Sifting through the dirt to get to the gold
"It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it... Continue Reading →
The key ingredient was to find a person of faultless poise. A person willing to see both sides of the argument, but also the ability to find an equilibrium permitting the completion of the task at hand. With two forces tugging at both ends, which way would he turn when the time came? The end... Continue Reading →
"I always had this feeling that there were two worlds. The one we live in, you know, just streaming along, future into present into past, recorded distortedly in people's minds, and this other world: stock footage. Small integers of life, I mean life in quotes, which represent whatever did take place, whether or not what's... Continue Reading →
"Women's lib, Frannie had decided, was nothing more nor less than an outgrowth of the technological society. Women were at the mercy of their bodies. They were smaller. They tended to be weaker. A man couldn't get with child, but a woman could---every four-year-old knows it. And a pregnant woman is a vulnerable human being.... Continue Reading →
" 'Negative thoughts back you into a corner,' her mother said to her, smiling, one afternoon after returning from a picnic with the baby in Flushing Meadows Park. 'They multiply and surround you. Don't think of what you don't have. Try to focus on the simple pleasures.' It was rich, this spouting of shibboleths, this... Continue Reading →
"I cannot remember much, I cannot feel much. Maybe erasure is necessary. Maybe the human spirit defends itself as the body does, attacking infection, enveloping and destroying those malignancies that would otherwise consume us." From a professional standpoint John Wade has hit rock bottom; his once promising political career is all but dead a mere... Continue Reading →
"I have often imagined him returning home a week early that summer, to a mother, to a father; and having to watch his father's face as the boy told him he failed because he was weak. A trifling incident in a whole lifetime, you may say. Not true. It could have changed him forever, his... Continue Reading →
"But he is going east, the worst direction, into unhealth, soot, and stink, a smothering hole where you can't move without killing somebody. Yet the highway suckered him on, and a sign says Pottstown 2. He almost brakes. But then he thinks." Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is getting old and it is not going gracefully. He's... Continue Reading →
SUMMARY 13 Years in America is a story of hope, sacrifice, and the modern search for happiness that is at once a moving personal journey and a sharp, hard look at the American Dream. After moving to the United States from Canada, a free-spirited young woman rejects the status quo and embarks on a journey... Continue Reading →
“Mystery is the attractive condition a thing (an object, an action, a person) possesses which you know a little about but don’t know about completely. It is the twiney promise of unknown things (effects, interworkings, suspicions) which you must be wise enough to explore not too deeply, for fear you will dead-end in nothing but... Continue Reading →
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