He was wrong; he knew he was when it was too late for him to stop just as a drunkard reaches a point where it is too late for him to stop, where he promises himself that he will and maybe believes he will or can but it is too late.
I’ve done what I could; a man that can live as lone as I have and not know when to quit is a fool.
Man the sum of his climatic experiences.
Above the counter where the ranks of crisp shapes behind the glass her neat gray face her hair tight and sparse from her neat gray skull, spectacles in neat gray rims riding approaching like something on a wire, like a cash box in a store. She looked like a librarian. Something among dusty shelves of ordered certitudes long divorced from reality, desiccating peacefully, as if a breath of that air which sees injustice done.
It is jealousy, I think, which makes us wish to prevent young people doing the things we had not the courage or the opportunity ourselves to accomplish once, and have not the power to do now.
But who knows why a man, though suffering, clings, above all the other well members, to the arm or leg which he knows must come off?
Beyond the bordering weeds a fence strangled in limp dilapidation, and from the weeds beside it the handles of a plow stood at a gaunt angle while its shard rusted peacefully in the undergrowth, and other implements rusted half concealed there – skeletons of labor healed over by the earth they were to have violated, kinder than they.
And so if Cash nails the box up, she is not a rabbit.
Time? Time? Why worry about something that takes care of itself so well? You were born with the habit of consuming time. Be satisfied with that.
She accepted that – not reconciled: accepted – as though there is a breathing-point in outrage when you can accept it almost with gratitude since you can say to yourself, ’thank God, this is all; at least I now know all of it –.
People will pay any price for motion. They will even work for it. Look at bicycles.
He just stood and looked at his dying mother, his heart too full for words.
Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;.
I write when I am inspired and I make sure I am inspired every day.
When folks wants a fellow, it’s best to wait till they sends for him, I’ve found.
Learn us all the refinement and education that there’s a better use for the mouth than running private opinions through it.
I have but one rift in the darkness, that is that I have injured no one save myself by my folly, and that the extent of that folly you will never learn.
Dalton Ames. Dalton Ames. Dalton Shirts. I thought all the time they were khaki, army issue khaki, until I saw they were of heavy Chinese silk or finest flannel because they made his face so brown his eyes so blue. Dalton Ames. It just missed gentility. Theatrical fixture. Just papier-mache, then touch. Oh. Asbestos. Not quite bronze.
I am too old for this. I was born too old for it, and so I am sick to death for quiet.
Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.