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She put her hand on his. —Otto, she said. —Sincerity becomes the honesty of people who cannot be honest with themselves.
It does not seem unreasonable that we invent colors, lines, shapes, capable of being, representative of existence, therefore it is not unreasonable that they, in turn, later, invent us, our ideas, directions, motivations, with great audacity, since we, ourselves having them upon our walls. What rude guests they prove to be, indeed: although paintings differ from life by energy a painter can never be a substitute for his paintings, so complete so independent as reality are they. Imagine the pleasure they enjoy at this.
He was preparing to meet his son, to win him as a friend, and influence him as a person.
—The people who demand pity of you hate you afterward for giving it. They always hate you afterward.
Benny had hardly looked at the face of the man who was talking to him: in contrast to his own it was a detailed fortification, every rampart erected with definite purpose, their parapets calculated to withstand repeated assaults from any direction, tried in innumerable skirmishes where many had approached so close as to tumble between scarp and counterscarp, an arrangement so long in the building that, though every bit of it had been erected for defense, in finished entirety it assumed aggressive proportions; inviting strategy, it might only be taken by storm.
Several people turned to see Mr. Feddle fall clattering to the floor; and in keeping with that refusal to be ruffled by disturbances, which they called good breeding, no one offered to help him up.
—And every time people meet, they seem to just get a little further away from each other. —These gulfs everywhere between everything and everybody, Stanley took up immediately, —it’s this fallacy of originality, of self-sufficiency. And in art, even art
—That’s all it is, Benny went on. —What’s tragedy to you is an anecdote to everybody else. We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.
Undisciplined lights shone through the night instructed by the tireless precision of the squads of traffic lights, turning red to green, green to red, commanding voids with indifferent authority: for the night outside had not changed, with the whole history of night bound up in it had not become better nor worse, fewer lights and it was darker, less motion and it was more empty, more silent, less perturbed, and like the porous figures which continued to move against it, more itself.
—Him Byronic? Miss Stein demanded. —I said moronic, said Mr. Schmuck’s assistant. —We have to keep a tank of straight oxygen on the set to sober him up . .
entrance. Miss Stein returned to hear the lantern-jawed young man finishing what was apparently a familiar joke, for she laughed before it was done while the tall woman listened with polite anticipation to,
—The radio? . . . good heavens yes, total loss in this country, don’t you know. Turned it on meself and had some brazen idiot ask me how was the color personality of my house, eh? Who the devil puts up with all that nonsense do you spose. A pound a year we pay at home, don’t you know, a pound a year to keep the airwaves clean, you might say. Cheap enough, eh? to keep that kind of infernal rubbish out of your house.
The tall woman interrupted her husband, who was absorbed in saying nothing to anyone.
In the daylight’s embrace, objects reared to assert their separate identities, as the rising sun rescued villagers from the throbbing harmony of night, and laid the world out where they could get their hands on it to assail it once more on reasonable terms. Shapes recovered proper distance from one another, becoming distinct in color and extension, withdrawn and self-sufficient, each an entity because it was not, and with daylight could not be confused with, or be a part of, anything else. Eyes were opened, things looked at, and, in short, propriety was restored.
He was becoming a “character,” which was exactly what he wanted.
We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.
One after another the flashbulbs burst and, in the gray light of that day, seemed each time to arrest an instant of riotous motion as lightning freezes motion and then, in the dark again, the persistence of vision retains that image of abandon which could not have sustained itself, as it did here, on the winter pavement, after the newspaper photographer had bundled up his equipment and hurried into the hotel, hoping to make the sporting final.
Have you ever thought about this, that right now this instant every one of them is somewhere being real?
Trains do not depart: they set out, and move at a pace to enhance the landscape, and aggrandize the land they traverse, laboring their courses with the effort of journeys never before made, straining the attention on sufferance of minutes passed separately until concentration is exhausted, and no other pace conceivable.
The haze settled on the city in the early morning conveyed that remarkable cold which they say will kill a man and not blow out a candle, motionless cold which seems to come from inside, and be diffused through the body from the very marrow of the bones.
—Why, proving one’s own existence, you’d be surprised what a man will do to prove his own existence?
The older man seemed interested in what the younger did only in order to disapprove of it; and the younger man’s total lack of interest in the elder’s activity only spurred that one on to redouble it.
Their pursuits were by now so mysterious to one another that neither showed surprise at anything the other did or said, each, in fact, depending more and more heavily on the other for encouragement, an arrangement somewhat similar to that magic formula of modern marriage, whose parties are encouraged by disapprobation and disinterest respectively.
A tall woman passed, speaking to her husband, —I’ve gotten used to poverty by now. —You mean other people’s? —Yes, it doesn’t bother me at all like it did, remember when we got here yesterday and I was giving money out everywhere? . .
leering at Mr. Yák from a face which only the heritage of centuries of ignorance could redeem, for there was enough guile in it to rule an empire.
His mustache looked like something he had fallen into, and his hair stood out in a heavy tangle behind.
The world of art settled, that of religion reared intrepidly.
—Of course I like music, but not just to listen to.
Spring came everywhere, as though for the first time.
