- "I saw that sign," said Dwayne, "and I couldn't help wondering if that was what God put me on earth for - to find out how much a man could take without breaking."
- "I've lost my way," said Dwayne. "I need somebody to take me by the hand and lead me out of the woods."
- "You're tired," she said. "Why wouldn't you be tired? You work so hard. I feel sorry for men, they work so hard. You want to sleep for a while?"
- "You have no use for truth?" said Beatrice. "You know what truth is?", said Karabekian. "It's some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I'll ask what he believes. He tells me, and I say, 'Yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?'"
- Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
- If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.
- "I just try to cheer people up," said Bonnie. "If that's a crime, I never heard about it till now. I'll stop saying it from now on. I beg your pardon. I did not mean to give offense."
- "The painting did not exist until I made it," Karabekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find."
- "Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."
- The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the earth is wrapper so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it, which is this one: ETC.
- Abe Cohen, the jeweler, said to Karabekian, "If artists would explain more, people would like art more. You realize that?"
- As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rust hinges and feeble springs. And our interrelationships were Byzantine.
dec 22 2012 ∞
jan 11 2015 +