Everyone knew vice was bad for any real revolutionary climate.
My heart is broken. It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.
If you could fly you’d want to do something else, like swim.
I always say that if I knew where the good songs came from I’d go there more often.
And it is quite as fair to observe that ignorance and slovenliness and the tradition itself are the inevitable products of just one thing: poverty.
To see him working on a digging was to see a man who had ceased to exist in the twentieth century, and who looked down on history like a golden eagle from some mountain peak.
And Xander’s kiss, my first real kiss, makes me press my lips together, try to taste it again.
Is falling in love with someone’s story the same thing as falling in love with the person himself?
She missed him the days when some pretext served to take him away from her, just as one misses the sun on a cloudy day without having thought much about the sun when it was shining.
Sabina could not understand why the dead would want to have imitation palaces built over them. The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.
I was like some diver at the bottom of the sea, so absorbed in contemplating the treasure of a sunken ship that I failed to notice the cold eyes of the octopus that lay in wait behind me.
She is always sad like a house on fire - always something wrong.
If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.
It was good to have people hate you—it kept you sharp.
For, whereas, spring's couriers were once the evidence of our finer senses, now the Associated Press does the trick.
Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.
You shouldn’t have isolated any of us unless your purpose was to drive us insane. You almost succeeded with me more than once. Humans need one another.
I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
The strange thing about your smile is that it has never once become less real or less intense. It is a smile caught from a moment in a still photograph, now extended into an indefinitely long moving film.
Her dad’s body is a castle for her. A shelter and a weapon. When he puts his arm around her shoulders she feels a mixture of terror and comfort.
Her sorrow drags me down like a vengeful current.
Then he began running away—until he realized there was no "away."
The goals we pursue are always veiled.
Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.
They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger.
Until that time, her betrayals had filled her with excitement and joy, because they opened up new paths to new adventures of betrayal.
He felt helplessly weak, the kind of weakness that came with illness, with grief.
The worst part of Leon’s fury was the way he whispered, this terrible tortured hissing from his mouth, giving his words a tone more deadly than a shout or a yell.
He is all for double lives, triple lives, lives lived in compartments.
No one should die alone.
The silence in the class was the kind Goober had never heard before. Stunned, eerie, suffocating.
They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.
Home: it was a phrase one used to mean four walls behind which one slept. There had never been a home.
Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
The cities are deserts where people are alone and lonely.
Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul.
Home. Home. Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light.
In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.
Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.
Is bravery, then, no more than pride? Because there are none to witness the shame shall I retreat?
No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire.
What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!…The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.
When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.
Life is nothing without expectation.
And I think if my own Papa died what would I do. I hold my Papa in my arms. I hold and hold and hold him.
It was a peculiar combination of old-maidishness and licentiousness that made Cutter seem so despicable.
I am not asleep, nor am I awake, and in my reverie things I have seen mingle with things I have read or heard, like rivers of different colour or clarity meeting.
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow.
The truth sears, a bitter liquor burning down my throat.