Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other’s discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

She never seemed to lose her temper, but it would almost have been better if she did, for it was the flat, dry, passionless redundance of her scolding that got everybody down.

doing her best to conceal her fear, never guessing, or at least never showing, that she was dealing with a chronic, compulsive failure, a strange little boy in love with the attitudes of collapse.

Never end a sentence with a preposition, Sobel. You don’t wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds to bargain on.’ You wanna say, ‘gave the plumbers new grounds on which to bargain.

That was when the childhood memory began to prey on his mind, for it suddenly struck him—and the force of it sent his thumbnail biting deep into the secret matchbook—that letting things happen and taking them gracefully had been, in a way, the pattern of his life. There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him.

But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can’t last long—not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved.

And where are the windows? Where does the light come in? Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven't got the answer to that one. I'm not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder's faulty craftsmanship, and if that's the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

he was too short a man to do this gracefully,

FOR A LITTLE while when Walter Henderson was nine years old he thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance,

while the teletypes chugged and rang and the Wall Street tickers ticked and everybody around me argued baseball, until it was mercifully time to go home.