Some people say the business about the jolly fat person is a myth, that all of us chubbies are neurotic, sick, sad people. I disag...ree. Fat people may not be chortling all day long, but they're a hell of a lot nicer than the wizened and shriveled. Thin people turn surly, mean and hard at a young age because they never learn the value of a hot fudge sundae for easing tension. Thin people don't like gooey soft things because they themselves are neither gooey nor soft. They are crunchy and dull, like carrots. They go straight to the heart of the matter while fat people let things stay all blurry and hazy and vague, they way things actually are. Thin people want to face the truth. Fat people know there is no truth.... Thin people believe in logic. Fat people see all sides. The sides fat people see are rounded blobs, usually gray, always nebulous and truly not worth worrying about. But the thin person persists. "If you consume more calories than you burn," says one of my thin friends, "you will gain weight. It's that simple." Fat people always grin when they hear that. They know better.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The bar ... is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable--and, contrary to modern mores, n...o music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn't like to talk.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aging process is a part of most of our lives, and it remains one we try to ignore until it seems to pounce upon us. We evade a...ll its signals. We stay blandly unprepared for some of its obnoxious effects, even though we have coped with the cracked voices and puzzling glands of our emerging natures, and have been guided no matter how clumsily through budding love-pains, morning sickness, and hot flashes. We do what our mentors teach us to do, but few of us acknowledge that the last years of our lives, if we can survive to live them out, are as physically predictable as infancy's or those of our full flowering. This seems impossible, but it is true.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 »
Coming about its own business Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox... It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket Stream, in a new world, far in the d...ark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man. Yet he shall spend a sunny day, and in this century be my contemporary; perchance shall read some scattered leaves of literature, and sometimes talk with me. Why read history, then, if the ages and the generations are now? He lives three thousand years deep into time, an age not yet described by poets. Can you well go further back in history than this? Ay! ay!--for there turns up but now into the mouth of Millinocket Stream a still more ancient and primitive man, whose history is not brought down even to the former. In a bark vessel sewn with the roots of the spruce, with hornbeam paddles, he dips his way along. He is but dim and misty to me, obscured by the æons that lie between the bark canoe and the batteau. He builds no house of logs, but a wigwam of skins. He eats no hot bread and sweet cake, but musquash and moose meat and the fat of bears. He glides up the Millinocket and is lost to my sight, as a more distant and misty cloud is seen flitting by behind a nearer, and is lost in space. So he goes about his destiny, the red face of man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has sta...mped with its own freedom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If what you mean by the word "matter" be only the unknown support of unknown qualities, it is no matter whether there is such a th...ing or no, since it no way concerns us; and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about what we know not what, and we know not why.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »