fiefoe

Funny/sad, the living:

She was a dull person, but a sensational invitation to make babies.
the baroque detailing of Montana’s body
It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.
A moment went by, and then every cell in Billy’s body shook him with ravenous gratitude and applause.
“‘I could carve a better man out of a banana.’”

Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.
What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.

Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni.
—and then it was time to go, always time to go.
I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.
Death on the Installment Plan
People aren’t supposed to look back.
He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.
He was doing nothing less now, he thought, than prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls.
She swallowed hard, shed some tears. Then she gathered energy from all over her ruined body, even from her toes and fingertips. At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence: “How did I get so old?”
“Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”
“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”
Here were more crippled human beings, more fools like themselves. Here was light opera.
that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man who was so full of loving echoes

Aug. 9th, 2011