Valiant efforts to make conversation all stumbled and sank into quicksand. The main thing I remembered were the forced smiles, the heavy smell of cherry pipe tobacco and Grandpa Decker’s not-very-frie...
Understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole;
Throw up his hands and say, ‘Who, me? I had nothing to do with it.’
Those guys who wore a wedding ring that didn’t really look like a wedding ring—or maybe it wasn’t a wedding ring at all and he was just super-proud of his Celtic
The world won’t come to me,’ he used to say, ‘so I must go to it’—
Telephone, Myriam’s not my wife! This— he handed
Strenuous occasions where (jumpy, un-opiated, wracked to the last synapse),
Still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier,
Sky darkened rapidly, darker every second; the wind rustled the trees in the park and the new leaves on the trees stood out tender and yellow against black clouds.
Relief,
Out of a clear blue sky the heroes and heroines abandoned their adventures for some dull sweetheart, got married and had families, and generally started acting like a bunch of cows.
Our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?
Other means) claiming to Hobie that I’d already sold the
Only now was it starting to make sense why Lady Macbeth could never scrub the blood off her hands, why it was still there after she washed it away.
Ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
Not that I’d even been thinking about Cinzia until the moment before, but it had all seemed so solid, so immutable, the whole social system of the building, a nexus where I could always stop in and se...
Nd isn’t the whole point of things—beautiful things—that they connect you to some larger beauty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or tryi...
My own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And
Music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky
Melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky.