All the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.
Ellen was in her late thirties, plump, her face unblemished still. It was as though whatever marks being in the world had left upon it up to the time the aunt vanished had been removed from between the skeleton and the skin, between the sum of experience and the envelope in which it resides, by intervening years of annealing and untroubled flesh.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past; it’s always part of the present.
Read anthing, trash or trashier; and listen to thrash. Espceially 83-90 era. They will absorb you. You will be in dire need of beer. Now that’s something you must be picky of.
The bells were ringing again, high in the scudding sunlight in bright disorderly tatters of sound.
There remains yet something of honor and pride, of life.
Not of exhaustion, but surrender, as though he had given over and relinquished completely that grip upon that blending of pride and hope and vanity and fear, that strength to cling to either defeat or victory, which is the I-Am, and the relinquishment of which is usually death.
It’s like a man that’s let everything slide all his life to get set on something that will make the most trouble for everybody he knows.
Some looked at him as they passed, at the man sitting quietly behind the wheel of a small car, with his invisible life ravelled out about him like a wornout sock.
All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.
I love, I will accept no substitute;... ; if happy I can be I will, if suffer I must I can.
I was a little crazy. You know how it is, how you want to rush into something you know is going to happen, no matter what it is. I guess lovers and suicides both know that feeling.
Nothing can marry two people closer than a mutual sin in the world’s eyes.
Any live man is better than any dead man.
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.
They travelled crosstown now; the cab could rush fast down each block of the continuous alley, pausing only at the intersections where, to the right, canyonniched, the rumor of Grandlieu Street swelled and then faded in repetitive and indistinguishable turmoil, flicking on and past as though the cab ran along the rimless periphery of a ghostly wheel spoked with light and sound.
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience.
Eating the business of eating inside of you space too space and time confused Stomach saying noon brain saying eat oclock.
Maybe you have to know anybody awful well to love them but when you have hated somebody for forty-three years you will know them awful well so maybe it’s better then maybe it’s fine then because after forty-three years they cant any longer surprise you or make you either very contented or very mad.
I found out some time back that it’s idleness breeds all our virtues, our most bearable qualities – contemplation, equableness, laziness, letting other people alone, good digestion mental and physical: the wisdom to concentrate on fleshly pleasures – eating and evacuating and fornication and sitting in the sun – than which there is nothing better, nothing to match, nothing else in all this world but to live for the short time you are loaned breath, to be alive and know it.