Andrew Johnson

“was another disappointment he hardly bothered to conceal. Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“mostly I just threw the insurance forms in the garbage and slept in the bathroom. Always in the handicapped stall. It was clean, spacious, and down at the end of the row against the wall so you couldn’t have guys shitting against you on two fronts. Like my grandmother said, “In the bedroom and the bathroom, never get outflanked.” I was six years old. God she was a pig.”
― Paul Neilan, Apathy and Other Small Victories: A Novel

“Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them. Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances. And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“He was forty-two years old, and he could see nothing before him that he wished to enjoy and little behind him that he cared to remember.”
― John Williams, Stoner