By scraps and bits I’ve in the past surrendered myself to strangers – men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would’ve made the one person in the world – but there he is with a dozen different faces moving down a hundred separate streets.
You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction.
You are a man of extreme passion, a hungry man not quite sure where his appetite lies, a deeply frustrated man striving to project his individuality against a backdrop of rigid conformity. You exist in a half-world suspended between two superstructures, one self-expression and the other self-destruction. You are strong, but there is a flaw in your strength, and unless you learn to control it the flaw will prove stronger than your strength and defeat you.
In the night his hand sometimes searches it out, and his fingers drift across the strings: then, the world.
However, even an attorney of moderate talent can postpone doomsday year after year, for the system of appeals that pervades American jurisprudence amounts to a legalistic wheel of fortune, a game of chance, somewhat fixed in the favor of the criminal, that the participants play interminably, first in the state courts, then through the Federal courts until the ultimate tribunal is reached – the United States Supreme Court.
He went back upstairs, and sat at his desk, and felt as though he were bleeding inside, and wished very much to believe in God.
The pheasant season in Kansas, a famed November event, lures hordes of sportsmen from adjoining states, and during the past week plaid-hatted regiments had paraded across the autumnal expanses, flushing and felling with rounds of birdshot great coppery flights of the grain-fattened birds.
Really, though, I toted up the other night, and I’ve only had eleven lovers – not counting anything that happened before I was thirteen because, after all, that just doesn’t count.
Is it because my friend is shy with everyone except strangers that these strangers, and merest acquaintances, seem to us our truest friends?
I know how trite this is, Jaime. And for the moment certainly no help at all. But remember – there’s always somebody else. Just don’t look for the same person, that’s all.
Well, she wanted to know, what did people say of her, was she remembered?
It was the master stroke, that stutter; for it contrived to make her banalities sound somehow original, and secondly, despite her tallness, her assurance, it served to inspire in male listeners a protective feeling.
You know what’s going to happen to you?” she said, with no hint of a stutter. “I’m going to march you over to the zoo and feed you to the yak.
Let me build you a drink.
A gentleman from Japan.
She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy’s adolescent voice.
Listen, you can throw me out if you want to. I’ve got a gall barging in on you like this.
What a terrible thing when neighbors can’t look at each other without kind of wondering!
Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hp-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheat stalks bristle, blaze.
It was drowning in the earth, this house, and they, all of them, were submerging with it.