Time Out of Joint

The odd thing in this world is that an eager-beaver type, with no original ideas, who mimes those in authority above him right to the last twist of necktie and scrape of chin, always gets noticed. Gets selected. Rises.

In a civil war… every side is wrong. It’s hopeless to try to untangle it. Everyone is a victim.

Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations—cut-rate gas stations—and motels on the rim of your own city. You fail to recognize it. And at the same time, you have to clasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but as long as you intend to live where you live.

Because you believe everyone’s against you, you force everyone to be against you.

Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.

A law of survival, Ragle had said. Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish . . . version of a timeless rule.

know it’s my psychosis, he said to himself, but I still don’t want to get caught.

From downstairs his mother called, “Sammy, you’re not going out on the roof, are you?” “No,” he yelled back. I am out, he told himself, making in his mind a fine distinction.

Knocking TV. It's a national pastime in itself. Think in your mind of all the homes, people sitting around saying, 'What's happened to this country? Where's the level of education gone? The morality?

In the cramped environment of little houses, with the car parked under the kitchen window, clothes hanging in the yard, countless skimpy errands keeping her involved until nothing else is left, only a preoccupation with things to get done, things to have ready

When cab drivers recognize me, he decided, it’s probably not in my mind. But when the heavens open and God speaks to me by name . . . that’s when the psychosis takes over. It would be hard to distinguish.

O, cuando menos, casi más allá. Sí, lo hemos calculado, una mata de judías que llegue hasta Betelgeuse. –¿Qué es Betelgeuse? –Una estrella distante. La utilizo como metáfora. De cualquier modo, sabemos que no interviene la adivinación en esto... excepto quizá en la etapa final. Cuando se trata de elegir entre dos o tres cuadrados.

–¿Cómo va la venta de agua al por menor? ¿El mercado se mantiene firme? –le preguntó a Black. Black se rió, apreciando la ironía: –Sí, la gente sigue bañándose y lavando los platos.

Tripping across a country pasture with Junie Black... spreading out a blanket on the hot, dry hillside, among the smells of grass and afternoon sun. No, not there. Is that gone, too? Hollow outward form instead of substance; the sun not actually shining, the day not actually warm at all but cold, gray and quietly raining.

We have a hodge-podge of leaks in reality.