The great shapes of the hills, embrowned and glowing with the molten hues of autumn, are all about him: the towering summits, wild and lonely, full of joy and strangeness and their haunting premonitions of oncoming winter soar above him, the gulches, gorges, gaps, and wild ravines, fall sheer and suddenly away with a dizzy terrifying steepness, and all the time the great train toils slowly down from the mountain summits with the sinuous turnings of an enormous snake.
All serious work in fiction is autobiographical.
Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.
The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. 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.
Why is it that we are always strangers in this world, and never come to know one another, and are full of fear and shame and hate and falseness, when what we want is love? Why is it? Why? Why? Why?
Then, then, will fury leave us, he will cease from those red channels of our life he has so often run, another sort of worm will work at that great vine, whereat he fed. Then, then, indeed, he must give over, fold his camp, retreat; there is no place for madness in a dead man’s brain, no place for hunger in a dead man’s flesh, and in a dead man’s heart there is a place for no desire. At.
It was the beginning of that dark time of blood, and crime, and terror which the years of prohibition brought and which was to leave its hideous mutilation not only upon the soul and conscience of the nation, but upon the lives of millions of people – particularly the young everywhere. At.
To hell with them all. Don’t let them worry you. Get all that you can. Don’t give a damn for anything. Nothing gives a damn for you. To hell with it all! To hell with it! There are a lot of bad days. There are a lot of good ones. You’ll forget. There are a lot of days.
And as he stood there with Margaret quietly by his side the old and tragic light of fading day shone faintly on their faces, and all at once it seemed to him that they were fixed there like a prophecy with the hills and river all around them, and that there was something lost, intolerable, foretold and come to pass, something like old time and destiny – some magic that he could not say.
Then he walked off with fatigued relief into time toward the twentieth century, feeling gratefully the ghost-kiss of absent weight upon his now free but still leaning right shoulder.
The great, the unspeakable crime against life is not that we have lived mistakenly or badly, but that we have lived cautiously and half-heartedly, and without belief.
He was the complete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding Golden Age, and, what’s more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with their blessings of time and family, saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with Glory.
They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their limbs and faces of their own little cosmos.
Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf upon the earth; the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled with fresh orchard scents.
There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger – it never made inquiries till later.
The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay like silence on the earth, it dropped through the leafy web of the young maples, printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.
The huge, dark wall of loneliness is around him now. It encloses and presses in upon him, and he cannot escape. And the cancerous plant of memory is feeding at his entrails, recalling hundreds of forgotten faces and ten thousand vanished days, until all life seems as strange and insubstantial as a dream.
The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of poetry was inextinguishable mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh.
The moonlight fell upon the earth like a magic unearthly dawn. It wiped away all rawness, it hid all sores. It gave all common and familiar things – the sagging drift of the barn, the raw shed of the creamery, the rich curve of the lawyer’s crabapple trees – a uniform bloom of wonder.
Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget.