Books and Pipes

People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth.

When I am too sad and too skinny to keep keeping, when I am a tiny thing against so many bricks, then it is I look at trees. When there is nothing left to look at on this street. Four who grew despite concrete. Four who reach and do not forget to reach. Four whose only reason is to be and be.

Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by herself, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life.

In the meantime they'll just have to move a little farther north from Mango Street, a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in.

...Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.

The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee; the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.

What I'm certain I don't want, she finally said aloud, is to find myself someday in a new century, an old bitter woman looking back, wishing that right now I'd had more nerve.

Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed, than at any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable.

There was nothing about her story remarkable other than that it was her life.

He held the Colt's before him, looking into it as if he expected to see his future in the sheen of its cylinder.

She rejected them out of hand, explaining later that what she found lacking in her suitors was a certain amplitude—of thought, of feeling, of being. That and the fact that both men kept their hair shiny with pomatum, as if to compensate in some visible way for their lack of sparkling wit.

He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an after life.

"That young girl," he added unexpectedly, "is one of the least benightedly unintelligent organic life forms it has been my profound lack of pleasure not to be able to avoid meeting.

It just seemed to us that if the whole of the rest of the Universe is destroyed it will somehow upset the balance. We're quite keen on ecology, you see.

There was a sound he couldn't immediately identify, partly because he didn't know the tune "I Left My Leg in Jaglan Beta" and partly because the band playing it was very tired, and some members of it were playing in three-four time, some in four-four, and some in a kind of pie-eyed πr^2, each according to the amount of sleep he'd managed to grab recently.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of flying.There is an art, it says, or, rather, a knack to flying.The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.

All she could foresee was eventually finding herself saying to someone that she loved him, when what she would mean was that he happened to have turned up at a particularly needy time.