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She was christened “Alice,” but she used to deny that she was really an Alice. I agreed. Everybody agreed. Sometime in a dream maybe I will find out what her real name was.
“I am committing suicide by cigarette,” I replied. She thought that was reasonably funny. I didn’t. I thought it was hideous that I should scorn life that much, sucking away on cancer sticks. My brand is Pall Mall. The authentic suicides ask for Pall Malls. The dilettantes ask for Pell Mells.
The public health authorities never mention the main reason many Americans have for smoking heavily, which is that smoking is a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide.
“One foot in front of the other—through leaves, over bridges,”
“Buy the place and burn it down,”
“Miss,” he said, his voice full of pain, “you do everything you can to give lonely, ordinary people like me indigestion and the heeby-jeebies, and you wouldn’t even hold hands with me to keep me from falling off a cliff.”
“Me? All my pleasures are looking at what used to be pleasures.”
Kelly wondered why he felt so little as he watched his family in the face of death.
Death through a blunder she might be able to understand; but death as a product of cool reason, a step in logic, she could never accept.
To find out in a rush whether a dictionary is prescriptive or descriptive, you look up ain’t and like.
I admit I know next to nothing about international politics, but it seems reasonable to suppose that nobody would want to fight wars if there were enough of everything to go around.
“Don’t forget to wind the restricted clock and put the confidential cat out,”
“So what’re you going to do next?” Fred looked surprised. “Do? What is there to do but report it in some suitable journal?”
“Happiness,” I told her. “Incomparable, continuous happiness—happiness by the kilowatt.”
The question is, rather, whether or not America is to enter a new and distressing phase of history where men no longer pursue happiness but buy it.
“You’re one of those people who enjoys suffering,” she said. “That’s a smart way to be,” he said.
“I’ll have to think a minute,” I said. “That’s a mistake,” he said. “You miss an awful lot of life that way.
As a matter of fact, it’s a respectful thing to say that somebody is childish in certain ways, because it’s people like that who seem to get all the big ideas.
“The mind is the only thing about human beings that’s worth anything. Why does it have to be tied to a bag of skin, blood, hair, meat, bones, and tubes? No wonder people can’t get anything done, stuck for life with a parasite that has to be stuffed with food and protected from weather and germs all the time. And the fool thing wears out anyway—no matter how much you stuff and protect it!
He had only two moods: one suspicious and self-pitying, the other arrogant and boastful. The first mood applied when he was losing money. The second mood applied when he was making it.
“Yeah, he had a collection too. And I took it away from him and threw it in the river.” “Threw it in the river?” said Helmholtz. “Yeah,” said Quinn. “Eight knives—some with blades as long as your hand.” Helmholtz paled. “Oh.” A prickling sensation spread over the back of his neck. “This is a new problem at Lincoln High. I hardly know what to think about it.” He swept spilled salt together in a neat little pile, just as he would have liked to sweep together his scattered thoughts. “It’s a kind of sickness, isn’t it? That’s the way to look at it?” “Sick?” said Quinn. He slapped the table. “You
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“My corner of the universe happens to be the air around my band. I can fill it with music. Mr. Beeler, in zoology, has his butterflies. Mr. Trottman, in physics, has his pendulum and tuning forks. Making sure everybody has a corner like that is about the biggest job we teachers have.
“When the cat’s away,” said Helmholtz, “this mouse gets lonesome.”
“A bundle of scar tissue,”
“Think of it this way,” said Helmholtz. “Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it.” A small cry of despair came from Jim Donnini. It was meant to be private, but it pierced every ear with its poignancy. “How?” said Jim. “Love yourself,” said Helmholtz, “and make your instrument sing about it. A-one, a-two, a-three.” Down came his baton.
I think that scientific persons of the future will scoff at scientific persons of the present. They will scoff because scientific persons of the present thought so many important things were superstitions.
“There is so much to be learned and seen out there,” he said. “A man could look at other worlds without a curtain of air between himself and them. A man could look at his own world, study the flow of weather over it, measure its true dimensions.” This last surprised me. I thought the dimensions of our world were well known. “A man out there could learn much about the wonderful showers of matter and energy in space,” said Stepan. And he spoke of many other poetic and scientific joys out there.
“One nice thing about flying,” he said to me that night. “What’s that?” I said. “You never know how bad it is till it’s too late,” he said, “and when it happens, it happens so fast you never know what hit you.”
De mortuis nil nisi bonum—Say nothing but good of the dead.
