Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.
The whole magic of a plot requires that somebody be impeded from getting something over with.
Things have changed very much, several times, since I grew up, and, like everyone in New York except the intellectuals, I have led several lives and I still lead some of them.
My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions.
Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?
I took a little celebrational nap.
There are times when every act, no matter how private and unconscious, becomes political.
A favorite strategy was the paragraph-terminating: Right? Followed immediately by Wrong. This linear invitation to a mugging was considered a strategy of wit.
People who are less happy, I find, are always consoling those who are more.
But you are, you know, you were, the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life.
My father always said that it is a reasonable expectation of life that no one will go out of his way, against his own interest, to break his word or to hurt another person. And this turns out, not just in obvious cases, for example haters, pathological people and institutions, sadists, but in everyday life itself to be plain untrue. I wonder why. A reasonable expectation of life, I have found, is hardly ever quite borne out.
The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.
I wonder if you know at all what is happening in my heart, what a word. I suppose you don’t. You’ve so many females, wife, sister, daughters, cousins, dog, in your life that you’ve probably confused me with them all.
The roof of the front porch of the house is covered, for some reason, with moss, and also, on one side, with wisteria, which gives the house a sort of raffish Veronica Lake look, a disheveled charm.
So it is to be another Christmas, then, and another New Year’s on my own. Well, it is all right. I have grown used to it, have come almost to prefer it. Those days for most adults, it is generally acknowledged, and perhaps for all but the fewest children are so grim. Along with birthdays and of course Thanksgiving, only worse. Why observe them, then, unless one is for the sake of the children, or the office, or someone else’s sake, obliged to. Well, no reason.
The idea of hostages is very deep. Becoming pregnant is taking a hostage–as is running a pawnshop, being a bank, receiving a letter, taking a photograph, or listening to a confidence. Every love story, every commercial trade, every secret, every matter in which trust is involved, is a gentle transaction of hostages. Everything is, to a degree, in the custody of every other thing.
It turned out that every single child on the school bus had known that one of their Kevins was missing. They had not mentioned it to the driver, or their teacher, or each other. They took it that Kevin had been left, forever, for some reason, which would become clear to them, with patience, in the course of time.
It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.
I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time.
None of us is leading quite the life we were at all prepared for.
Greg, who had spent the winter in a Patmos monastery, had a single Greek word: Oreia. It seemed to be an exclamation of approval or joy. He used it incessantly, in a tone so flat, bleak and despairing that we all began to like it. Oreia, we would say, when the waiter, after four hours, brought our dinner. Oreia, when, after nine straight days, the rain stopped. Oreia, when the radio, which was dead most nights, woke up and spoke the news.