Young Hearts Crying

"I think you'll find ordinary people are nicer than you give them credit for being"

"As my husband always used to say, who cares?"

"A lot of people care, Ann."

"Well, that's a nice thought, but try counting them up on your fingers. Name me four. Name me three."

"Well, marriage is funny, Mike", Harold said once with the wind whipping the vapor of his voice over his shoulder. "You can go along for years without ever knowing who you're married to. It's a riddle."

"You're right," Michael said. "It is."

"Then maybe once in a while you take a look at this girl, this woman, and you think: What's the deal? How come? Why her? Why me?"

"Yeah, I know what you mean, Harold."

"Try to remember this, men. The mark of a professional in any line of work - I mean any line of work - is that he can make difficult things look easy."

"But this isn't a lecture course. The only way any of us can learn this craft is by saturating ourselves in examples of it, in and out of print, and then trying to put the best of what we've found into our own work."

"Of course. And isn't that the worst kind of loss? When you don't even realise the value of something until you've thrown it away?"

"It's often occurred to me," she said, "that 'friend' is about the most treacherous word in the language."

exchanging agreeable remarks for no other purpose than to keep silence from closing in.

And from this distance they all did look like kids - boys and girls from far and wide with their cheap hand luggage and their Army duffel bags, brave entertainers who might travel for years before it occurred to them, or to most of them, that they weren't going anywhere.

"It's funny, you know? Distance doesn't matter anymore. It's almost as if geography didn't exist. All you do is doze and float in a pressurised cabin for a while - and it doesn't even matter how long, because time isn't important, either - and before you know it you're in Los Angeles, or London, or Tokyo. Then if you don't happen to like wherever it is you find yourself, you can doze and float again until you find yourself somewhere else."

"All I'm trying to say is that I'm afraid I got a kind of who-cares feeling out of this. Very strong writing, fine writing; still, the material kept making me think, Yeah, yeah, I get it, but who cares?"

"Yeah, well, sure, 'remarkably intelligent'. Look, baby, the world is crawling with these diamond-in-the-rough types, these salt-of-the-earth characters, and they're all remarkably intelligent. My God, I knew half-literate guys in the Army who could scare the shit out of you with their intelligence."

"I don't get it," Laura said. "How come boys can do whatever they feel like and girls can't?"

"Because they're boys'''," Lucy cried. "Boys have done whatever they've felt like since the beginning of time, don't you even know that? Haven't you ever learned that yet, you poor, ignorant little - how smart do you have to be to know a thing like that? They're irresponsible and self-indulgent and careless and cruel, and they get away with it all their lives because they're boys''."