Old women beat their heads against the walls, moaning men prostrated themselves: it was the art of sorrow, and those who best mimicked grief were much admired. After the funeral everyone went away, satisfied that they’d done a good job.
La idea de someterme a otra forma de vida disciplinada me desesperaba.
Her power resided in her attitude: she behaved as though she believed she was irresistible; and whatever her opportunities may have been, the style of the woman implied an erotic history complete with footnotes.
If the killer wasn’t him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It’s the same the whole world over. You know that.
The inhabitants of the village, numbering two hundred and seventy, were satisfied that this should be so, quite content to exist inside ordinary life – to work, to hunt, to watch television, to attend school socials, choir practice, meetings of the 4-H Club.
Feeling wouldn’t run half so high if this had happened to anyone except the Clutters. Anyone less admired. Prosperous. Secure. But that family represented everything people hereabouts really value and respect, and that such a thing could happen to them – well, it’s like being told there is no God. It makes life seem pointless. I don’t think people are so much frightened as they are deeply depressed.
Four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.
I have my family to protect, and my name, and I am a coward where those institutions enter.
I have a fair chance they won’t catch me. Provided you keep your bouche fermez.
She was still on the stairs, now she reached the landing, and the ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light. It was a warm evening, nearly summer, and she wore a slim cool black dress, black sandals, a pearl choker. For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.
Ottilie was used to boldly smiling at men; but now her smile was fragmentary, it clung to her lips like cake crumbs.
Mille tendresse.
That night I left a message in her mailbox: Tomorrow is Thursday.
I waited until ten past six, then made myself delay five minutes more.
So,” he said, “what do you think: is she or ain’t she?” “Ain’t she what?” “A phony.” “I wouldn’t have thought so.” “You’re wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you’re right. She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can’t talk her out of it. I’ve tried with tears running down my cheeks.
But it took us a year to smooth out that accent. How we did it finally, we gave her French lessons: after she could imitate French, it wasn’t so long she could imitate English. We.
Adoro Nueva York.
Darling,” she instructed me, “would you reach in the drawer there and give me my purse. A girl doesn’t read this sort of thing without her lipstick.
No one comprehended that really he was ill, that grief had made him so, that grief had drawn a circle around him he could not escape from and others could not enter.
So I say the sane thing to do is shut up. You live until you die, and it doesn’t matter how you go; dead’s dead.
Graham Greene was a first-class writer. Until the Vatican grabbed him.