You can be young without money, but you can’t be old without it.
Every time you come in yelling that God damn Rise and Shine! Rise and Shine! I say to myself, How lucky dead people are!
Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.
The rest of my days I’m going to spend on the sea. And when I die, I’m going to die on the sea. You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die–with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship’s doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. Poor lady, they’ll say, The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.
Mendacity is a system that we live in, declares Brick. Liquor is one way out an’death’s the other.
A single watch or clock can be a powerful influence on a man, but when a man lives among as many watches and clocks as crowded the tiny, dim shop of Mr Gonzales, some lagging behind, some skipping ahead, but all ticking monotonously on in their witless fashion, the multitude of them may be likely to deprive them of importance, as a gem loses its value when there are too many just like it which are too easily or cheaply obtainable.
We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.
The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back of his mind he has the crazy hope that one of his purchases will be life everlasting!–Which it never can be….
To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of a dissolving economy.
Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.
Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?
Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.
I don’t ask for your pity, but just for your understanding – not even that – no. Just for some recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.