The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages.
There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world.
Minnesota is a human moment.
Maybe that was the answer I needed, the one route back. So simple. To decide to love the age.
We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in this. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a failed scheme but that’s not the point. To plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most particularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are an attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual.
I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
A writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear.
Men in small rooms, in isolation. A cell is the basic state. They put you in a room and lock the door. So simple it’s a form of genius. This is the final size of all the forces around you. Eight by fifteen.
It’s the novelist who understand the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You’re half murderers, most of you.
It’s the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent.
Behind me, his bedroom light went out, brightening the sky, and how queer it seemed, half the heavens coming nearer, all those incandescent masses increasing in number, the stars and constellations, because somebody turns off a light in a house in the desert...
The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he’d always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past.
Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence.
It makes me feel true to the system, knowing that unnecessary risk is integral to the code of urban pathology.
We learn nothing from the stereotypes around us, not even that we’re all the same.
Aren’t you going too far?” “I’m from New York.
People stress the violence. That’s the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there’s a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There’s a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there’s a satisfaction to the game that can’t be duplicated. There’s a harmony.
All the amazement that’s left in the world is microscopic.
Then there was a second male voice from the flight deck, this one remarkably calm and precise, making the passengers believe there was someone in charge after all, an element of hope: “This is American two-one-three to the cockpit voice recorder. Now we know what it’s like. It is worse than we’d ever imagined. They didn’t prepare us for this at the death simulator in Denver. Our fear is pure, so totally stripped of distractions and pressures as to be a form of transcendental meditation.
I liked being with Wilder. The world was a series of fleeting gratifications. He took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure. It was this forgetfulness I envied and admired.
He is saying terror is what we use to give our people their place in the world. What used to be achieved through work, we gain through terror. Terror makes the new future possible. All men one man. Men live in history as never before. He is saying we make and change history minute by minute. History is not the book or the human memory. We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.