The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time. Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes? Because there is a clue in the past.
I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen. When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.
My mother refused to let me fail. So I insisted.
Suppose you ask God for a miracle and God says yes, very well. How do you live the rest of your life?
Why is it that no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.
What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than J.C. Penney pantsuits.
I couldn't stand it. I still can't stand it. I can't stand the way things are. I cannot tolerate this age.
Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most. Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Free people have a serious problem with place, being in a place, using up a place, deciding which new place to rotate to. Americans ricochet around the United States like billiard balls.
Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.
Jews wait for the Lord, Protestants sing hymns to him, Catholics say mass and eat him.
Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere.
Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.
The enduring is something which must be accounted for. One cannot simply shrug it off.
I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.
In this world, goodness is destined to be defeated.
It makes people nervous for one to step out of one's role.
Consciously cultivate the ordinary.
This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone's finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?
There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.
A good title should be like a good metaphor. It should intrigue without being too baffling or too obvious.
A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.
Small disconnected facts, if you take note of them, have a way of becoming connected.
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