Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time.
Why was she so hateful? Why couldn’t she behave like other people wanted her to? Harriet sat on the sofa, berating herself; and the sharp unpleasant thoughts tumbled through her mind long after she’d picked herself up and trudged up to bed. Her anxiety and guilt were not confined to her mother-or even her immediate situation-but ranged far and wide, and the most torturous of it revolved around Ida. What if Ida had a stroke? Or was struck by a car?
The policeman interrogated Edie for half an hour. With his droning voice, and his mirror sunglasses, it was slightly like being interrogated by The Fly in the Vincent Price horror movie of the same name.
A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape.
Harriet was going to be in the eighth grade next year; and what she had not expected was the horrifying new indignity of being classed-for the first time ever-a “Teen Girl”: a creature without mind, wholly protuberance and excretion, to judge from the literature she was given.
It was a state which might have seemed a suspiciously narcotic one except that it differed so little from his customary manner.
The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato’s four divine madness, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.
Blacks and blues, that’s the ticket, blacks and blues.
Suddenly, I was struck by a horrible thought: is this what it’s like? Is this the way it’s going to be from now on?
And here he was, the great one himself, scorching us all with his rays of glory.
Everything was bathed in a celestial light. I listened to Jack and Lars talk about pinball, motorcycles, female kick-boxing, and was heartwarmed at their attempts to include me in the conversation. Lars offered me a bong hit. The gesture was, to me, tremendously touching and all of a sudden I realized I had been wrong about these people. These were good people, common people; the salt of the earth; people whom I should count myself fortunate to know.
And now here she was again, like an apparition, drinking red wine from a plastic cup and calling me by name.
People have used these books for centuries. Their accuracy is beyond dispute.” “Well, I have as much respect for ancient learning as you do, but I don’t know that I’d want to stake my life on some home remedy from the Middle Ages.” “Well, I suppose I can check it somewhere else,” he said, without much conviction.
Manche Dinge sind so schrecklich, dass man sie nicht sogleich begreifen kann.
I wish you smoked. I don’t know why you don’t. You weren’t an athlete in high school or anything, were you?” “No.” “That’s why Bun doesn’t smoke. Some clean-living type of football.
It was getting warmer. The dirty snow was pockmarked from the warm rain, and melting in patches to expose the slimy, yellowed grass beneath it; icicles cracked and plunged like daggers from the sharp peaks of the roofs.
Henry tells me that this particular sort of mushroom was a great favorite of the emperor Claudius. Interesting, because you remember how Claudius died.” I did remember. Agrippina had slipped a poisoned one into his dish one night.
Neither place was readily apparent to a drunk stumbling out into the night. But Monmouth was scarcely thirty feet away, and my own room, with its conspicuously lighted window, must have loomed in his path like a beacon.
She, I thought, was very beautiful, in an unsettling, almost medieval way which would not be apparent to the casual observer.
Son of a Clemson football star turned banker.
And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion.