The Folded Leaf (Vintage International Book 1)

by William Maxwell

Now instead of being freed of his childhood, Lymie will have to go on smearing his face up with taffy-apples of one kind or another and being stopped by every plaster pig that he encounters, for years to come.

To know the world’s injustice requires only a small amount of experience. To accept it without bitterness or envy you need almost the sum total of human wisdom, which Lymie Peters at fifteen did not have.

The great, the universal problem is how to be always on a journey and yet see what you would see if it were only possible for you to stay home: a black cat in a garden, moving through iris blades behind a lilac bush. How to keep sufficiently detached and quiet inside so that when the cat in one spring reaches the top of the garden wall, turns down again, and disappears, you will see and remember it, and not be absorbed at that moment in the dryness of your hands. If

The boys took off their shoes and their bright-colored socks, rolled their trousers above the knee, and waded in slowly, their bare feet searching for soft places in the gravel bottom. They came out of the water bearing slimy specimens in their hands and in their eyes the sorrowful realization of all that they had lost by starting to school at the age of six.

She was only gone five minutes, and the saleswomen gathered around and tried to comfort him, but a child lost goes on crying, right down to the end of time.

Those who are brave enough go straight into the center of any dangerous situation and often come out alive on the other side. Most people aren’t very brave, of course, and to try and skirt around a danger looks safer than to go right into the center of it. Unfortunately it isn’t safer, because if you don’t go through the center you meet with an ambush later on, and there the chances are totally against you. But the odd thing is that if you keep walking around a danger, if you choose the indirect, cautious method, avoiding an open conflict, it will seem for a time to work.

There is, for every person to discover, a limit, an end to his will, a wall before which he stands and has to say “This wall I can’t climb over.”