A Fine and Private Place

I am infected with life and will die of it in time.

I walked a long way that night, thinking many philosophic thoughts which, fortunately, I don’t remember.

You’re greediest when you’re born, and after that it’s downhill all the way. Live to be two hundred and you wouldn’t demand anything.

He sighed, telling himself that the inevitable is a great blessing to a man weary of making choices.

There is no such thing as abstract justice. There is such a thing as law. The difference should be apparent.

There are honest people in the world, but only because the devil considers their asking prices ridiculous.

I’m sure I’ll go to heaven. I’ve been dull enough.

Walking by yourself in the rain is for college kids who think loneliness makes poets.

It’s like marriage. The race there is between total knowledge of each other and death. If death comes first, it’s considered a successful marriage.

If I sound petty and malicious, it’s because I am.

Now is it their friendship I want, he wondered, or their dependency?…Am I so tired and so purposeless that I want to keep them with me forever, living off their need and their loneliness? You can’t do that, Jonathan. They are minds, and you cannot make minds dependent on you. That would surely make you the devil.

He knew very well that the great majority of human conversation is meaningless. A man can get through most of his days on stock answers to stock questions, he thought. Once he catches onto the game, he can manage with an assortment of grunts. This would not be so if people listened to each other, but they don’t. They know that no one is going to say anything moving and important to them at that very moment. Anything important will be announced in the newspapers and reprinted for those who missed it. No one really wants to know how his neighbor is feeling, but he asks him anyway, because it is polite, and because he knows that his neighbor certainly will not tell him how he feels. What this woman and I say to each other is not important. It is the simple making of sounds that pleases us.

The one delusion you never had in your life was the one about the permanence of happiness.

“There are people,” he said, “who give, and there are people who take. There are people who create, people who destroy, and people who don’t do anything and drive the other two kinds crazy. It’s born in you, whether you give or take, and that’s the way you are.”

It was an old trick, one he remembered from every discussion and bull session he had ever taken part in: if you don’t know, make it up. Nobody ever admitted he didn’t know a quotation, or a book, or an essay on something. The rule also had a corollary: if you’re not sure, it’s Marlowe.

Goddam organizers, he thought. You get something good going, and somebody comes along and organizes it. He told himself that this was inevitable, the way of the world, but it bothered him. The raven would have been in favor of a movement in the general direction of chaos, consternation, and disorganization, had he not known that such a project would require the most organization of all. Besides, there would undoubtedly be a squirrel running it.

He had always detested funerals and avoided them as much as possible. But it’s different, he thought, when it’s your own funeral. You feel it’s one of those occasions that shouldn’t be missed.

He had foreseen every such change in his fortune, ignored it always, and called the refusal innocence.

Forget it, Jonathan, and go back to sleep. And before you go to sleep, pray that no well-meaning god ever makes you immortal.

Funny that I should become such a great believer in justice. I always used to open my history courses by telling the students that if they expected to hear a series of movie scenarios, with the good guys winning in the end, they might as well all go home because not only didn’t the good guys win, but there weren’t any good guys.

Love is not an excuse for bad taste.

Beautiful is a word for young people. Beauty is a phase you grow through, like acne.

What can I tell you, Laura? That I confused justice and revenge? People do that a great deal, and they always have.