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the maddening invulnerability of the stupid,
Her confrontation is with everybody, and secure under the breadth of her satire he can say what he pleases.
Harry as just another in the parade of more or less dutiful husbands whose brainlessly sown seed he spends his life trying to harvest.
That’s what you have, Harry: life. It’s a strange gift and I don’t know how we’re supposed to use it but I know it’s the only gift we get and it’s a good one.” Her crystal eyes have filmed with a liquid thicker
He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk. Flower stalks.
your wife’s parents can’t get at you the way your own can. They remain on the outside, no matter how hard they knock, and there’s something relaxing and even comic about them.
The days go all right as long as Nelson is awake. But when the boy falls asleep, when his face sags asleep and his breath drags in and out of helpless lips that deposit spots of spit on the crib sheet and his hair fans in fine tufts and the perfect skin of his fat slack cheeks, drained of animation, lies sealed under a heavy flush, then a dead place opens in Harry, and he feels fear.
“Right and wrong aren’t dropped from the sky. We. We make them. Against misery. Invariably, Harry, invariably”—he grows confident of his ability to negotiate long words—“misery follows their disobedience. Not our own, often at first not our own. Now you’ve had an example of that in your own life.”
with the simplicity he feels now in everything.
You do things and do things and nobody really has a clue.
The way she is fighting for control of herself repels him; he doesn’t like people who manage things. He likes things to happen of themselves.
He feels his inside as very real suddenly, a pure blank space in the middle of a dense net. I don’t know, he kept telling Ruth; he doesn’t know, what to do, where to go, what will happen, the thought that he doesn’t know seems to make him infinitely small and impossible to capture. Its smallness fills him like a vastness.
