When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
I don’t fire up the prose. I just tell it straight and don’t fool around with it.
It’s funny how we can be in love with someone one day, and the next we can easily fall in love with someone else.
He was going somewhere, he knew that. And if it was the wrong direction, sooner or later he’d find it out.
In his better moments, Mr Baxter is a decent, ordinary guy – a guy you wouldn’t mistake for anyone special. But he is special. In my book, he is. For one thing he has a full night’s sleep behind him, and he’s just embraced his wife before leaving for work. But even before he goes, he’s already expected home a set number of hours later. True, in the grander scheme of things, his return will be an event of small moment – but an event nonetheless.
Things change, he says. I don’t know how they do. But they do without your realizing it or wanting them to.
In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another’s company.
You sound like a nice man,” the woman said. “Do I? Well, that’s nice of you to say.” He knew he should hang up now, but it was good to hear a voice, even his own, in the quiet room.
It’s seldom anything turns out to be better than you expected it to be. Usually it’s the other way around.
Physical love, that impulse that drives you to someone special, as well as love of the other person’s being, his or her essence, as it were. Carnal love and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other person.
What’s there to tell? The people over there embrace for a minute, and then they go inside the house together. They leave the light burning. Then they remember, and it goes out.
He understood that it only took one lunatic and a torch to bring everything to ruin.
A small wax and sawdust log burned on the grate. A carton of five more sat ready on the hearth. He got up from the sofa and put them all in the fireplace. He watched until they flamed. Then he finished his soda and made for the patio door. On the way, he saw the pies lined up on the sideboard. He stacked them in his arms, all six, one for every ten times she had ever betrayed him.
He left through the patio door. He was not certain, but he thought he had proved something. He hoped he had made something clear. The thing was, they had to have a serious talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things that had to be discussed. They’d talk again. Maybe after the holidays were over and things got back to normal. He’d tell her the goddamn ashtray was a goddamn dish, for example.
Then i don’t know I remembered how he was when he was nineteen, the way he looked, running across this field to where his dad sat on a tractor, hand over his eyes, watching Wes run toward him – Chef’s House.
I thought for a minute of the world outside my house, and then I didn’t have any more thoughts except the thought that I had to hurry up and sleep.
You’ll be surprised to see what can collect in a mattress over the months, over the years. Every day, every night of our lives, we’re leaving little bits of ourselves, flakes of this and that, behind. Where do they go, these bits and pieces of ourselves? Right through the sheets and into the mattress, that’s where! Pillows, too. It’s all the same. He.
It made him feel older, having married friends.
I don’t want to talk to anybody. Actually, I’d talk to Molly, if I could, but I can’t any longer – she’s somebody else now. She isn’t Molly any more. But – what can I say? – I’m somebody else, too.
I knocked stuff out of the medicine cabinet. Things rolled into the sink. ‘Where’s the aspirin?’ I said. I knocked down more things. I didn’t care. ‘Goddamn it,’ I said. Things kept falling.
Though he continued to take classes here and there in the sciences and in business, Ralph also took some classes in philosophy and literature and felt himself on the brink of some kind of huge discovery about himself. But it never came.