"In this white flame of suffering Paul's spirit had been tempered to steel, and the crowd of workers shared this process, and took new views of solidarity; Bunny felt the thrill of a great mass experience, and yearned to be part of it, and then shrunk back, like a young man in the Bible story who had too many possessions."
"To the hour of his death, the elder Ross never really understood this strange son of his. He was always being surprised by the intensity with which Bunny took things, which to the father were part of the nature of life. The father kept two compartments in his mind, one for things that were right, and the other for things that existed, and which you had to allow to exist, and to defend, in a queer, half-hearted, but stubborn way. But here was this new phenomenon, a boy's mind which was all one compartment; things ought to be right, and if they were not right, you ought to make them right, or else what was the use of having any right--you were only fooling yourself about it."
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| Age of Summerhood (2013) |
"... 'Gee whiz, Dad!' exclaimed the boy. 'Eli was saying every word that you taught him! Do you suppose he really believes it all?'
Dad answered that only the Holy Spirit could tell that. Eli was a lunatic, and a dangerous one, but a kind that you couldn't put in an asylum, because he used the phrases of religion. He hadn't wits enough to make up anything for himself, he had jist enough to see what cold be done with the phrases Dad had given him; so now there was a new religion turned loose to plague the poor and ignorant, and the Almighty himself couldn't stop it."
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| 9 1/2 Weeks (1986) |
"Dad's mind wasn't like that; it got on one subject and stayed there, and ideas came through it in a slow, grave procession; his emotions were like a furnace that took a long time to heat up. Sometimes on these drives he would say nothing for a whole hour; the stream of his consciousness would be like a river that has sunk down through the rocks and sand, clean out of sight; he would be just a pervading sense of well-being, wrapped in an opulent warm overcoat, an accessory, you might say, of a softly purring engine running in a bath of boiling oil, and traversing a road at fifty miles an hour. If you had taken his consciousness apart, you would have found, not thoughts, but conditions of physical organs, and of the weather, and of the car, and of bank-accounts, and of the boy at his side. Putting it into words makes it definite and separate--so you must try to take it all at once, blended together. 'I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster, and J. A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, and now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Lobos River, and at sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and "Bunny" is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have the painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say.'"
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| The Blues Brothers (1980) |
"'I want Garp,' Alice said.
'I''m sorry that you can't have him,' Helen said.
'I'm thorry, Helen,' Alice said. ...
Time, Garp knew, would ease everything. Time would also prove him wrong about Alice's writing. She may have had a pretty voice but she couldn't complete anything; she never finished her second novel, not in all the years that the Garps would know the Fletchers--or in all the years after. She could say everything beautifully, but--as Garp remarked to Helen, when he was finally exasperated with Alice--she couldn't get to the end of anything. She couldn't thtop. ...
... And perhaps what remained of the friendship between the Garps and the Fletchers was actually saved by the Fletchers' having to move away. This way, the couples saw each other about twice a year; distance diffused what might have been hard feelings. Alice could speak her flawless prose to Garp--in letters. The temptation to touch each other, even to bash their shopping carts together, was removed from them, and they all settled into being the kind of friends many old friends become: that is, they were friends when they heard from each other--or when, occasionally, they got together. And when they were not in touch, they did not think of one another."
"Years later, Garp read in a critical introduction to Grillparzer's work that Grillparzer was 'sensitive, tortured, fitfully paranoid, often depressed, cranky, and choked with melancholy; in short, a complex and modern man.'
'Maybe so,' Garp wrote, 'But he was also an extremely bad writer.'"
