More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?
Strange how one person can saturate a room with vitality, with excitement. Then there are others, and this dame was one of them, who can drain off energy and joy, can suck pleasure dry and get no sustenance from it. Such people spread a grayness in the air about them.
it is true that people rarely take action on advice of others unless they were going to do it anyway,
I think he didn’t like himself, and when that is so the subject usually must find an area for dislike outside himself. Else he would have to admit his self-contempt.
This sounds as though I bemoan an older time, which is the preoccupation of the old, or cultivate an opposition to change, which is the currency of the rich and stupid. It is not so. This Seattle was not something changed that I once knew. It was a new thing. Set down there not knowing it was Seattle, I could not have told where I was. Everywhere frantic growth, a carci-nomatous growth. Bulldozers rolled up the green forests and heaped the resulting trash for burning. The torn white lumber from concrete forms was piled beside gray walls. I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.
I arrived in Monterey and the fight began. My sisters are still Republicans. Civil war is supposed to be the bitterest of wars, and surely family politics are the most vehement and venomous. I can discuss politics coldly and analytically with strangers. That was not possible with my sisters. We ended each session panting and spent with rage. On no point was there any compromise.
Then I remembered something I heard long ago that I hope is true. It was unwritten law in China, so my informant told me, that when one man saved another’s life he became responsible for that life to the end of its existence. For, having interfered with a course of events, the savior could not escape his responsibility. And that has always made good sense to me.
My hired helper worked beside me, and neither of us being expert we were well splattered. Suddenly we found ourselves out of paint. I said, “Neal, run up to Holman’s and get a half-gallon of paint and a quart of thinner.” “I’ll have to clean up and change my clothes,” he said. “Nuts! Go as you are.” “I can’t do it.” “Why not? I would.” Then he said a wise and memorable thing. “You got to be awful rich to dress as bad as you do,” he said. And this isn’t funny. It’s true. And it was true at the orgy. How unthinkably rich these Texans must be to live as simply as they were.
had camouflaged myself in an old blue jacket and my British navy cap on the supposition that in a seaport no one ever looks at a sailor any more than a waiter is inspected in a restaurant.
“Anyway, the subject skims the joy off a pan of conversation.”
“If by force you make a creature live and work like a beast, you must think of him as a beast, else empathy would drive you mad.
To me, it had been a day larger than a day, not to be measured against other days with any chance of matching.
The beds were good but I could not sleep. The gray man walked across my eyes, and the faces of the Cheerladies, but mostly I saw the old man squeezed as far away from me as he could get, as though I carried the infection, and perhaps I did. I came out to learn. What was I learning? I had not felt one moment free from the tension, a weight of savage fear. No doubt I felt it more being new-come, but it was there; I hadn’t brought it. Everyone, white and black, lived in it and breathed it—all ages, all trades, all classes. To them it was a fact of existence. And it was building pressure like a
...more
I tossed about until Charley grew angry with me and told me “Ftt” several times. But Charley doesn’t have our problems. He doesn’t belong to a species clever enough to split the atom but not clever enough to live in peace with itself. He doesn’t even know about race, nor is he concerned with his sisters’ marriage. It’s quite the opposite.
