"There was no foundation, no hidden closet, nothing built into the thin walls. On the whole, it was the kind of house that would stand even years after Moses died, held up by the tribal imagination. Driving by, the Indians would look across the field toward the house and hold it upright with their eyes, remembering Moses lived there.
It would be just enough to ensure survival."
("I want to walk circles around James getting closer and closer to him in a new dance and a better kind of healing which could make James talk and all before he learns to cry.")
"'Victor, I'm sorry about your father,' Thomas said.
'How did you know about it?' Victor asked.
'I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here crying.'"
"The conversation went on like that, perfunctorily. The magic was gone. It was as if we'd broken the ice but the frigid waters had made us slow and phony with hypothermia. I'd missed my chance, I reckoned, to be her real friend. Rebecca had opened the door to me and I'd shut it in her face. I was boring. I had nothing to contribute."
"I put up with him for a while because I thought maybe he was pointing to some dark truth about myself, and I suppose he was. I was a fool to be with a man like him. I was a fool about men in general. I learned the long way about love, tried every house on the block before I got it right. Now, finally, I live alone."
"That was my dinner. It took me years to learn how to feed myself properly, or rather it took years to develop the desire to feed myself properly. Back there in X-ville, I desperately hoped I could avoid every having to resemble a grown woman. I didn't see that any good could come of that."
"I will say this about houses. Those perfect, neat colonials I'd passed earlier that evening on my way through X-ville are the death masks of normal people. Nobody is really so orderly, so perfect. To have a house like that says more about what's wrong with you than any decrepit dump. Those people with perfect houses are simply obsessed with death. A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. I knew this implicitly at age twenty-four. Of course at twenty-four I was also obsessed with death. I had tried to distract myself from my terror not through housekeeping, like housewives of X-ville, but through my bizarre eating, compulsive habits, tireless ambivalence, Randy and so forth. I hadn't realized this until sitting at Rebecca's kitchen table, watching her crack open a peanut, lick her fingers: I would die one day, but not yet. There I was."
"'Just fuck the world and get on, Nick,' he says.
I ask him to repeat himself.
'I said, fuck the world.'
It sounds all right coming out of his mouth. The word 'world' rears around like something brewerful. Like something I could swallow and burp and taste and get all up in me and sick of, and I think, eat, I'll fuck it. My head hurts suddenly. I ask Johnson for a tablet and he dumps the vial out into his palm and picks one up between his fingers and says, 'Open up,' and I stick my tongue out, and he sets the tablet on it--quaking, steaming tongue there, feed me, and it's bitter, and my tongue shirks and scoots and tucks back and something stills in me and something's something I don't know what and I don't care and it's good."
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| Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) |
"Another shadow, that of my friend, also fell across my soul. It never left me--because I myself did not wish to leave it.
But of that shadow I never spoke to anyone. I talked to it in private, and, thanks to it, was becoming reconciled with death. I have my secret bridge to the other side. When my friend's soul crossed the bridge, I felt it was weary and pale; it was too weak to shake my hand."
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| School Ties (1992) |
"As a child, then, I had almost fallen into the well. When grown up, I nearly fell into the word 'eternity,' and into quite a number of other words too--'love,' 'hope,' 'country,' 'God.' As each word was conquered and left behind I had the feeling that I had escaped a danger and made some progress. But no, I was only changing words and calling it deliverance. And there I had been, for the last two years, hanging over the edge of the word 'Buddha.'
... Buddha will be the last well of all, the last word precipice, and then I shall be delivered forever. Forever? That is what we say each time."
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| The Blues Brothers (1980) |
"The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life--all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes' cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us."
