I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make.
E plicticos, dar raspunsul e ca lucrurile bune nu ti se intampla decat daca esti si tu bun.
Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally: the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she?
The good people of Kansas want to murder me – and some hangman will be glad to get the work.
Bun? Cinstit ar fi mai aproape de ce vreau sa spun. Adica nu cinstit in sensul legii – as jefui un mormant, as fura banutii de pe ochii mortilor daca mi-as inchipui ca asta mi-ar inveseli ziua –, vreau sa spun cinstit fata de tine insuti. Sa fii oricem, dar nu un las, un prefacut, un escroc sentimental, o curva; mai degraba as vrea sa am cancer decat o inima necinstita.
Good taste is the death of art.
Excitement – a variety of creative coma – overcame me.
She is still a child.
Da, in sfarsit mi s-a facut frica. Pentru ca s-ar putea sa o tin tot asa la nesfarsit. Sa nu stii ca ceva e al tau decat dupa ce te-ai descotorisit de el.
Dar e duminica, domnule Bell. Ceasurile raman in urma duminica. Si apoi, nici nu m-am culcat inca, ii spuse ea si apoi ii marturisi: Vreau sa spun – nu ca sa dorm.
Days, fast fading as snowflakes, flurry into autumn, fall all around like November leaves, the sky, cold red with winter, frightens with the light it sheds.
Who needs money anyhow? Leastwise, not right aways we don’t... except for dopes. We ought to save enough so we can have a dope every day cause my brains get fried if I can’t have myself an ice-cold dope. And cigarettes. I surely do appreciate a smoke. Dopes and smokes and Henry are the only things I love.” “You like me some, don’t you?” he said, without meaning really to speak aloud. In any case, Idabel... did not answer.
He was a middle-aged child that had never shed its baby fat, though some gifted tailor had almost succeeded in camouflaging his plump and spankable bottom. There wasn’t a suspicion of bone in his body; his face, a zero filled in with pretty miniature features, had an unused, a virginal quality: it was as if he’d been born, then expanded, his skin remaining unlined as a blown-up balloon, and his mouth, though ready for squalls and tantrums, a spoiled sweet puckering.
What have you done what have I done, like an echo in a cave that reduces all to nonsense.
When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.
It was not, however, an atmosphere she would have chosen for herself – the airless inescapable pressures of intimacy with others would have withered her soon enough – her system required the cold, exclusive climate of the individual.
When he was in the army he’d picked up a great many girls: sometimes nothing happened except a lot of talk, and that was all right too: because it didn’t matter what you said to them, for in those transient moments lies or truth were arbitrary and you were whatever you wanted to be.
Susan, summarizing the problem from Nancy’s viewpoint, had once said, “You love Bobby now, and you need him. But deep down even Bobby knows there isn’t any future in it. Later.
Never mind, all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own cocoon, I shall weep a little for you.
Here he was in little Olathe, Kansas. Kind of funny, if you thought about it; imagine being back in Kansas, when only four months ago he had sworn, first to the State Parole Board, then to himself, that he would never set foot within its boundaries again. Well, it wasn’t for long.