As I come to understand Vietnam and what it implies about the human condition, I also realize that few humans will permit themselves such an understanding.
Even though it’s somebody else’s tragedy rather than my own. I was there and I laughed along with all the rest and I guess that makes it part of my story also.
Although the fire is dead, these cinders are its voice.
In this world, you shouldn’t rely on help from anybody. In the end, a man stands alone.
The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness. We are alone. There is nothing else.
If you had a population that were miserable and restless because they had nowhere bearable to live, then the preferred solution seemed not to be spending money on improving their condition but on hiring more police in case things should turn ugly, housing these new myrmidons in properties from which the itchy and disgruntled man-herds were already serendipitously purged.
Nor does anyone know what the purpose is in anything, or why things happen in the way they do. It don’t seem fair when you see some of them mean buggers living to a ripe old age and here’s your lovely daughter took so soon. All I can tell you is what I believe. There’s justice up above the street, my dear.
Do you understand how I have loved you? You’d have all been dead in a year or two from liver failure, men, or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten. I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time, and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity.
All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy.
There’s no point worrying about it now, at any rate. Things tend to sort themselves out, Alma thinks, although she knows that this directly contradicts the laws of physics, common sense, and her political experience of the last forty years.
Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.
Wherever did these jumped-up monkeys get all their ideas from?
Artists use lies to tell the truth, while politicians use them to cover the truth up.
Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so? Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?
The third and, given due consideration, most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favor.
I am not man so much as syndrome; as a voice that bellows in the human heart. I am a rain. I cannot be contained. Free of Life, how then shall I be shackled? Free of Time, how then shall History be my cage? I am a wave, an influence. Who then shall be made safe from me?
Fair enough, you have managed to successfully swindle me, and so I will never work for you again.
Maybe the world has run out of room for monsters... or maybe... they’re just getting harder to recognize.
Some of us have always lived on edge, Daniel. It is possible to survive if you observe rules: just hang on by fingernails... and never look down.
There is something in death akin to that which exists in love: both spur men to eloquence.
I want you to look at this face. I want you to look at all of these carven wrinkles. At these haunted eyes. And I want you to consider that in my experience this is what a human face looks like after 40 years of writing. So, that’s something to think about.