Ordinary People

People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.

Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.

. . . crazy world or maybe it's just the view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture.

Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.

The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.

Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningles actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.

And do not be paralyzed. It is better to move than to be unable to move, because you fear loss so much: loss of order, loss of security, loss of predictability.

People have a right to be the way they are.

And what about tomorrow then? And all the tomorrows to come? Why can't we talk about it? Why can't we ever talk about it?

She hands him his coffee; crosses to the doorway; motes of dust flutter nervously in her wake.

with grief? There is no dealing; he knows that much. There is simply the stubborn, mindless hanging on until it is over. Until you are through it. But something has happened in the process. The old definitions, the neat, knowing pigeonholes have disappeared. Or else they no longer apply. His eyes move again to the calendar. Wednesday, November fifth. Of course. Obvious. All the painful self-examination ; the unanswered questions. At least he knows what is wrong today. Today is Jordan’s birthday. Today he would have been nineteen.

He hangs on now, pressing his hand lightly against the wall, below the window, waiting for the familiar arrow of pain. Only there is none. An oddly pleasant swell of memory, a wave of warmth flooding over him, sliding back, slowly. It is a first

People use people according to their own needs. Or don't use them. When a primary need is one of safety.

Because it has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others.

It has always been easier to believe himself capable of evil than to accept evil in others.

And once I wanted to be a fireman. Then

Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it's damn hard to smile.

fast. Get those months, days, hours, minutes out of the way, it can’t be quick enough.

See? Haven't lost your sense of humor after all but your sense of identity is what seems to have been misplaced. No. Wrong. You can't lose what you never had.

First. I give a damn. About everything you do

He will be eighteen in January, but he looks younger than that, and vulnerable; yet older at the same time. Tired. His face is drawn. He has an urge to shield him, but how? There is no way. No way at all.

Happy!” She looks at him. “Oh, Ward! You give us all the definition, will you? But first you’d better check on those kids. Every day, to make sure they’re good and safe, that

He had left off being a perfectionist then, when he discovered that not promptly kept appointments, not a house circumspectly clean, not membership in Onwentsia, or the Lake Forest Golf and Country Club, or the Lawyers' Club, not power, or knowledge, or goodness - not anything - cleared you through the terrifying office of chance; that it is chance and not perfection that rules the world.

He closes his eyes. A jungle in there, inside his head. He opens them quickly.

Fine. We can make it a combination Christmas and birthday present. You decide. I'll leave it up to you". If it were up to him, he would give him everything: sun and moon, eternal happiness, serene and uncomplicated.

It's all right, Con, to feel anxious. Allow yourself a couple of bad days, now and then, will you?

Maybe you gotta feel lousy sometime, in order to feel better. A little advice, kiddo, about feeling. Don't think too much about it. And don't expect it always to tickle.

her eyelashes are light-gold crescents.