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Sometimes I think that jealousy, like skiing, is only for those with enough youthful stamina and energy to endure it.
Camphor filled our hearts, long ago and far away.
I guess that is what they mean by “character” on the East Coast: leaving summer behind.
“Fiction is history that didn’t happen and history is fiction that did.”
So a lot of Hollywood architecture seems to have been designed to look good in a photograph rather than to keep out the rain.
“You knew Jim well, did you?” he asked, and looked at me like Jim would have looked at me when he heard something too L.A. for words—alarmed. “Just for cheap thrills,” I said. “He seemed more like the expensive-trouble kind,” Renzo said, “expensive regrets.” I laughed and said, “Well, in those days we thought we’d live forever. We thought the more we had to regret, the better. Besides, we didn’t believe death applied to us personally.” “Yeah,” Renzo said, “well, I was in Vietnam.”
I think one of the reasons it seemed in the seventies that we couldn’t lose was Watergate. There was Nixon, this man my father had been insisting was a crook for so long, who actually was a crook. And then we were getting rid of Nixon and were getting out of Vietnam and women could have abortions and the CIA was found to have illegally kept records on three hundred thousand citizens. It seemed a shoo-in that we’d won. And if we’d only had a dashing leader, we might have. But no, all the people who could have inspired us dumped girlfriends like Mary Jo Kopechne into ponds. If ever a country was
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Everyone felt safe and protected: no police ever found their way there, and no one boring ever stayed for long.
I’ve always tried to cultivate a disillusioned and world-weary attitude to counteract my rude streak of optimism, which gets in the way of reality. Not that anything works.”
Although I don’t ever think I’ll get enough mangos in my life, eating one in the hot rain is one of the more perfect divine interventions. Mangos will make you forget anything but mangos.
He may have been from the horrible Midwest, but he knew banana-leaf wallpaper when he saw it.
A friend of mine has a psychedelic master’s tape in which he says there are two types of drugs—good and bad—and how you can tell the difference is that the bad keep you wrapped up in society’s ethics, like alcohol and cocaine, whereas the good drugs take you outside social boundaries and make you realize they have no point. This was definitely a good drug, because by the time seven rolled around, I couldn’t see the point in so much as dinner. Never mind a social ethic.
