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We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
So it goes.
When you’re dead you’re dead.
Make love when you can. It’s good for you.
He didn’t read them. He praised them for what he imagined to be in them.
“What could be worse than Hell?” he said. “Purgatory,” I said.
“Olly-olly-ox-in-free.”
The man was the job and the job was the man.
They were people.
Only in retrospect can I think of them as trailing slime behind.
Everybody is supposed to play games for mental health.
We didn’t listen to each other’s words. We heard only the melodies in our voices.
Always alone, I drank toasts to her, said good morning to her, said good night to her, played music for her, and didn’t give a damn for one thing else.
I am an old fool who borrowed the dreams of a young fool.
the greatest contribution America had made to the world, a contribution that would be remembered for thousands of years, was the invention of A.A.
It was typical of his schizophrenia as a spy
“future civilizations—better civilizations than this one—are going to judge all men by the extent to which they’ve been artists. You and I, if some future archaeologist finds our works miraculously preserved in some city dump, will be judged by the quality of our creations. Nothing else about us will matter.”
“You’ve got to write again,” he said. “Just as daisies bloom as daisies and roses bloom as roses—you must bloom as a writer and I must bloom as a painter. Everything else about us is uninteresting.”
“It’s all I’ve seen, all I’ve been through,” I said, “that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I’ve lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.”
And how simple, how sublimely familiar was the tale her … body told! … It was like the breeze’s tale of what a breeze is, like the rose’s tale of what the rose is. …
Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to a human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will.”
“Not to write, but to write the way I wrote,”
“It takes a heap of living,” I said, “to make a house a home.”
“Most things in this world don’t work—” he said, “but aspirin do.”
“Life is divided up into phases,” he said. “Each one is very different from the others, and you have to be able to recognize what is expected of you in each phase. That’s the secret of successful living.”
“a schedule. That’s what I’ve found, too. Sometimes I simply stare at a blank sheet of paper, but I still sit here and stare at it for the whole period I’ve set aside for work.
can hardly deny that I said them. All I can say is that I didn’t believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying. The experience of sitting there in the dark, hearing the things I’d said, didn’t shock me. It might be helpful in my defense to say that I broke into a cold sweat, or some such nonsense. But I’ve always known what I did. I’ve always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind—schizophrenia.
It represented, I suppose a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about.
“Generally speaking, espionage offers each spy an opportunity to go crazy in a way he finds irresistible.”
Man, I think, is an infantry animal.
“He’s like you,” said Wirtanen. “He can be many things at once—all sincerely.” He smiled. “It’s a gift.”
“My truth goes marching on,”
“Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova
“Can I ask who your agent in Jones’ house is?” I said. “Who was it that slipped the note into my pocket, telling me to come here?”
“Dat Old Golden Rule.”
confess to a ghastly lack in myself. Anything I see or hear or feel or taste or smell is real to me. I am so much a credulous plaything of my senses that nothing is unreal to me. This armor-plated credulity has
“My good old normal self,” I said. Kraft pointed to a pterodactyl that was winging over the swamp. “Who would think a thing like that could fly?” he said.
“I have a full life behind me—” she said, “all in those few sweet hours with you.”
I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be likened unto a system of gears whose teeth have been filed off at random. Such a snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
But never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on a gear of my thinking machine. Never have I said to myself, “This fact I can do without.”
I had taught myself to think of death as a friend.
“Better move on, don’t you think?”
I smoked cigarettes all the way, began to think of myself as a lightning bug. I encountered many fellow lightning bugs.
Maybe it’s all chemicals.”
“Maybe it’s different chemicals that different countries eat that makes people act in different ways at different times,”
like any human family, we loved our nests and needed them.
ramshackle rising,
“Just when you think there isn’t any point to life—” he said, “then, all of a sudden, you realize you are being aimed right straight at something.”
“what does it mean? Where do I fit in? What’s the point of any of it?”
the most offensive compound word in the English language.
