A: Please don’t eat me.
B: Listen, even after you’ve become a cadaver, you’re still retrievable. God is within us and he has different ways of showing it in our lives, and this is just one way of showing it.
A: Don’t eat—
B: —My friend sent you to me, assuring me that I can use you freely…
Most doctors try to dynamite all the bridges between the unconscious and the conscious because they are afraid of the unconscious (shock treatment, drugs, etc.). Rosen is afraid of the unconscious too, but fascinated by it. He tries to (1) keep the bridge open, even the most tenuous bridge—make more bridges, (2) be more permissive than most doctors about schizophrenic behavior…
Now I have shaken off what is extraneous to me: people, friends and enemies, habits, comforts, books; I live in solitude—years of it, if needs be—until once more, ripened and complete as a philosopher of life, I may associate with people (and then probably be obliged to do so)…
I suppose that the fact that I got into the Government (and in a post where I ought to have made good) and was thereafter discarded has created the impression that I am a dud…
Indeed a life lived altogether for me and mine, and all saved up and centered on three things: Dorothy, Charlie, and the sawmill house. The Nation, of course, goes hang. So does Columbia. So does New York…
Without flattery, Langston, you are the brains of this argosy. All the ideas have come out of your head…
Weeping (treacherously) I said when he askd what was the matter—“I’m so selfish it hurts” and felt, as if there were reason or vindication there, intimate pangs of a heart that had drawn up tight as a fist…
All around us we see those who once suffered the same thing and saved themselves by taking refuge in coldness and superiority. It is not that we fear what we are experiencing, but rather the dreadful result: that after the lived experience we will become numb and assume the same cowardly gesture unto eternity…
A: She did not seem to understand we were talking about a comedy book and not the transcripts from the Nuremberg Trial.
B: That hamster was going to start appearing in press conferences.
A: Right? For selfish reasons, I wish she’d decided to spend more time being a genius.
B: Obviously. Efficiency is great for U.S. Steel, but it doesn’t necessarily make sense for books.
A: Right…
I think it would be better, for Lawrence’s sake, for them to remain if the collection is sold intact. Would you consider changing your original will, or in some other way making it possible not to have to leave these out?
