To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.
If it weren't there, you'd climb it.
Noise is a kind of rain to Athenians, an environment shaped by nature. Nothing can prevent it.
I think pleasure is in the moment more than in the thing.
But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes.
A moving vehicle is no different moving backwards than it is moving forwards, especially when the driver regards the whole arrangement as if he were on foot, able to touch, to bump, to brush his way past vague obstacles in the street.
The concierge stood outside the building, a man about my age with the forceful dark look of his profession, organized loitering.
Damn it, I miss the sand. He was sweeping it back, was he, into the desert? Good man.
Terror. This is the subject she chose. In Europe they attack their own institutions, their police, journalists, industrialists, judges, academics, legislators. In the Middle East they attack Americans. What does it mean?
He wanted to know about my travels. I told him I was a traveler only in the sense that I covered distances. I traveled between places, never in them.
I miss my apartment, my cat. I never thought I'd miss my apartment. That must be where my body is.
Self-depreciation is a language I don't think I understand. It's so often a form of ego, isn't it, a form of aggression, a wanting to be noticed even for one's flaws.
Is it possible, love affairs as functions of geography?
A man has jealous thoughts about a woman he's never loved, a woman who's simply a friend.
You don't have to hate a man to enjoy his bad luck. True? And you don't have to love a woman to feel possessive toward her or resentful of her affairs.
"There they go," Charles said. "The twenty-four hours of my life. A.M. and P.M."
We know we will die. This is our saving grace in a sense. No animal knows this but us. It is one of the things that sets us apart. It is our special sadness, this knowledge, and therefore a richness, a sanctification.
We went to a movie together, went to dinner, saw a man so fat he had to move sideways down a flight of steps.
You're not vain, you're hopeful. Vanity is a defensive quality. It contains an element of fear. It's a look into the future, into wasting away and death.
Greeks from the audience were on stage now, dancing, and soon tourists began approaching the edges of the platform, carrying purses with them and shoulder bags and wearing sea captain's hats, looking back at friends —looks that begged encouragement for some stupidity they thought they were about to invent.
The Germans are sitting in the sun.
The evening was to be a lesson in seriousness, in authentic things, whatever is beyond a pale understanding, whatever persuades the complacent to see what is around them.
Power works best when it doesn't distinguish friends from enemies.
Air travel reminds us who we are. It's the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don't understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.
Could these drivers be worse than Greeks?
I go everywhere twice. Once to get the wrong impression, once to strengthen it.
We said goodbye at the corner, taking each other's hands in the way people do who want to press gladness into the flesh at the end of an uncertain time.
What is it about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it?
I should have had this conversation with someone else.
It was as though the sky and not the earth offered ultimate support, the only purchase that mattered.
Guide to what? There's nothing here.
I'd like to fuck her everywhichway to Sunday or whatever the phrase.
Hell is the place we don't know we're in.
"I'm not a serious man," he said. "If you wanted to compose a mighty Homeric text on my life and fortunes, I might suggest a suitable first line. 'This is the story of a man who was not serious.'"
I'll tell you what the shock is. To live apart is the shock, the seizure. This is what I register daily and obsessively.
We're our own children.
The world isn't shrinking at all. People who say it's shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm.