Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We’ll smell smoke then, and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure.
There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.
Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
I don’t know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius – I know it too well to blush behind it.
Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.
By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.
Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.
For he had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out – through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused.
She was buried in his flesh. She throbbed in the beat of his pulses. She was wine in his blood, a music in his heart.
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.
I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation.
The traveller gets out, walks up and down the platform, sees the vast slow flare and steaming of the mighty engine, rushes into the station, and looks into the faces of all the people passing with the same sense of instant familiarity, greeting, and farewell, – that lonely, strange, and poignantly wordless feeling that Americans know so well.
Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.
We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we’re willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won’t admit that either, but it’s true.
We are the sum of all the moments in our lives – all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.
And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the combination of two things: the ghastly imitation of swarming life and metropolitan gaiety in the scene, and the almost total absence of life itself.
They clung together in that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic island, where the world was quiet, believing all they said. And who shall say – whatever disenchantment follows – that we ever forget magic, or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold?
Out of the nameless and unfathomed weavings of billion-footed life, out of the dark abyss of time and duty, blind chance had brought these two together on a ship, and their first meeting had been upon the timeless and immortal seas that beat forever at the shores of the old earth.
Could I make tongue say more than tongue could utter! Could I make brain grasp more than brain could think! Could I weave into immortal denseness some small brede of words, pluck out of sunken depths the roots of living, some hundred thousand magic words that were as great as all my hunger, and hurl the sum of all my living out upon three hundred pages – then death could take my life, for I had lived it ere he took it: I had slain hunger, beaten death!