“There can be a real meeting between two people at the point where they always felt marooned. Right at the edge.”
begin to get along with myself
“I was awful lonely then but still enjoyed the romance of the road.”
for a week keep record of first words every day
“I’ve always set myself up as a great enemy of sentimentality. But now, I see, that time brings a certain yearning toward past experience. That’s the thing my old man got lost in. That & the bottle.”
“Life compels me now. I must eat! I must have coffee! I must smoke & become engaged in the activities of the day. I must be pulled inexorably out of myself in order to be reminded again & again of the need to come back.”
“What would it be to be a conscious day-dreamer?”
“Now & then a glimpse of what “seeing” might be.”
they move to Minnesota and Jessica immediately wanted to leave again, Sam said we’ll try a year, then they stayed for decades
“How could I be this way? How is it possible? After all these years; all this time & so-called effort? I’m just an arrogant self-righteous old prick watching T.V. & snickering.”
“Sometimes lists are better than writing—more fun—but then they get boring—so does writing. I would like to be burning up with writing, but I’m not. Other things are more fun. Fun is important, I guess. It feels good to have fun. Did you ever consider the possibility of losing your mind entirely? Maybe we have. More later—if it comes.”
“There are these monumental turning points in a life that cannot be denied. Circumstances. Choices. A fork in the road. Whatever you want to call them. Things come up in which you could go one way or the other and no matter which turn you make your life is forever, irrevocably changed.”
the movies: “a dark room where a bunch of strangers sit down and watch huge images of other strangers who somehow seem more familiar than the people they know in real life”
drunkenly kicks daughter’s boyfriend out of wedding for flirting with someone
biking similar to canoe: silent, little effort, exposure of the body, “almost a part of things and yet slightly distanced”
“I have been lucky beyond reason—yet still bewildered.”
Dark: “When I was young I thought I’d like to be an Authentic Man. I wanted to believe in something. I wanted to be a ‘real’ person. God knows I tried. But I can see how that it was all in vain.”
“Funny how we crave the next season—just like we look forward to a future we can’t see.”