Chili > Recent Status Updates

"Until a few months ago, he had never known a 'nice' woman who looked at life differently, and if a man married it must be necessarily among the nice."

"No doubt she simply echoed what was said for her, but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday, and he wondered at what age 'nice' women began to speak for themselves."

"What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty as a 'decent' fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal?"

I don't like any of these characters so far but I need to know what happens! I hate this feeling ugh

Getting whiplash from Stoner prose to this… should I DNF lol

“He dimly recalled that he had been thinking of failure — as if it mattered. It seemed to him now that such thoughts were mean, unworthy of what his life had been.”

“But he read little, though the presence of his books comforted him.”

“Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.”

“Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed. Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them.”

“…he has the body of an upright greyhound and the face of—eerily, uncannily—a fresh-hatched chicken (plus soulless eyes that reflect no light and seem to “see” only in the way that fish’s and birds’ eyes “see”).”

Lol DFW’s kinda hilarious

“…the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. A sub-sumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small.”

“It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.”

“This will be fatherhood from hereon in, he thinks: just another anonymous consumer of her brand.”

“Are we bad people Did I do the wrong thing
What will become of us”

“After class Elaine told Cass she had decided that instead of a brand ambassador she now wanted to be a poet.”

“In his dark nature there was a touch of the feminine, as in all the great pirates, and it sometimes gave him intuitions.”

“The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!”

Thesis statement of this book: “Treachery and violence are a just return for treachery and violence!”

“You are a dog in the manger, Cathy, and desire no one to be loved but yourself!” “You are an impertinent little monkey!” exclaimed Mrs. Linton, in surprise. “But I’ll not believe this idiocy!

"Lately I never felt good enough. I always wanted to explain to him that I was not good." "And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good. Is that it?" "I guess so. Maybe that's it."

"Maybe it's true that we are all descended from the restless, the nervous, the criminals, the arguers and brawlers, but also the brave and independent and generous."

“Things do not change with a change of scene.”

“”I think when a man finds good or bad in his children he is seeing only what he planted in them after they cleared the womb.” “You can’t make a race horse of a pig.” “No,” said Samuel, “but you can make a very fast pig.”

“The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.”

“Might it not be that in the dark pools of some men the evil grows strong enough to wriggle over the fence and swim free? Would not such a man be our monster, and are we not related to him in our hidden water? It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.”

“He felt the warmth for his brother you can feel only for one who is not perfect and therefore no target for your hatred.”

“Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

"The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them.”

“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ‘em to ashes, then burn the ashes.”