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“Man, I feel like I could run sixty miles!” I told the Rat. “Me too,” he said. — But what we had to do in reality was make payments over the next three years, with interest, to city hall for the cost of repairing the damage to the park.
“So you don’t read books by living writers?” “No, I don’t see the point.” “Why not?” “I guess because I feel like I can forgive dead people,” I said, shifting my attention to the Route 66 rerun on the portable TV behind the bar. “As a rule, that is.”
The Rat’s novel had two good things about it. First, there were no sex scenes; second, no one died. Guys don’t need any encouragement—left to themselves, they still die and sleep with girls. That’s just the way it is.
Whenever I wake up in someone else’s home, I feel like I’m stuck in another body inhabited by someone else’s spirit.
For some reason, I find the phrase “So well do I deal out judgements” cool in the extreme.
All things pass. None of us can manage to hold on to anything. In that way, we live our lives.
He belonged to the radical group occupying Building Nine on our campus. Their motto was “Action determines ideology, not vice versa.” What determined action was never made clear to me, though I asked.
But everything had passed with the flow of time. At an almost unbelievable pace. What had once been a violent, panting flood of emotion had suddenly withdrawn, leaving behind a heap of what felt like meaningless old dreams.
When the sky darkened he would take the same path back to his own world. This return, though, was always accompanied by an ineffable sadness. The world awaiting him out there was just too big, too powerful; there seemed to be no place where he could burrow into it.
Each of us had all the troubles we could carry. They rained down on us from the sky, and we raced around in a frenzy to pick them up and stuff them in our pockets. Why we did that stumps me, even now. Maybe we thought they were something else.
Each of us had, to a greater or lesser degree, resolved to live according to his or her own system. If another person’s way of thinking was too different from mine, it made me mad; too close, and I got sad. That’s all there was to it.
There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.
She looked off into space, the sweet smile playing on her lips. It feels strange somehow, she said. Like none of it really happened. Oh, it happened all right. But now it’s gone. Does it make you sad? No, I said, shaking my head. There was something that came out of nothing, and now it’s gone back to where it came from, that’s all.
