…because heroes are creatures created by ignorance; like infatuations, they are born of hype, of superstition, fraud, as are gods, saints, and movie stars; and they all pass into legend, myth, romance, still further fictions, like clouds into clouds.
Can my crabby complaints, my discontents, be stored like grain against that unlikely lean year when there is a famine in misfortune?
“On these occasions, like a thorn in the side, a vestige of my vanished imagination nearly always emerges from out of my undisturbed torpor. And I make plans founded on ignorance, I raise edifices bound on hypotheses, and I’m dazzled by what’s bound to never happen.”
“Thus, for instance, he once saw his cat leap vertically into the air and do a backward somersault, whereupon it lay where it fell, rigid.”
“— but then it gave him an intense loneliness, as when one is happy and there is nothing to use the happiness on, as when he looks around and there is no way to share the instant of happiness — which until now he had usually felt on Saturday night.”
“One has always had to grow sick and mad, that others need no longer do so.”
The steward and his sons followed the corpse to the grave. Albert was unable to accompany them. Charlotte’s life was despaired of. The body was carried by laborers. No priest attended.
“The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear.”
