Frederick Barthelme Quotes

Like most marriages, ours eventually wore down all the cartilage. We were a hip needing replacement. Bone on bone, grinding, day in and day out. It worked but it was hard.

Meg Pokrass writes like a brain looking for a body. Wonderful, dark, unforgiving.

I remember that feeling, that comfort, that sense of everything in its place, the rightness of it all, when the winter is loved and the summer is all the sun there is. When you want that specific moment, that time, that place, that situation, forever. You can't force it or wish it, and praying doesn't help. You wait, you keep going, you hope maybe it will come around again. That flawless equilibrium.

Edward Lasco was on the screened porch of his rented house in a comfortable but not elegant older section of the town where he'd lived for the past fifteen years when his wife, Elise, who six months before had left him and moved to a nearby city to work in a psychiatric hospital, came around the side of the house and stood beside the screen looking in. She had on a business outfit - natural linen suit, knee-high boots, dark glasses with at least three distinguishable colors tiered top to bottom in the lenses - and she carried a slick briefcase, thin and shiny. Her hair was shorter than he'd seen it, styled in a peculiar way so that it seemed it spots to jerk away from her head, to say, "I'm hair, boy, and you'd better believe it." Edward had come outside with a one-pint carton of skim milk and a ninety-nine-cookie package of Oreos and a just-received issue of InfoWorld, and he was entirely content with the prospect of eating his cookies and drinking his milk and reading his magazine, but when he saw Elise he was filled with a sudden, very unpleasant sense that he didn't want to see her. It'd been a good two and a half months since he'd talked to her, and there she was looking like an earnest TV art director's version of the modern businesswoman; it made him feel that his life was fucked, and this was before she'd said a word.

I lay on the bed and shut my eyes, thinking that nobody really likes marriage, that it's a flawed arrangement, that people get enthusiastic and jump in for a hundred reasons and then, after the ceremony, after a few years, the whole deal turns into a concert they wouldn't have dreamed of attending.

I remember loving pencils. I was fond of paper. I loved the small of textbooks. I loved the way the light from a desk lamp was bright on a page. I loved the smell of fresh-cut grass. It was a thing everybody loved, but there was no shame in being that much like everybody else, in sharing that.

What had been quiet and restful was now silent and empty.

But if someone had slowed him down, just slightly interrupted his course, maybe he could have gotten through that one nightmarish moment; maybe he would never get that close to it again.

I expect I knew better than to try to recapture the experience now, in my mid-fifties, when time went so fast that I wouldn't have time, wouldn't , or couldn't, allow myself the time, to savor it. I counted that inability as another of the losses of getting older, which goes too slow at first, leaving you aching to speed things up, and then goes too fast when it's way too late to slow things down. And all the time, young or old, you're looking at people on the other side of the equation, riddled with envy.

There is a feeling of disbelief that comes over you, that takes over, and you kind of go through the motions. You do what you're supposed to do, but in fact you're not there at all.

A computer is a wonderful and friendly machine, because it's always just a little better than you are. You're always a little bit behind, but it stays right there with you anyway. It allows you to make the mistakes, and then to try to find out what the mistakes are, and then to repair the mistakes. It's always your friend. It quits on you, but it doesn't leave the apartment.