kat’s Reviews > Slouching Towards Bethlehem > Status Update

“It’s not an unpleasant place to be, out there on Alcatraz with only the flowers and the wind, and a bell buoy moaning and the tide surging through the Golden Gate, but to like a place like that, you have to want a moat.

I sometimes do, which is what I am talking about here.” (From “Rock of Ages”)

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s store at 4 a.m. of a bad night, and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.”

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself…. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

“I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.“