"The lean days, blue skies with never a cloud, a sea of blue day after
day, the sun floating through it. The days of plenty--plenty of worries,
plenty of oranges. Eat them in bed, eat them for lunch, push them down
for dinner. Oranges, five cents a dozen. Sunshine in the sky, sun juice
in my stomach" (pàg. 23)
"“I’d love to read it!” she said, and she sat erect, rigid with
eagerness. I threw myself on the bed, buried my face in the pillow, and
the little girl read my story with a soft sweet voice that had me
weeping at the first hundred words. It was like a dream, the voice of an
angel filling the room, and in a little while she was sobbing too,
interrupting her reading now and then with gulps and chokes, and
protesting. “I can’t read anymore,” she would say, “I can’t.” And I
would turn over and beseech her: “But you’ve got to, Judy. Oh, you got
to!”" (pàg. 61)
"Dear Sammy,
That little whore was here tonight; you know, Sammy, the little Greaser dame
with a wonderful figure and a mind for a moron. She presented me with certain
alleged writings purportedly written by yourself. Furthermore she stated the man with the scythe is about to mow you under. Under ordinary circumstances I
would call this a tragic situation. But having read the bile your manuscripts
contain, let me speak for the world at large and say at once that your departure
is everybody's good fortune. You can't write, Sammy, I suggest you concentrate
on the business of putting your idiotic soul in order these last days before you
leave a world that sighs with relief at your departure. I wish I could honestly say
that I hate to see you go. I wish too that, like myself, you could endow posterity
with something like a monument to your days upon this earth. But since this is
so obviously impossible, let me urge you to be without bitterness in your final
days. Destiny has indeed been unkind to you. Like the rest of the world, I
suppose you too are glad that in a short time all will be finished, and the ink spot
you have splattered will never be examined from a larger view. I speak for all
sensible, civilized men when I urge you to burn this mass of literary manure and
thereafter stay away from pen and ink. If you have a typewriter, the same holds true; because even the typing in this manuscript is a disgrace. If, however, you persist in your pitiful desire to write, by all means send me the pap you compose. I found at least you are amusing. Not deliberately, of course." (pàg. 142)
"When it was all gone, the dream of floating toward bursting stars, and
the flesh returned to hold my blood in its prosaic channels, when the
room returned, the dirty sordid room, the vacant meaningless ceiling,
the weary wasted world, I felt nothing but the old sense of guilt, the
sense of crime and violation, the sin of destruction.” (pàg. 173)
