Homer & Langley

There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

I remember holding her in my arms and absolving God of meaninglessness.

The ultimate technological achievement will be escaping from the mess we've made. There will be none after that because we will reproduce everything that we did on earth, we'll go through the whole sequence all over again somewhere else, and people will read my paper as prophecy, and know that having gotten off one planet, they will be able to destroy another with confidence.

She's some kind of Socialist-anarchist-anarcho-syndicalist-Communist. Unless you're one of them you can't tell exactly what any of them are.

Jacqueline, for how many days have I been without food. There was a crash, the whole house shook. Where is Langley? Where is my brother?

I'm Homer, the blind brother.

Grandmamma had been the last connection to our past. I had understood her as some referent moral authority to whom we paid no heed, but by whose judgments we measured our waywardness.

The bad news is that if we do in fact get off the earth we will contaminate the rest of the universe with our moral insufficiency.

And so do people pass out of one's life and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own.

We had a joke, Langley and I: Someone dying asks if there is life after death. Yes, comes the answer, only not yours.

I knew he was the real thing because when he laughed other men at the table laughed with him.

And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the keys, it was not just a piano in front of you, it was a universe.

The images of things are not the things in themselves.

[...] solo podía recordar con la facilidad con que moría la gente. Y estaba por otra parte esa sensación que uno experimenta en el recorrido a un cementerio tras los pasos de un ataúd: cierta impaciencia con el muerto, el deseo de estar de vuelta en casa donde uno podía mantener la ilusión de que la condición permanente no es la muerte sino la vida cotidiana

And then there was that feeling one gets in a ride to a cemetery trailing a body in a coffin-an impatience with the dead, a longing to be back home where one could get on with the illusion that not death but daily life is the permanent condition.

Christ, what I wouldn't give to be something other than a human being.

Homer, maybe you can tell me why I am fatally attracted to women who are no more than mirrors of myself.

You have to know someone to want to kill him.

It was innocents who died, not those born with the strength of no illusions.