Now the broken-off parts of her life, the fragments, bits, puzzle pieces, began to fall into place, to assemble themselves, as invariably they do once we are under the enchantment of Death.
Much of the time he lay part-dressed on his bed, sipping gin, and thinking, and thinking, - though what it was, of which he thought, he seemed not to know.
Maggots in corpses. He'd seen. Whitely churning, in the mouths of dead soldiers, where their noses had been, their ears and blasted-away jaws. Most of the soldiers had been men as young as he himself...
Loving Felix she’d acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she’d acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, truth was common prop...
Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.
Life is the horror, abortion or miscarriage is the redemption. As Sophocles said so beautifully, ‘Never to have been born is best, but once you’ve entered this world, return as quickly as possible to...
Keeing busy is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.
In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father 'Chaplin' was all the magic. A great man draws magic into himself, like reverse lightning. There's nothing to spare for anyone el...
In her behavior Mrs. S——was youthful and loud-talking which made us uneasy, for children are not comfortable when adults behave as if they are not adults. Often it seemed that Mrs. S——was winking at u...
I love insult, it's always honest.
I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell a...
How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.
Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn’t seen in years turning up looking all wrong.
Asked by a journalist how he had felt after an unsuccessful election, Abraham Lincoln said, Like a little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark, he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh.
And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.
And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
A library is a mausoleum: books of the dead. And so many. And so many secrets lost to him forever. Hadn't time for it all and if he couldn't do it all then there was no point in doing any of it. For s...
None of the rest of my life figures here.
No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.