The Victim

It was clear that the man was no fool. But what was the use of not being a fool if you acted like this?

What’s life? Metabolism? That’s what it is for the bugs.

Everybody is busy. Every man turns himself into a whole corporation to handle the business.

If a man disliked you, he would dislike you for all the reasons he could think of.

There’s nothing worse than being confused, too, in addition to being unlucky.

Mr. Benjamin shrugged his shoulders. "We have to live today," he said. "If you had a son, Harkavy, you'd want him to have a college education. Who's going to wait for the Messiah? They tell a story about a little town in the old country. It was out of the way, in a valley, so the Jews were afraid the Messiah would come and miss them, and they built a high tower and hired one of the town beggars to sit in it all day long. A friend of his meets this beggar and says, 'How do you like your job, Baruch?' So he says, 'It doesn't pay much, but I think it's steady work.

But when he sat down for a moment on the bed, all the comedy of it was snatched away and torn to pieces. He was wrong about the woman's expression: he was trying to transform it into something he could bear. The truth was probably far different. He had started out to see what had happened with her eyes and had ended by substituting his own, thus contriving to put her on his side.

I was lucky. I got away with it.” He meant that his bad start, his mistakes, the things that might have wrecked him, had somehow combined to establish him. He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful . . . the part that did not get away with it—the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.

Well, you are a privileged character. You’re the only man living whose mother lost her mind and died.

He meditated on his weakness.

More than human, can you have any use for life? Less than human, you don’t either.

That’s from the Middle Ages.’ My God! We have a name for everything except what we really think and feel.

Everybody wanted to be what he was to the limit.

But you find people who have their luck and take the credit for it, too—all brains and personality, when all that happened was that they were handed a bucket when it rained.

He had almost fallen in with that part of humanity of which he was frequently mindful (he never forgot the hotel on lower Broadway), the part that did not get away with it—the lost, the outcast, the overcome, the effaced, the ruined.

I know that I don't have to be next year what I was last year. I've been at one end and I can get to the other. There's no limit to what I can be. And even if I should miss being so dazzling, I know the idea of it is genuine.