What did he understand? Nothing. Where was he headed? Nowhere. What did he want? To know. What? A meaning. Why? A riddle.
She spoke and he could not understand. The sounds were distinct in his ear but they had no shape or meaning. It was as though his head were the prow of a boat and the sounds were water that broke on him and then flowed past. He felt he had to look behind to find the words already said.
Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.
It was like that kid had been born knowing how to read. He was only in the second grade but he loved to read stories by himself – and he never asked anybody else to read to him.
He fluttered his eyelids, so that they were like pale, trapped moths in his sockets.
Aber die Erinnerung kommt nie von vorne auf einen zu – sie kommt seitlich um die Ecke.
This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.
A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness.
They are all very busy people. In fact they are so busy that it will be hard for you to picture them. I do not mean that they work at their jobs all day and night but that they have much business in their minds always that does not let them rest.
The others all have something they hate. And they all have something they love more than eating or sleeping or wine or friendly company. That is why they are always so busy.
You see, it’s like I’m two people. One of me is an educated man. I been in some of the biggest libraries in the country. I read. I read all the time. I read books that tell the pure honest truth. Over there in my suitcase I have books by Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen and such writers as them. I read them over and over, and the more I study the madder I get.
Today we are not put up on the platforms and sold at the courthouse square. But we are forced to sell our strength, our time, our souls during almost every hour that we live. We have been freed from one kind of slavery only to be delivered into another. Is this freedom?
The eyes of his friend were moist and dark, and in them he saw the little rectangled pictures of himself that he had watched a thousand times.
Always he wanted to set her up to something, to give to her. And not only a sundae or some sweet to eat – but something real. That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff’s mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.
You are walking down a street and you meet somebody. Anybody. And you look at each other. And you are you. And he is him. Yet when you look at each other, the eyes make a connection. Then you go off one way. And he goes off another way. You go off into different parts of town, and maybe you never see each other again. Not in your whole life.
He mentioned Beethoven. She had read in the library about that musician – his name was pronounced with an a and spelled with a double e. He was a German fellow like Mozart. When he was living he spoke in a foreign language and lived in a foreign place – like she wanted to do.
The warring love and hatred – love for his people and hatred for the oppressors of his people – that left him exhausted and sick in spirit.
She stood in the corner of the bride’s room, wanting to say: I love the two of you so much and you are the we of me. Please take me with you from the wedding, for we belong to be together.
She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad.
There was something about speaking in a foreign language that made her feel like she’d been around a lot.
There are times when a man’s greatest need is to have someone to love, some focal point for his diffused emotions. Also there are times when the irritations, disappointments, and fears of life, restless as spermatozoids, must be released in hate.