Greed in a good cause is still greed.
Freud offended me. He seemed to feel that any suggestion of depth in human nature was an illusion.
Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.
Balzac once said, ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.
As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns.
Not really. I’ve seen Paths of Glory at least a dozen times. It’s one of Mr. Kubrick’s finest. Much better than The Shining and Barry Lyndon, in my opinion, but of course he was much younger when he made it.
There is hope, therefore I live.
It did not want new things, ever. It wanted only to eat and sleep and dream and eat again.
A man and a woman rush up. The woman raises her own cell phone and takes a picture with it. Pauline Enslin observes this without much surprise. She supposes the woman will show it to friends later. Then they will have drinks and a meal and talk about the grace of God and how everything happens for a reason. God’s grace is a pretty cool concept. It stays intact every time it’s not you.
I’m not taking that,” Mort said, and part of him was marvelling at what a really accommodating beast a man was: when someone held something out to you, your first instinct was to take it. No matter if it was a check for a thousand dollars or a stick of dynamite with a lit and fizzing fuse, your first instinct was to take it.
I’m not sure we ever believe the simplest emotions in our art, although we see them all around us, every day.
They’ve gone to the land of Nineteen, he thought. Whatever is there.
Philosophers and psychologists may argue over what’s real and what isn’t, but most of us living ordinary lives know and accept the texture of the world around us.
I want him to know the game is over. No more Castles. The real gunslingers are here. Let’s see if he can deal with them.
But time changed. That was something only drunks and junkies understood. When you couldn’t sleep, when you were afraid to look around because of what you might see, time elongated and grew sharp teeth.
I used to laugh at that old wheeze about a man wanting his son to be better than he was, but as I get older it seems less funny and more true.
Boring and unpleasant did not mean a task was unfruitful, a fact a lot of people seemed not to know, or to willfully ignore.
I felt pretty good, actually. When you’re still too young to shave, optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.
Tommy died in 1969. He was a hippie with leukemia. Bummer, man.
The Echo was a rag specializing in yard sales, area sports, and town politics. The residents scanned those things, he supposed, but mostly bought the paper for the obituaries and Police Beat. Everybody liked to know which of their neighbors had died or been jailed.