I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.
If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.
I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.
My dream was one day ordering a drink and finding out it tasted wonderful.
I also had a dim idea that if I walked the streets of New York by myself all night something of the city's mystery and magnificence might rub off on me at last. But I gave it up.
I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow.
I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will....
I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn't feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn't have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship o...
I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.
When they asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn't know.
I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.
I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.
So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about as numb as a slave in a totalitarian state.
My mother smiled. "I knew my baby wasn't like that." I looked at her. "Like what?" "Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital." She paused. "I knew you'd decide to be all right again.
I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols...
I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of the throat and I'd cry for a week.
I buried my head under the darkness of the pillow and pretended it was night. I couldn't see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.
The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.
