Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.
They had something to do. They could escape from themselves.
I wonder if the small town isn’t, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix?
I decided to leave here. Stern resolution. Grasp the world. Then I found that the Village Virus had me, absolute.
I’m not a humming-bird. I’m a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens.
So kindly,” Carol mused, “so well meant, so neighborly – and so confoundedly untrue. Is it really my failure, or theirs?
Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism – without the splendor.
Maud’s manner indicated that the falsity of the story was an insignificant flaw in its general delightfulness.
It is composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe in precisely the principles for which those ancestors.
But she knew that she still had no plan in life, save always to go along the same streets, past the same people, to the same shops.
You see, we don’t like murder as a way of argument – that’s what really marks the Liberal!
For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues.
Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep. And with the coming of fear went out their pride.
She knew that there was nothing heroic or obviously dramatic in it, no magic of rare hours, nor valiant challenge, but it seemed to her that she was of some significance because she was commonplaceness, the ordinary life of the age, made articulate and protesting.
Don’t be scared of upsetting folks ’coz most of ’em are topsy-turvy anyway, and you’ll only be putting ’em back on their feet.
With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one characteristic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging, sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unselfdramatizing curiosity, and it drove him on.
The gospel crew could never consider their converts as human beings, like waiters or manicurists or brakemen, but they had in them such a professional interest as surgeons take in patients, critics in an author, fishermen in trout.
He was in that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can attain – unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.
With the loneliness of one who has put away a possible love Carol saw that he was a stranger. She saw that he had never been anything but a frame on which she had hung shining garments.
He believed that dissent – even a cranky, erratic, eccentric, old-fashioned version of it – was not disloyalty but at the heart of an American democratic identity.
She was like the revolutionist at fifty: not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades.