I qualify it as pathetic. Pathetic – because despite the insatiable fire of my venereal appetite, I intended, with the most fervent force and foresight, to protect the purity of that twelve-year-old child.
Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.
And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only been defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night – every night, every night – the moment I feigned sleep.
From my point of view, any outstanding work of art is a fantasy insofar as it reflects the unique world of a unique individual. Art is not just simple arithmetic, it’s a delicate calculus. Keep in mind the passion of the scientist and the precision of the artist.
I had possessed her – and she never knew it.
By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane.
I do not want, John. You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.
Every author believes, when his first book is published, that those that acclaim it are his personal friends or impersonal peers, while its revilers can only be envious rogues and nonentities.
Thus the story describes a full circle... a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces.
The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale’s white church tower when I looked around me for the last time.
As it happens with many people who do not trouble about religion in the ordinary trend of life, I hastily invented a soft, warm, tear-misty God, and whispered an informal prayer. Let me get there in time, let him hold out till I come, let him tell me his secret. Now it was all snow: the glass had grown a grey beard.
Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants. All silence is the recognition of a mystery. There was much about you that seemed mysterious. A.
She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one’s own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quietly getting used to the strange creatures she found there.
The heating system was a farce, depending as it did on registers in the floor wherefrom the tepid exhalations of a throbbing and groaning basement furnace were transmitted to the rooms with the faintness of a moribund’s last breath.
In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?
Blue evenings in Berlin, the corner chestnut in flower, light-headedness, poverty, love, the tangerine tinge of premature shoplights, and an animal aching yearn for the still fresh reek of Russia...
And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.
The determinate scheme by stripping the sunrise of it’s surprise would erase all sunrays.
What further concentration is needed, what added intensity must one’s gaze attain, for the brain to enslave the visual image of a person?
One of the functions of all my novels is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.