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Having given us the needles, they now perversely no longer supplied the dope.
Claude’s Vietnamese was bad and his French worse, but his English was excellent. I point this out only because the same thing could not be said of all his countrymen.
they chanted, Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . . I no longer prayed, but my tongue could not help wagging along with these old women.
America, a country not content simply to give itself a name on its bloody birth, but one that insisted for the first time in history on a mysterious acronym, USA, a trifecta of letters outdone later only by the quartet of the USSR.
Although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the federal bank of its narcissism, was not only superconfident but also truly superpowerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam?
Mine was just a snub-nosed .38 revolver, good for covert activities, Russian roulette, and suicide,
The proper way to approach a prostitute is to adapt the attitude of a theatergoer, sitting back and suspending disbelief for the duration of the show.
I was to fall in love two or three times a year and was now well past due.
Over the next few days, we wept and we waited. Sometimes, for variety, we waited and we wept.
An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel, trying to generate ideas.
the world would be a better place if the word “murder” made us mumble as much as the word “masturbation.”
Here I speak of those cartoons named Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, Number One Son, Hop Sing—Hop Sing!—and the bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap not so much played as mocked by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The performance was so insulting it even deflated my fetish for Audrey Hepburn, understanding as I did her implicit endorsement of such loathsomeness.
“money votes” was “open sesame” to the deep caverns of the American political system.
Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching’s accompaniment.
I complained to auntie once, but she cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.
If youth was not wasted, how could it be youth?
Now known by just one name, like John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Mary,
This was the problem with a walk down memory lane. It was almost always foggy, and one was likely to trip and fall.
And when God made us human—if God exists—He didn’t intend for us to be slaves to each other.
We had been through so much, me and myself.
