What Ben Thinks

Nov 01 2011 ∞
“ How pretty the sky is! I ought to go there on a rocket that never comes down.
— Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire

+ ∞
“ I, I, I took the blows in my face and my body! All of those deaths! The long parade to the graveyard! Father, mother! Margaret, that dreadful way! You just came home in time for the funerals, Stella. And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths - not always. Sometimes their breathing is hoarse, and sometimes it rattles, and sometimes they even cry out to you, ‘Don’t let me go!’ Even the old, sometimes, say, ‘Don’t let me go.’ As if you were able to stop them! But funerals are quiet, with pretty flowers. And, oh, what gorgeous boxes they pack them away in! Unless you were there at the bed when they cried out, ‘Hold me!’ you’d never suspect there was the struggle for breath and bleeding. You didn’t dream, but I saw! Saw! Saw! And now you sit there telling me with your eyes that I let the place go! How in hell do you think all that sickness and dying was paid for? Death is expensive, Miss Stella! And old Cousin Jessie’s right after Marget’s, hers! Why, the Grim Reaper had put his tent on our doorstep!… Stella. Belle Reve was his headquarters! Honey - that’s how it slipped through my fingers! Which of them left us a fortune? Which of them left a cent of insurance even? Only poor Jessie - one hundred to pay for her coffin. That was all, Stella! And I with my pitiful salary at the school. Yes, accuse me! Sit there and stare at me, thinking I let the place go! I let the place go? Where were you. In bed with your - Polak!
—  Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire

Oct 28 2011 ∞
“ Collette’s painted eyelids lifted and lowered like the slowly beating wings of a great blue eagle. “But that,” she said, “is the one thing none of us can ever be: a grown-up person. If you mean a spirit clothed in the sack and ash of wisdom alone? Free of all mischief - envy and malice and greed and guilt? Impossible. Voltaire, even Voltaire, lived with a child inside him, jealous and angry, a smutty little boy always smelling his fingers. Voltaire carried that child to his grave, as we all will to our own. The pope on his balcony…dreaming of a pretty face among the Swiss Guard. And the exquisitely wigged British judge, what is he thinking as he sends a man to the gallows? Of justice and eternity and mature matters? Or is he possibly wondering how he can manage election to the Jockey Club? Of course, men have grown-up moments, a noble few scattered here and there, and of these, obviously death is the most important. Death sends that smutty little boy scuttling and leaves what’s left of us simply an object, lifeless but pure, like The White Rose. Here” - she nudged the flowered crystal toward me - “drop that in your pocket. Keep it as a reminder that to be durable and perfect, to be in fact grown-up, is to be an object, an altar, the figure in a stained-glass window: cherishable stuff. But really, it is so much better to sneeze and feel human.
— Truman Capote - Unspoiled Monsters (from Answered Prayers)

Jul 24 2011 ∞

Jul 05 2011 ∞

1 note

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“ Arms about each other, their bodies pressed together, the boy and the girl moved up and down the driveway. They were dancing. And when the record was over, they did it again, and when that one ended, the boy said, “I’m drunk.”
The girl said, ‘You’re not drunk.”
“Well, I’m drunk.” the boy said.
The man turned the record over and the boy said, “I am.”
“Dance with me,” the girl said to the boy and then to the man, and when the man stood up, she came to him with her arms wide open.
— Raymond Carver - Why Don’t You Dance?

+ ∞
“ They wore each other like a pair of socks.
— TC Boyle - The Love of My Life
(a lovely short story about young love going wrong and murdering babies)

Jun 06 2011 ∞

Jun 01 2011 ∞
“ Now that it’s June we’ll sleep out in the garden, and if it rains we’ll sink into the mud.

May 27 2011 ∞

I want to be John Darnielle when I grow up.

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