Allan Gurganus · 736 pages
Rating: (5.4K votes)
“Beware of using up your last forty years in being the curator of your first fifty.”
“Truth always leaves a pleasure asking questions.”
“How soon, sugar, the terrible becomes routine. We've all got this dangerous built-in talent: for turning horrors into errands. You hear folks wonder how the Germans could have done it? I believe part of the answer is: They made extermination be a nine-to-five activity. You know, salaries? Lunch breaks? And the staff came and did their job and went home and ate supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job and went home and ate their supper and slept and woke and came back and did their job. --That's partly how you get anything done, especially a chore what's dreadful, dreadful. -- Honey? we've all got to be real careful of what we can get used to.”
“(Spring is the earth forgiving itself.)”
“I started thinking of my absentee diamond. My thumb and little finger kept reaching for their pet and sidekick.”
“Seemed our house stirred up troubles enough to keep a radio soap show in daily episodes forever.”
“Once you harden, the arteries do.”
“All their lives they’ve said how Folks that don’t Work should Starve. Now they can’t work but they ain’t ready for what they been wishing on the shiftless of all races.”
“Fifteen, that’s the age when the only world event that counts is whatever mood you’re in that day.”
“Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun”
“For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt--something is gained but something is lost.”
“It's hard to follow a person's logic if you don't know how they feel.”
“How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.”
“Those three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us.”
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