《Who Will Run the Frog Hospital》Lorrie Moore

'Yes,' I say.  I cannot tell her the truth.  Or can I? Can I tell you the truth?  I might begin.  And she might say, Bien sur.  And I would explain that, well, after weeks of fighting and months of door-slamming straight out of the most boisterous of farces, Daniel pushed me down the stairs.

-
Daniel has never really like opera.  'What I like is philosophy,' he said to me once. 'Philosophy's great.  Except I don't like the whole Existence thing.  Do we exist?  That really pisses me off.  But I like Good and Evil.  I like What is Art.  But just a little of What is Art.  If you get too much it circles back around again to Do we exist?, which pisses me off.'

-
Deputy Kerry unlocked my handcuffs by the car but still clutched my elbow, pushing me along in front of him like a little cart.  It was a long march during which I understood that, for all the unusualness in their lives, all my parents had ever wanted was to be average, normal, useful, ordinary.  They could not bear the full force and chaos of their own eccentricity, could not bear the full life of it, the full course, all the stuff and ramifications.  To see something out of line in their own children must have reminded them of all that they were and could not hide from.  It must have reminded them of the deep and sorrowful loneliness of themselves, which they had tried so desperately not to suffer.

-
My husband has that look again, the look of how difficult the world is, life is, how sometimes you just want to go back to your house with the bushes around it and stay inside... 'Don't you feel, you must, like going home?' Daniel asks in a voice of such ailing homesickness it makes me smile.

Everywhere life is full of heroism.

I lean warmly toward him, try to get closer, in empathy and companionship, to study his face, so moist and young in these rains, to match or approximate it, 'don't be lorn, don't be blue, it's only morn, and I'm with you.' I sing this, but he stiffens, then tries not to stiffen, forces a smile but moves too quickly away.  He does this often now.  Something, someone, keeps him, is kept, in some other corner of his life.  I can't follow him there - where that is, a place of woundedness, we are too without each other.  To meet there would be to step into the strange dark rage of strangers.  But I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.  I can feel the jangle and money of it.  I will wait for him, I think: let him go and sicken himself, confuse himself, dash through the bad woods of himself.  Love is perennial as the grass!  I'll wait for him, my heart in epilogue, knit and reknit, perhaps as it always has been.  I'll wait until I just can't wait anymore.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.  

《冰雪紀行》 Werner Herzog

而在維也納，當多瑙河上那座老橋在黎明時分坍塌時，有位本來打算過橋的目擊者說，橋是緩緩躺平下來的，就像老先生就寢的動作。

《寂寞芳心小姐》 Nathanael West

“就算他真經歷過上帝的神蹟，那也是他家的事，只有心理學家會對這無意義的事感興趣。”

“他的問題和我們一樣，就是沒有物質生活，只有精神生活，而這是無可避免的。”

“他是個逃避現實的人。他想耕耘心靈的花園。但你不能逃避現實，不然這心靈花園的果實要賣給誰呢？這種農會真是失敗。”

他想像自己在當鋪窗口，眼前盡是毛皮大衣、鑽戒、名錶、槍、釣具和曼陀林等。這些都是帶有受苦意味的物品。一把鍍金匕首刀鋒上閃著痛苦的光芒，一支磨損的喇叭苦苦哀號著。

《Tender is the Night》F. Scott Fitzgerald

They were still in the happier stage of love.  They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be  on a plane where no other human relations mattered.  They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence, as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other.  They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew, she stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.

I love you

"I love you, of course I love you! Jesus Christ can you let it go? Is that okay?"
"I love you if okay. Of course I love you - is not."

Writing advise from Charlie Kaufman as Robert McKee

Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

Writing advise from Matrick Marber 《Closer》

Larry: You should write another one.

Dan (shrugs) Haven't got a subject.

Beat.

Larry: When I was nine, a policeman touched me up.
He was my uncle. Still is. Uncle Ted.
Nice bloke, married, bit of a demon darts player.

Don't tell me you haven't got a subject, every human life is a million stories.

Thank God life ends - we'd never survive it.

From Big Bang to weary shag, the history of the world.

Our flesh is ferocious... our bodies will kill us... our bones will outlive us.

Walks with Men - Ann Beattie

Well: better someone be mysterious than that the mystery be solved, because you might stuck with an answer you didn't want.

Chilly Scenes of Winter - Ann Beattie

Laura should be here.  What is he going to say to her?  He wants, somehow, to convey to her that her husband is a dull man.  Since he is also dull, he wants to point out that she wouldn't be getting into anything unexpected; she would just be swapping a dull person who doesn't care much about her for one who does.  That sounds awful. He will have to think harder.  He puts his watch away.  It is heavy in his pocket.  He pushes it far into the pocket, not wanting to lose it.  What would his old puckered-cheeked grandfather think of his rendezvousing with a woman at an elementary school?

On the ride to her apartment Sam sits in the back.  Betty wanted to sit back there, and both kept insisting until finally Sam pushed her aside and climbed in.  Charles felt sorry for her, trying to act like one of the guys, to act indifferent.  He thinks she is starting to like him again.  He looks quickly at her legs.  They are so fat.  She is so plain.  They have nothing to talk about.  He knew it would be this way.

"When would you... when are you going to call me?"
"Soon."
"You meant not tomorrow?"
"A second was just a convenient way to put it.  I'll call you when I can call you."
"Laura, shit!  I'm sorry if I made you mad, but I've got to see you.  I stayed away when you went back to him, but now I'm coming over there."
"If you come over tonight I won't be here," she says.
"Then tomorrow.  Alright?"
"If it means that much to you."
"It does."
"I don't think you're thinking of me.  I think you're thinking about what's best for you."
"I love you!"
Silence.
"I know," she says.  "I'll see you tomorrow."
"Where do you live?" he says.
"On Wicker Street - 140 Wicker.  A small building."
"Okay.  I'll see you then."
She hangs up.  What went wrong?  What's happening? Where is Wicker Street?
That night he dreams that he is launched in a spaceship to the stars.  His mother is there.  She is taking a bath on a star.  He gets back in the rocket.  Mechanical failure!  That strange jingling!  HE sits up in bed, eyes wide open.  The dog is walking again, his collar jingling.  By now it is clear; the dog has insomnia.

Ann Beattie

I became disenchanted with New York when I realized that I felt as if I had accomplished something when I picked up the laundry and got the Times and a quart of milk. I spent a lot of time worrying about alternate-side parking. I lived on the fourth floor of a brownstone. If I had messed up and hadn’t jockeyed my car to the right side of the street for the next day and somebody moved their car at four o’clock in the morning, it was an automatic response, in winter or summer, maybe I put my slippers on, but I would run down in my pajamas and get that place. All of a sudden I thought, This is absolutely ridiculous.