"But no one waved in the arc lamp's feeble glow for any punk's returning.
No one stood waiting under any arc lamp for any lost sparrow at all."
-The Man with the Golden Arm
"Someone--could it still be that steerer?--cried out in sleep on the other side of the wall--bringing him, out of the wisdom of some ancestral dream, news of salvation to policeman and prisoners, dealers and steerers and captains, blind men and hustling girls, cripples and priestlike coneroos alike.
To the hunter as well as the hunted.
Record Head wept.
Crocodile tears: he belonged to no man at all."
-The Man with the Golden Arm
"Because I understood, a long time ago, so long ago I can't remember where or how I first found it out, that it's all a crazy sort of joke on us all; that there isn't any true meaning to anything that won't be untrue in half an hour, and if you can live through it you're doing fine. If you can live through it, and have a few of the good things on the way--music, a girl, a sense of work that you like, then you're as lucky as possible. I think that, once you get rid of the notion that the world is going to hell unless you keep it from going there personally, you're better off. It frees you to do and say what you think, to talk back and not fall for the hundred myths with which we're deluged every day, and not to expect too much. After all, it's only your life."
-Letter to Joe Haas
Friday, June 11, 2010
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