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Like all of his friends, he considered it a compliment when somebody called him a wiseass.
But Josef, like many boys of nineteen, was under the misapprehension that his heart had been broken a number of times, and he prided himself on the imagined toughness of that organ.
Forget about what you are escaping from,’” he said, quoting an old maxim of Kornblum’s. “‘Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.’”
“I’m closer today than I was yesterday.”
IN THE IMMEMORIAL STYLE of young men under pressure, they decided to lie down for a while and waste time.
Every universe, our own included, begins in conversation. Every golem in the history of the world, from Rabbi Hanina’s delectable goat to the river-clay Frankenstein of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, was summoned into existence through language, through murmuring, recital, and kabbalistic chitchat—was, literally, talked into life.
And then the man reminded Max, with a serious but suave and practiced air, that freedom was a debt that could be repaid only by purchasing the freedom of others.
Such regrets would come only belatedly, a few days after, when he made the realization that death really did mean that you were never going to see the dead person ever again.
Her bedroom-studio was at once the canvas, journal, museum, and midden of her life. She did not “decorate” it; she infused it.
“There is only one sure means in life,” Deasey said, “of ensuring that you are not ground into paste by disappointment, futility, and disillusion. And that is always to ensure, to the utmost of your ability, that you are doing it solely for the money.”
On the leftovers, he lived like a king. He ate lox at breakfast every morning for seven weeks.
Dream
ONE OF THE STURDIEST PRECEPTS of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is either past or in the offing.
As with many lonely children, his problem was not solitude itself but that he was never left free to enjoy it. There were always well-meaning adults trying to jolly him, to improve and counsel him, to bribe and cajole and bully him into making friends, speaking up, getting some fresh air;
“Only love could pick a nested pair of steel Bramah locks.”
