“To paraphrase Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear, and all those guys, "I wish I had known this some time ago.”
“While sex heads a great number of lists, we all have other things we like to do in between.”
“Yes,” he said. “But I wonder . . . I’ve a peculiar feeling that I may never see you again. It is as if I were one of those minor characters in a melodrama who gets shuffled offstage without ever learning how things turn out.”
“I can appreciate the feeling,” I said. “My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author. But look at it this way: inside stories seldom live up to one’s expectations. Usually they are grubby little things, reducing down to the basest of motives when all is known. Conjectures and illusions are often the better possessions.”
“Before you are fully aware of anything else, you are aware whether you are awakening in your own bed.”
“things sort of equal to equal things sort of being equal to each other, it didn’t much seem to matter.”
“От важных дел либо очень скоро в тоску впдаешь, либо наталкиваешься на уйму трудностей - всё зависит от того, какую долю ответственности на себя взвалишь.”
“But I thought about all the things that had to have spun into place in order for us to be alive and for us to be right there, right then. I thought about the few thing we thought we knew and the billions of things we couldn't know, all spinning, whirling our there somewhere.”
“Reputation never has very much to do with reality,” she said. “I could name half a dozen paragons of virtue that are horrible, small-souled, evil people. And some of the best men I know, you’d walk out of the room if you heard their names. No one on the screen is who they are when you breathe their air.”
“Is not it interesting that you had everything you needed in the first nine months, why is not that true for the next ninety years, because we interfere.”
“Why would you need a ship, Max? You're thinking of leaving already?"
No, no," Max said. "This would be just for fun. Or emergencies." Carol's face had darkened and his eyes had gone small. His expression scattered Max's brain so much he started babbling: "It'll have a trampoline. And a big aquarium. An aquarium under the water, inside the ship, where we keep the fish and squids and stuff we like...”
“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea —e. e. cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may”
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