Sex is emotion in motion.
If you try to nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.
The dead don't die. They look on and help.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation.
We must receive the one who curses us as a messenger from God, rebuking our hidden evil thoughts, so that we, seeing our thoughts with exactness, might correct ourselves. For we do not know how many hidden evils we have; Only a perfect man can understand all of his own shortcomings.
How lacking in intuition men could be in persuading themselves that mending some stranger's socks, and attending to his comfort, could content a woman.
And I really wanted a driver's license. I was 43, had my learner's permit and had failed the test once already - but that was in Riverhead, on Long Island.
For me, I still have feelings for all of my ex-girlfriends. In different parts of my life, I would miss that person. There's something that drew me to that person, and I shared something with them.