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Tuesday, June 4, 1991

But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.

Swedenborgian Hell:

Picture a community made up of people all totally in love with themselves, not caring about others unless they are allies, and you will see that their love is no different from that of thieves for each other.

One Minus One

And, as we walked back down to see her, the nurse coming with us, there was this double regret—the simple one that I had kept away, and the other one, much harder to fathom, that I had been given no choice, that she had never wanted me very much, and that she was not going to be able to rectify that in the few days she had left in the world.

That men who don't make friends easily seldom have any trouble making enemies is perhaps ironic, at least in the sense that intimacy is at the core of both relationships. In the leather shops where Mather Grouse worked, he had no friends, though with the majority of his fellow workers he was on congenial terms.

Winter Syntax
A sentence starts out like a lone traveler heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face, the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

Wow!

The Wind

How just before the door opened and she was grabbed by the hair and dragged backward, my grandmother turned to her children and tried to smile, to give them this last glimpse of her.

In 1947 West Point officially “decommissioned” all of its horses.

Patton had claimed that the saddest moment in his life came when he stood at attention, weeping, as his cavalry regiment marched past to stack their sabers for the last time.

Douglas MacArthur

"The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here," he co cluded. "Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be the corps, and the corps, and the corps."

The point of his nose was impossibly aristocratic, precocious for a baby, I thought, uncertain. This was the first baby I had ever been privileged to study. He didn't blink, like the leader of a prison gang. He didn't change his expression. So the study was mutual. He stared holes through me. He saw straight into my heart and didn't seem to care that it was riddled with cowardice, hubris, stupidity, regret.

…war by ambush instead of by combat, by infiltration instead of by aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him... These are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

As always, he presented an air of elegant outrage.

What’s new?

He stood in the entryway, glaring, belligerent. I glared back at him, furious that he'd interrupted my communication with Flora. Beat it! I'm talking to a dead customer!

Asema and I were both paralyzed. There was a sliding sensation. Like when you see the car driving along in front of you slip on ice and proceed across the roadway sideways. It is something that an Indigenous person often feels as they listen to non-Indians appreciate an unbelievably dense dealing with Indians

The woman in the book looked indianesque, or she might have just been in a bad mood.

Leaf Storm

"I'm sure it's not a message. I'm sure it's not that he looks like someone but that he's the same person he looks like. I'm sure, rather, that he's a military man. He's got a black pointed mustache and a face like copper. He's wearing high boots and I'm sure that it's not that he looks like someone but that he's the same person he looks like."

Silver Water
His funeral was like a Lourdes for the mentally ill. If you were psychotic, borderline, bad-off neurotic, or just very hard to get along with, you were there. People shaking so bad from years of heavy meds that they fell out of the pews. People holding hands, crying, moaning, talking to themselves.

As natural beauty declines over the years, so too, unnoticed, do standards of beauty.

Travelin Man

He could elude a wider search than the state would send into the swamp after a black man. For this was black man's country, slow and silent, absorbing the white man's inroads like a sponge. A white man loomed large on Ocean Island, but a black man was swallowed up in it, and disappeared.

He believed he had everything he needed, and he did not need much. A gift not only represented clutter, it took up room in his thoughts as one more distracting obligation of gratitude, as an unwanted requirement to think of someone else, of their goodwill bearing down on him like a low cloud.

Mkondo

…she felt a darkness tear away from her eyes. Shivers ran down her arms; joy founted up. It was rapture, the oldest feeling, a sensation like rising from the thick canopy of forest and turning, looking out over the treetops, seeing the world again, for the first time.

Mkondo

The twining of their lives: born on different halves of the world; brought together by chance and curiosity; leveraged apart by the incompatibility of their respective landscapes

For a Long Time this was Griselda Story
(5 Stars)

Rosemary found it impossible to look at Griselda her presence was too solar for this kitchen with its cracked countertops and veneered cabinets, a box of stale doughnuts, a wilted amaryllis slumped out of its plastic pot, a porcelain Santa on the windowsill that should have been put away weeks ago. Moonlight fell in parallelograms through the kitchen window.

“But can you explain what Nature does for you—a Jewish city type? You're not a Transcendentalist update."
"No. That's not my line."
“And to your country neighbors you're one of the beasts that should have been drowned in the Flood."
"Oh, absolutely. But I don't worry about fitting in or belonging to the community. It's the stillness all around that attracted me...."

He had, what is more, the courage to assert his right to be exactly what he seemed to be. This as Ravelstein pointed out was not posture. There was absolutely nothing in Nikki's appearance that was decorative or theatrical. He doesn't look for trouble, mind you, but "he's always ready for a fight. And his sense of himself is such that... hell fight. I've often had to hold him back."

“Where I’m from it’s only midnight for a second
& the trees look like grandfathers laughing in the rain.”

Spirited men and women, the young above all, were devoted to the pursuit of love. By contrast the bourgeois was dominated by fears of violent death. There, in the briefest form possible, you have a sketch of Ravelstein's most important preoccupations.

It pleased him that she had fallen in love with an old guy like me. "There's a class of women who naturally go for old men," he said. As I've already indicated, he was drawn to irregular behavior. Especially where love was the motive.

The Answer Man

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Wow what a great story! Stephen King is the best!

The Journey to Galway

What a short and sweet story!

Life, in an absolute sense, is worth living, just as art is worth pursuing, science is worth exploring, justice is worth seeking. However, the fact that something is worth doing doesn't always mean a person is endowed with the capacity to do it, or that a person, once endowed with that capacity, can retain it.

That a mother can do all things humanly possible for a child, and yet she can never understand the incommunicable vastness and strangeness of the world felt by that child; that a mother cannot make the world just a little more welcoming so the child feels less alone; that a mother cannot keep that child alive-these are facts I have to live with now, every single day, for the rest of my life.