Our most treasured family heirloom is our sweet family memories. The past is never dead, it is not even past.
Gough never pretended to perfection or to sainthood – well, hardly ever. Although when he set off the metal detector at airport security, he would blame his aura.
I’m bad and I’m going to hell, and I don’t care. I’d rather be in hell than anywhere where you are.
I don’t care much for facts, am not much interested in them, you can’t stand a fact up, you’ve got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it’s not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction.
People need trouble – a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it.
By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.
Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.
Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid. Ain’t nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
Did you ever have a sister? did you?
A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences.
It is not proof that I sought. I, of all men, know that proof is but a fallacy invented by man to justify to himself and his fellows his own crass lust and folly.
Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.
She is like all the rest of them. Whether they are seventeen or fortyseven, when they finally come to surrender completely, it’s going to be in words.
Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?
Caddy got the box and set it on the floor and opened it. It was full of stars. When I was still, they were still. When I moved, they glinted and sparkled. I hushed.
I took out my watch and listened to it clicking away, not knowing it couldn’t even lie.
I will never lie again.
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.