endless – people’s stories are when they have grievances. And how tedious for everyone.
Anyone who wants to govern the country, has to entertain it.
You must take your chance on what you are. And you can’t sit still. I know this double poser, that if you make a move you may lose but if you sit still you will decay. But what will you lose? You will not invent better than God or nature or turn yourself into the man who lacks no gift or development before you make the move. This is not given to us.
Strict and literal truthfulness was a trivial game and might even be a disagreeable neurotic affliction.