Цитаты из книги John Henry Days

Things don’t just happen because you tell them to. They happen because something has been paid.

It sounds ridiculous but love is often ridiculous to those on the outside. Take the elevator down to the street and wait five minutes for a ridiculous couple to walk by, what are they wearing, something ridiculous, mismatched socks, you might have a little chuckle but you will envy with all your heart the inarguable adoration in their smiles.

When he departed this morning, his papers were spread across the room according to the manner in which he had organized his vast materials, which is to say not organized at all but entirely submissive to the disorder of this project.

It didn’t matter where you lived, Alphonse believed, you go five minutes in any direction from your house and become a stranger in your own neighborhood. Windows, drapes, doorsteps, doors, each one harboring a stranger and not a neighbor, one of the great number that make up the rest of the world. All it takes is five minutes in any direction to find yourself in the nation. Drive six hours and what do you find?

The law of nicknames: contradictory or supremely apt, born of accidents and sticking for life or arbitrary and annoying.

The night is clear and naked and swarming with so many anxious stars that it almost seems to him an invasion, a celestial troop movement auguring nothing good. In the cities it is safe because there are no stars, the light from a million apartment windows provides protection: they reduce the night into a vast purple mediocrity shielding against higher thought.

People disappear into the world and leave clues in storage. In storage is optimism, everything temporary and defined, it promises a reversal of destiny and yet speaks in the dull syllables of finality, has the eloquence of a cemetery.