It was as if I were an oyster and somebody forced a grain of sand into my shell – a grain of sand that I didn’t know was there and didn’t particularly welcome. Then a pearl started forming around the grain and it irritated me, made me angry, tortured me sometimes. But the oyster can’t help becoming obsessed with the pearl.
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.
Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth.
Oscar Wilde is one of the people that I would have most liked to know. I’m sure I would have liked him a lot.
Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans – in fact, few Kansans – had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there.
Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.” THE.
I thought writers were quite old.
At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them – four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and again – those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers.
She was seventy-four years old, but in Nye’s opinion, “looked younger – maybe ten minutes younger.
Cuatro sillas y una mesa. En la mesa, papel; en las sillas, hombres. Ventanas a la calle. En la calle, gente; contra las ventanas, lluvia.
Then he wrote ‘For Sale’ on the windshield. One day I heard a sucker stop and offer him forty bucks – that’s forty more than it was worth.
After all, it was “painful” to imagine that one might be “not just right” – particularly if what was wrong was not your fault but “maybe a thing you were born with.
The guests stand about in petrified pairs, and there is no conversation. He notices then that many are also saddled with malevolent semblances of themselves, outward embodiments of inner decay.
I don’t want to own anything until I find a place where me and things go together. I’m not sure where that is but I know what it is like.
It was a changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic. His.
If you walk a singular path, you always carry a certain grief.
The Rupp family were Roman Catholics, the Clutters, Methodist – a fact that should in itself be sufficient to terminate whatever fancies she and this boy might have of some day marrying.
Mr. Belli had several vanities: for example, he thought he was saner than other people; also, he believed himself to be a walking compass; his digestion, and an ability to read upside down, were other ego-enlarging items. But his reflection in a mirror aroused little inner applause; not that he disliked his appearance; he just knew that it was very so-what.
What’s the matter with you? Are trying to ruin the day? It’s a beautiful day: leave it alone!
It’s a bore, but the answer is good things only happen to you if you’re good.