Rubin, the man at the newsstand, had poor eyes. They may not have been actually weak but they were poor in expression, with lacy lids that furled down at the corners.
She has two husbands. Whose are the kids? The fellow detected her and she gave a signed confession that two of the four children were not the father’s.
And I thought there was altogether too much of this to live with. Better forget it, in part. The Ganges is there with its demons and lords; but you have a right also, and merely, to wash your feet and do your personal laundry in it. Or even if you had a good car it would take more than a lifetime to do a tour of all the Calvaries.
You see, I understand what it is when the lonely person begins to feel like an animal.
But can thought wake you from the dream of existence? Not if it becomes a second realm of confusion, another more complicated dream, the dream of intellect, the delusion of total explanations.
And he makes all sorts of people feel that he has exactly what they’ve been looking for. Subtlety for the subtle. Warmth for the warm. For the crude, crudity. For the crooks, hypocrisy. Atrocity for the atrocious. Whatever your heart desires. Emotional plasma which can circulate in any system.
Compulsory veneration is bound to come out as rebellion, hatred, and blasphemy.
I may be old enough for my second childhood, but at least the first is well behind me.
He tried to make his lust comical, to show how absurd it all was, easily the most wretched form of human struggle, the very essence of slavery.
He was a splendid old man, only partly fraudulent, and what more can you ask of anyone?
But what about justice? – Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without – totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle.
In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don’t mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While.
Unrequited love. Nowadays called hysterical dependency.
An old man, disappointed, of failing strength, may try to reinvigorate himself by means of anger.
We are survivors, in this age, so theories of progress ill become us, because we are intimately acquainted with the costs. To realize that you are a survivor is a shock.
His intellect would have been more effective if he had had an aggressive paranoid character, eager for power. He was jealous but not exceptionally competitive, not a true paranoiac.
In every direction, the walls of life are tiled with such facts so that you can never account for them all, only note some of the more conspicuous ones.
Yes, there are good reasons for revulsion and fear. But revulsion and fear impair judgment. Anxiety destroys scale, and suffering makes us lose perspective.
A bit of ideology and being up to date is most apropos,” Chekhov said – tongue in cheek, I suspect. In a more serious vein, he wrote that writers “should engage in politics only enough to protect themselves from politics.
His friend, his former friend, Valentine, and his wife, his ex-wife Madeleine, had spread the rumor that his sanity had collapsed.