What’s any artist, but the dregs of his work?
I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.
How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
We want someone to bring us the news.
That’s what I can’t stand. I know I’ll bounce back, and that’s what I can’t stand.
If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.
I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there’s always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!
Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?
How real is any of the past, being every moment revalued to make the present possible...
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon, all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it, you become its prey.
Each generation was a rehearsal of the one before, so that that family gradually formed the repetitive pattern of a Greek fret, interrupted only once in two centuries by a nine-year-old boy who had taken a look at his prospects, tied a string around his neck with a brick to the other end, and jumped from a footbridge into two feet of water. Courage aside, he had that family’s tenacity of purpose, and drowned, a break in the pattern quickly obliterated by the calcimine of silence.
The most difficult challenge to the ideal is its transformation into reality, and few ideals survive.
But what I remember is the countryside then, the brilliance of outdoors and outwindows, and the sunlight streaming through the lozenge shapes of the glass, and we were locked away from it, locked inside to worship. And there was the sun out there for everyone else to see. Good God, tell me Clovis wasn’t lonely at dawn. Tell me he wasn’t sick at the sunset.
None of us grew but the business.
A man’s damnation is his own damned business.
The room was filled with smoke, dry worn-out smoke retaining in it like a web the insectile cadavers of dry husks of words which had been spoken and should be gone, the breaths exhaled not to be breathed again. But the words went on, and in those brief interruptions between cigarettes the exhalations were rebreathed.
Holy things and holy places, out of mind under the cauterizing brilliance of the summer son, reared up now as the winter sun struck from the south, casting shadows coldly upon the avenues where the people followed and went in, wearing winter hearts on their sleeves for the plucking.
Free trade and Christianity, it’s the German East Africa Company, it’s French Equatorial Africa, it’s the Belgians cutting down the Congo population from twenty million to ten in barely twenty years, by nineteen fourteen there’s nothing left to plunder in Africa so they go to war with each other in Europe instead that’s what the whole damned first world war was all ab...