Mark André > Recent Status Updates

Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jeasus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

All that the hand says when you touch.

Chance. We’ll never meet again. But it was lovely. Goodbye, dear. Thanks. Made me feel so young.

All that the hand says when you touch.

pitched about like snuff at a wake

He was too shiftless to go out and look for another job; he didn’t have the initiative to steal, and after she had told him three or four times to do a thing, he did it; but he never told her . . . and if her barn had caught on fire, he would have called his wife to see the flames before he began to put them out. And of the wife, she didn’t even like to think. Beside the wife, Mr. Greenleaf was an aristocrat.

‘Greenleaf’
The bull, gaunt and longlegged, was standing about four feet from her, chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor.

His soul expanded momentarily but then he became aware of his mother across from him and the vision shriveled. He studied her coldly. Her feet . . . dangled like a child’s and did not quite reach the floor. She was training on him an exaggerated look of reproach. He felt completely detached from her. At that moment he could with pleasure have slapped her as he would have slapped a particularly obnoxious child . . . .

The frustration of having to wait on the bus as well as ride on it began to creep up his neck like a hot hand.

The sky was a dying violet and the houses stood out darkly against it, bulbous liver-colored monstrosities of a uniform ugliness though no two were alike.

She lifted the hat one more time and set it down slowly on top of her head. Two wings of gray hair protruded on either side of her florid face, but her eyes, sky-blue, were as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten.

Moorish. Also the form, the figure. Hands felt for the opulent. Just compare for instance those others. Wife locked up at home, skeleton in the cupboard. Allow me to introduce my. Then they trot you out some kind of a nondescript, wouldn’t know what to call her. Always see a fellow’s weak point in his wife. Still there’s destiny in it, falling in love.

She must have been thinking of someone else all the time. What harm?
[. . .] First kiss does the trick. The propitious moment. Something inside them goes pop. [. . .]

There she is with them down there for the fireworks. My fireworks. Up
like a rocket, down like a stick.

. . . under different names, the rivalry of Aphrodite and Proserpine for the love of Adonis, for Phaedra is merely a double of Aphrodite. The theory probably does no injustice either to Hippolytus or to Artemis. For
Artemis was originally a great goddess of fertility, and, on the principles of early religion, she who fertilises nature must herself be fertile, and to be that she must necessarily have a male consort.

It is the very rudeness and barbarity of the custom which allow us a hope of explaining it. For recent researches into the early history of man have revealed the essential similarity with which, under many superficial differences, the human mind has elaborated its first crude philosophy of life.

Teachers rarely lasted very long in the country schools. The work was so hard and the proposals so constant that they married within a very short time.

They were handsome girls and they carried with them the glow of their descent from the kings of Ireland. [...] No one ever thought of them as deserving pity. Samuel raised a distinctly superior breed. They were better read and better bred than most of their contemporaries. To all of them Samuel communicated his love of learning, and he set them apart from the prideful ignorance of their time.

Well, a man’s mind can’t stay in time the way his body does.

Uisquebaugh—it’s an Irish word—whisky, water of life—and so it is.

Let’s close it like a book and go on reading! (...) A man will have clean hands once we get the lid slammed shut on that stinking century. There’s no rot on this clean new hundred years. (...) It’s not stacked, and any bastard who deals seconds from this new deck of years—why, we’ll crucify him head down over a privy.
Oh, but strawberries will never taste so good again and the thighs of women have lost their clutch!

Old men who didn’t know whether they were going to stagger over the boundary of the century looked forward to it with distaste. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost—good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies any more, and you couldn’t trust a gentleman’s word.

She’s no more a wife than an alley cat.

Her fingers were pink and soft, but the skin on the back of her hand seemed to have an underbloom like a pearl. Adam chuckled with delight. Her breathing stopped and he became electrically alert—then her throat clicked and the rhythmed snoring continued. Gently he worked her hand and arm under the cover before he tiptoed out of the room.

I hated to do it,” he said. “I had to. And I think it did her good. She seems like a changed girl to me. Maybe we haven’t bent the twig enough. We’ve spared the rod. Maybe we were wrong.” And he knew that although his wife had insisted on the whipping, although she had forced him to whip Cathy, she hated him for doing it. Despair settled over him.

There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.

He liked everything you brought him. He didn’t like me. He didn’t like anything I gave him. Remember the present I gave him, the pocketknife? I cut and sold a load of wood to get that knife. Well, he didn’t even take it to Washington with him. It’s right in his bureau right now. And you gave him a pup. It didn’t cost you a thing. [. . .] They shot it after the funeral.

It is the dull eventless times that have no duration whatever. A time splashed with interest, wounded with tragedy, crevassed with joy—that’s the time that seems long in the memory. And this is right when you think about it. Eventlessness has no posts to drape duration on. From nothing to nothing is no time at all.

In that day an educated rich man was acceptable. He might send his sons to college without comment might wear a vest and white shirt and tie in the daytime of a weekday might wear gloves and keep his nails clean. And since the lives and practices of rich men were mysterious, who knows what they could use or not use? But a poor man—what need had he for poetry or for painting or for music not fit for singing or dancing

When Will was a growing boy, his father had not been long enough in the Salinas Valley to be thought of as an “old timer.” He was in fact a foreigner and an Irishman. At that time the Irish were much disliked in America. They were looked upon with contempt, particularly on the East Coast, but a little of it must have seeped out to the West.

And you must not expect to find that people understand what they do. So many things are done instinctively, the way a bee makes honey or a fox dips his paws in a stream to fool dogs. A fox can’t say why he does it, and what bee remembers winter or expects it to come again?