The reason I do not spend my days in despair and my nights in hopeless weeping simply is that I am in love with my own ruin. I the...refore deserve no sympathy, and probably shan't get it: my own profound self-compassion is enough. I am so abominably self-conscious that no smallest detail in this tragedy eludes me. Day after day I sit in the theatre of my own life and watch the drama of my own history proceeding to its close. Pray God the curtain falls at the right moment lest the play drag on into some long and tedious anticlimax.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real th...an nothing. They rise up out of the pit and know no rest until they drag you down into its dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have been required to put roots and shoots and little stems and tendrils together much as their author did, to wander discourage...d and confused as Hansel and Gretel through a dark wood of witches, to strike the hot right way suddenly, but just as suddenly to mire, to drag, to speed, to shout Urreek! to fall asleep, to submit to revelations, certainly to curl a lip, to doubt, unnose a disdainful snort, snick a superior snicker, curse, and then at some point not very pleasantly to realize that the game I'm playing is the game of creation itself, because Tender Buttons is above all a book of kits like those from which harpsichords or paper planes or model bottle boats are fashioned, with intricacy no objection, patience a demand, unreadable plans a pleasure.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man's real faith is never contained in his creed, nor is his creed an article of his faith. The last is never adopted. This it i...s that permits him to smile ever, and to live even as bravely as he does. And yet he clings anxiously to his creed, as to a straw, thinking that that does him good service because his sheet anchor does not drag.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The wilderness experiences a suddent rise of all her streams and lakes. She feels ten thousand vermin gnawing at the base of her n...oblest trees. Many combining drag them off, jarring over the roots of the survivors, and tumble them into the nearest stream, till, the fairest having fallen, they scamper off to ransack some new wilderness, and all is still again.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murde...rous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt Drag out to their last dregs and I resume... On such legs as are left me, in such heart As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive To honey and bread old purity could love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta ...of our social class, our parents' lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies--all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »