Цитаты из книги Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You : 13 Stories

As if we were all wound up a long time ago and were spinning out of control, whirring, making noises, but at a touch could stop, and see each other for the first time, harmless and still. This is a message; I really believe it is; but I don’t see how I can deliver it.

Anything would do for her to look at; beautiful or ugly had ceased to matter, because there was in everything something to be discovered.

Once a friend of mine—a woman, of course—said to me that since pain was only possible if you looked backward to the past or forward to the future she had eliminated the whole problem by living every moment by itself; every moment, she said, was filled with absolute silence. I have tried this, I will try anything, but I…

And how often talking to both men and women I hear myself in witty and rueful pursuit of this theme—how women build their castles on foundations hardly strong enough to support a night’s shelter; how women deceive themselves and uselessly suffer, being exploitable because of the emptiness of their lives and some deep—but…

When my faith is restored, and riding high, I skip over these lessons superstitiously; when it is low, and very low, and gone, I read them for comfort, because it is a comfort to discover that one’s own case holds no particular agony, only some shopworn recognisable pain.

I know. You build yourself up ready for something bad to happen and then when it doesn’t, it’s a queer feeling, you can’t feel good right away, it’s almost like a disappointment.

But the young people in the store, with their long wild hair and Indian headbands and their costumes of striped overalls and underwear with holes (what was that but a costume? No farmer in his right mind, no matter how poor, would appear in town in such a get-up), and their lilting, pious discussions of gardening and…

What he objected to, he had said to Eugene, what he objected to in this generation, if that was what it was, was that they could not do a thing without showing off. Why all this yawping about everything, he asked. They could not grow a carrot without congratulating themselves on it.

He had joined these clubs not out of a real desire to be sociable but as a precaution against his natural tendencies, which might lead him, he thought, into becoming a sort of hermit.