Indignation

You be greater than your feelings. I don't demand this of you - life does. Otherwise you'll be washed away by feelings. You'll be washed out to sea and never seen again.

other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.

It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That's what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.

Is that what eternity is for, to muck over a lifetime's minutiae? Who could have imagined that one would have forever to remember each moment of life down to its tiniest component?

Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one's most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.

I wouldn’t so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!” Whereupon,

It’s about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.” “Oh,

other people’s weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength. A

That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.

Beyond your dormitories, a world is on fire and you are kindled by underwear. Beyond your fraternities, history unfolds daily—warfare, bombings, wholesale slaughter, and you are oblivious of it all. Well, you won’t be oblivious for long! You can be as stupid as you like, can

what his uneducated father had been trying so hard to teach him all along: of the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.

You be greater than your feelings. I don’t demand this of you—life does. Otherwise you’ll be washed away by feelings. You’ll be washed out to sea and never seen again. Feelings can be life’s biggest problem. Feelings can play the most terrible tricks. They

Una ragazza in effetti c'era. Non era ancora in ballo, però ci avevo già messo gli sopra. Era una studentessa del secondo anno che come me si era appena trasferita a Winesburg, pallida e snella, con capelli castani scuri e un modo di fare che m'intimidiva per come mi pareva distaccato e risoluto. Seguiva le mie stesse lezioni di storia americana e a volte sedeva proprio accanto a me, ma non volendo correre il rischio di sentirmi dire di lasciarla in pace, non avevo trovato il coraggio di farle neppure un cenno di saluto, e tanto meno di parlarle. Una sera la vidi in biblioteca.

wonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens. And even that was wonderful in its way, because it was something you did, and did well, that you didn’t care to do. So there was a lesson in doing it. And

Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.’” “And my

My father believes not what he sees with his eyes for an entire lifetime, instead he believes what he’s told by the plumber on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!” I couldn’t stop. He’d been driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber! “Yeah,

At the outset of my mature life, before everything suddenly became so difficult, I had a great talent for being satisfied. I’d

vowing himself to “just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.” After

I can’t say that I blame them. I can’t say that I would expect any daughter of mine to remain loyal to an educational institution where she has been exposed not merely to belittlement and humiliation and fear but to a genuine threat of physical harm by an army of hoodlums imagining, apparently, that they were emancipating themselves. Because

As in life, I know only what is, and in death what is turns out to be what was. You

You are not just shackled to your life while living it, you continue to be stuck with it after you’re gone. Or,

Human conduct can be regulated, and it will be regulated! The

so conspicuous was his abhorrence of “rebellious insolence” that he might have been enunciating the name of a menace resolved to undermine not just Winesburg, Ohio, but the great republic itself.