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their formative years under a rain of bombs, keeping alive by catering to the desires of soldiers.
kept peeling in unexpected places. I heard that
looked back at him as I turned out the door, bumping into a colonel. I remember thinking with an ache of pity and laughter that this was the last time the young lieutenant would speak. For no one man can put his hands up to stop a locomotive. . . .
tremendously wise, older than the human race. They understood one another, as though from France and New
intuitive appreciation of her as a woman.
They had an acuteness in their eyes and a predatory richness of the mouth as though they’d bitten
an awareness of having been born alone and sequestered by some deep difference from other men. For this she loved them. And Momma knew something of those four freedoms the Allies were
women would have brought it on themselves by insisting on equality with the men. To Momma, thinking of her girlhood in Milan, this wasn’t an inviting picture. . . . —Why don’t signorine come here? Rhoda asked authoritatively of Momma. Intellectual Italian women, I mean. I’d
darling. Momma’s bar is like nature, which abhors vacuums and solitary people. —I’m not answerable to the
the muscles of his back shimmered like salmon. The nostrils in his almost black face showed
we’ll never become, cold-blooded sex machines,
and feminine. All
and all degrees and all nuances. —The basis of life and love and cruelty and death, said the other British
in the long run, Magda, who is master and...
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snakes asleep. Ella the
the less clear cut the boundaries
weren’t nicely divided in Momma’s mind as they are to a biologist. They overlapped and blurred in life. This trait was what kept life and Momma’s bar from being black and white. If everything were so clear
lay around in gluey pools like melted lavender sherbet.
an odd force to unite so many varied personalities! Something they all want . . . and when they’ve had it, their reactions will be different. Some will feel themselves defiled. Others will want another try at it. Others
everything in this world. These are the sane. The Orientals are wiser in these matters than we or Queen Victoria. No phase of human life is evil in itself, provided the whole doesn’t grow static or subservient to the part. . . . But beware, Esther, of the bright psychiatrists who try to demarcate clearly
negligence of magnificence. He had gold hair which caught the
they gave out a peace, a wild tranquillity.
—Happiness, Captain Joe said, is a compromise, signora, between being what you are and not hurting others. . . . We smile, Orlando and I. . . . Genius knows its own weaknesses
about them. For better or for worse I think I annihilated myself
of poetry and prose come closer together than they ever have before. There’s too
Legionnaire with scars instead of milky skin? Why was I alive at all? How had I possibly managed to live?
You have the disease of empathy. You try to enter into the minds of others. Perhaps you do.
goods. . . . We’re heading either for world
we possess. Then life would be worth
Men by themselves are sterile; they tend to become brutal and onetrack. Night after night
affection, as people do after a long marriage in which they’ve had no children to distract them from themselves.
simply a charade to ease the torture of
more divided than we were united? At such times I’d lay my head on the concrete
in the steaming Virginia summers. Few men or women have had a relationship as spiritual as ours.
beautiful job in
hand you the booby prize as an infantry company officer.
and efficiency and robbery in the midst of ruin and
air above Naples. . . . Poison gas? Perfume? — Ah, blow it, the mess
like the cheeks
Neapolitan women put up a hand to their heads, and their legs, which seemed often to be skinned in dewy feathers.
Prezzi sbalordativi.
necessary even to think in this lovely language, for your breath comes and goes anyhow, and you might just as well use it to talk with. And good loving talk! If you’ve nothing to say, ehhh
before
through the ruptured mains in the streets. There were red whispers of typhus, and prayers that it was true that the Americans had a new disinfectant. And in the daytime the poor sun squeaking through the rains
this captain had always been resident some place inside her, had chosen this moment to step out and introduce himself. For he had a way of allaying her doubts before she uttered them. He knew her, and she knew him, as though all their lives they’d
familiar, because the externals weren’t necessary. Something else in them was touching. And there was respect for each other’s privacy, like
everything she thought or said as though, well,
sinking feeling that maybe He wasn’t coming
think often at night, she said, that I must lose you. I’m too happy. . . .
breath choked up in her throat; she felt that she was being crushed. Something red and beaconlike flickered in her mind, crying Not Yet, Not Yet. With a violence, not of revulsion, but to keep her mind intact, she released herself.
