ON the universe.
as told in his books...
"I lingered a bit looking out over the lake at the twinkle of lights in Evian and Thonon-les-Bains. The moon hung like a streetlamp over the Alps. As I was ambling toward my car, there were soft footsteps behind me and I felt a hand touch my elbow. It was Lou-Lou."
Adam's Cane
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"If a tiny omniscient insect crawled into your ear one cozy star-filled night and whispered, “Friend of this world, I must tell you that there are no historical facts,” would this change anything about your life? If the insect then decided to stay a while and explain what it meant, would you listen?"
Jesus & Mary / Three Forgotten Tales
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"Only feelings – like love – are simple. They are either there or they aren’t. Existence is complicated. It is infinite and can’t be understood. People try to understand it by simplifying it. But they’re fooling themselves. It's that simple."
Don't Bullshit Me Johnny
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"They love the world. They love existence. All of it. The whole glorious salmagundi. The whole heaven. The whole hell. The whole beauty. The whole monstrousness. In the end, isn’t existence kind of an all or nothing deal?"
God & Naomi / Three Forgotten Tales
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"Then all the dragonflies surrounded her, clamped their feet to her body, and lifted her to heaven where, armless, she signed autographs for all the Apostles."
The Burnt Roses
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"The pyracantha, junipers, gravel, and straw fields were white until three-thirty when 'Queen For A Day' came on and the snow became water and seeped into the earth."
The Burnt Roses
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"It was Farley who raised his hand and got everyone’s attention and quiet. You could hear birds warble, then Tammy said, “For eighty years Betty Swain lived and loved. Before dying she asked for children to sing these two songs.” Tammy waved a finger in the warm summer air and the children danced anti-clockwise and sang. "
The Flood
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"We have the unbelievable good fortune of living today, and what do so many of us do? We spend our time bitching about it. The old man scratched his head and his crotch. Then he thought, I guess that’s just the way people are... "
The Old Man and the Stone
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"She lamented in the pattern death is usually lamented: the other, the self, the condition of life in general, then a return to the self or the other. In her case she finished with grief of the self, concurrent with the pouring of the last swig from the bottle of Old Crow."
The Burnt Roses
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"She bled blood and dark green bile on the mashed vine. A crow found her first, dancing on her back and pecking at her loose innards until the sky was filled with golden stars. Mankind came at noon the next day."
The Burnt Roses
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"Daddy taught me a long time ago that dictionaries and grammar books are no more true than anything else, that they’re just a set of rules that some egg-headed hotshots made up a few hundred years ago and that they’re just like rules for a dumb game like Monopoly."
Don't Bullshit Me Daddy
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" ...when he came back out of the bathroom he walked over to my bed and gave me another soft smackaroo in the middle of my forehead. I knew then that he loved me because he thought I didn’t know he had kissed me."
Don't Bullshit Me Daddy
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"A lot of people actually seem to make things simpler as they get older. Hell, for all I know, maybe that’s the secret to life... simplify everything and be a dumb shit all your life."
Don't Bullshit Me Daddy
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"He pointed out that, if nothing else, people who studied anthropology were less jingoistic and that the doors to their minds were at least a crack open. The local press called him unpatriotic to which he responded, “If America wants to lead the world, we have to think of the world first and America second.” He got a few tomatoes thrown at his front door."
The Anthropologist
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"Leaving the party is another story. Hemingway wasn’t invited but he knew when to leave. With a four-second memory he no doubt would have kept swimming up and down the cool rippled stream. But he remembered what it was like when he had whatever he knew he would never have again. Or maybe he didn’t want it anymore."
The Anthropologist
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"Was it possible to live outside of culture. Was it possible to put one’s culture in brackets, live away from it, then crawl back into it? Is that what Oscar Wilde did when he called a priest to his death bed in the little room off the Rue de Seine in Paris? Was it even possible to separate a man from his culture?"
The Anthropologist
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"NBC Nightly News is said to be the most watched news program in the country. In occurred to the old man that the underworld was not under the ground at all. It was in everybody’s living room every evening."
The Old Man and the Stone
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"The younger old man thought that were he a god, he would have divined that in the case of the man across the table with a brace on his neck, the beautiful vineyards – that lay in front of them like a glorious tablecloth over the lakeside land – were both the problem and the solution."
The Old Man and the Stone
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"I also know that for me, I seem to only be able to want it all – all deep, deep, deep eternity - when I see it through the four eyes of love and not the two eyes of solitude. I wonder how Pierre feels - if he feels anything at all. For all I know, he might feel more than I do, or anyone else… "
My Friend Pierre
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"Dad was dead. The funeral was over. We all followed the hearse up the street to the cemetery and laid him in the ground. The pastor held his tongue. The silence was golden and all eyes were misty except the globes under the white sombrero. He’d done this too often to cry. And besides, when you believe God is there to clean up each and every mess, there isn’t much left to shed a tear for."
Adam's Cane
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"It was fully dark outside. The dogs were quiet next to my feet on the carpet. I got up to put on the Dvořák concerto. I don’t know why my father didn’t include it in his going away party because it’s a killer, too. I’ve got a Karajan version with Rostropovich on the cello. It strikes me as music that was written by somebody who was perfectly suspended between life and death and who, when the chips were down, chose life."
Adam's Cane
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"Then, for whatever reason, she thought of the pre-flood world and the millions of people who had seen God, had talked to God, had felt God within them, in their bosom as sure as blood, and who had lived happily and unhappily in a paint-by-numbers world. That world was gone."
The Flood
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"Brothers and sisters, princes and ditch-diggers, dogs and cats, friends and enemies, in three days that snake had gone from happily cruising around the neighborhood to absolute nothingness. No corpse. No carcass. No coffin. No stain. No nothing. Now I know all you reincarnation or recycling types are going to jump up and tell me that everything is okay because the snake went through the birds’ stomachs and the birds digested it and their excrement tucked it back into the loins of mother earth etc., etc., but I’m not buying a word of it. That snake was gone.
Foster's Depression
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"The idiot flips out over a little useless foot long snake. He stops talking. He stares at the wall for a year and a half. Talk about wasting away your life."
Foster's Depression
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