Blind People

"He closed the door carefully, as though his whole life had been spent in the exact science of closing doors."

"His mother had too much God in her."

"The afternoon moved like lava."

"And I remembered the inside of that apartment, how it smelled of mice and dust, and the old women who sat in the lobby on hot afternoons, and the old woman with the pretty legs. Then there was the elevator man, a broken man from Milwaukee, who seemed to sneer every time you called your floor, as though you were such a fool for choosing that particular floor, the elevator man who always had a tray of sandwiches in the elevator, and a pulp magazine."

"The hotel was called the Alta Loma. It was built on a hillside in reverse, there on the crest of Bunker Hill, built against the decline of the hill, so that the main floor was on the level with the street but the tenth floor was downstairs ten levels. If you had room 862, you got in the elevator and went down eight floors, and if you wanted to go down in the truck room, you didn't go down but up to the attic, one floor above the main floor."

"Afraid of a woman! Ha, great writer this! How can he write about women, when he's never had a woman? Oh you lousy fake, you phony, no wonder you can't write! No wonder there wasn't a woman in The Little Dog Laughed. No wonder it wasn't a love story, you fool, you dirty little schoolboy."

"Then Lola Linton came on, slithering like a satin snake amid the tumult of whistling and pounding feet, Lola Linton lascivious, slithering and looting my body, and when she was through, my teeth ached from my clamped jaws and I hated the dirty lowbrow swine around me, shouting their share of a sick joy that belonged to me."

"I pulled the huge door open and it gave a little cry like weeping. Above the altar sputtered the blood-red eternal light, illuminating in crimson shadow the quiet of almost two thousand years."

"I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet. Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street. The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun. And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Los Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mâché homes were castles. The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home. These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians. With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged."

"I don't remember what I did after I left her. Maybe I went up to Benny Cohen's room over the Grand Central Market. He had a wooden leg with a little door in it. Inside the door were marijuana cigarets."

"Tonight there was music in the saloon, a piano and a violin; two fat women with hard masculine faces and short haircuts. Their song was Over the Waves. Ta de da da, and I watched Camilla dancing with her beer tray. Her hair was so black, so deep and clustered, like grapes hiding her neck. This was a sacred place, this saloon. Everything here was holy, the chairs, the tables, that rag in her hand, that sawdust under her feet. She was a Mayan princess and this was her castle. I watched the tattered huaraches glide across the floor, and I wanted those huaraches. I would like them to hold in my hands against my chest when I fell asleep. I would like to hold them and breathe the odor of them."

"I sat smiling wretchedly, my heart weeping for The Little Dog Laughed, for every well-turned phrase, for the little flecks of poetry through it, my first story, the best thing I could show for my whole life. It was the record of all that was good in me, approved and printed by the great J. C. Hackmuth, and she had torn it up and thrown it into a spittoon."

"Lift thyself up, look. around, and see something higher and brighter than earth, earthworms, and earthly darkness."

"How calmly may we commit ourselves to the hands of Him who bears up the world!"

"Has it never occurred to us, when surrounded by sorrows, that they may be sent to us only for our instruction, as we darken the cages of birds when we wish to teach them to sing?"

"The miracles of earth are the laws of heaven."

"Suffering is my gain; I bow To my Heavenly Father's will, And receive it hushed and still; Suffering is my worship now."

"When in your last hour (think of this) all faculty in the broken spirit shall fade away, and sink into inanity — imagination, thought, effort, enjoyment — then will the flower of belief, which blossoms even in the night, remain to refresh you with its fragrance in the last darkness."

"The last, best fruit that comes to perfection, even in the kindliest soul, is tenderness toward the hard; forbearance toward the unforbearing; warmth of heart toward the cold; and philanthropy toward the misanthropic."

"The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy."

"No one is so much alone in the universe as a denier of God. With an orphaned heart, which has lost the greatest of fathers, he stands mourning by the immeasurable corpse of nature, no longer moved and sustained by the Spirit of the universe."

"The wish falls often warm upon my heart that I may learn nothing here that I cannot continue in the other world; that I may do nothing here but deeds that will bear fruit in heaven."

"The life of Christ concerns Him who, being the holiest among the mighty, and the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages."

"The virtues, like the body, become strong more by labor than by nourishment."

"Music is the moonlight in the gloomy night of life."

"When Antipater demanded fifty children as hostages from the Spartans, they offered him, in their stead, a hundred men of distinction; unlike ordinary educators, who precisely reverse the offering. The Spartans thought rightly and nobly. In the world of childhood all posterity stands before us, upon which we, like Moses upon the promised land, may only gaze, but not enter."

"The past and future are veiled; but the past wears the widow's veil; the future, the virgin's."

"A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward."

"The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope (1725)"

"The Odyssey of Homer, trans. William Cowper (1791)"

"The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Samuel Butcher and Andrew Lang (1879)"

"The Odyssey, trans. George Herbert Palmer (1884)"

"The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Philip Stanhope Worsley and John Conington (1865)"

"The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Doubleday, 1961)"

"The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, 1997),"

"The Odyssey, trans. E. V. Rieu (Penguin Books, 1946)"

"The Iliad of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope (1720)"

"The Iliad of Homer, trans. Edward, Earl of Derby (1864)"

"The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson (W. W. Norton & Company, 2017),"

"The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler (1898)"

"The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, 1991),"

"It was Homer who gave laws to the artist; it was Homer who inspired the poet."

"The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (University of Chicago Press, 1951)"

"Notwithstanding the veneration due and paid to Homer, it is very strange, yet true, that among the most learned, and the greatest admirers of antiquity, there is scarce one to be found who ever read the Iliad with that eagerness and rapture which a woman feels when she reads the Novel of Zaïda... The common part of mankind is awed with the fame of Homer, rather than struck with his beauties."

"Facilius esse Herculi clavam quam Homero versum subripere."

"His gods are perhaps at once absurd and entertaining."

"The Iliad of Homer, trans. Samuel Butler (1898)"

"As learned commentators view In Homer more than Homer knew."

"But how did you come to have this skill about Homer only, and not about Hesiod or the other poets? Does not Homer speak of the same themes which all other poets handle? Is not war his great argument? and does he not speak of human society and of intercourse of men, good and bad, skilled and unskilled, and of the gods conversing with one another and with mankind, and about what happens in heaven and in the world below, and the generations of gods and heroes? Are not these the themes of which Homer sings?"

"Are vitality and creativity somehow connected with bellicosity? Could there have been Greek civilisation without this restless obsession with fighting? The place of Homer, especially the Iliad, in Greek culture accentuates these disturbing questions. While the cliché that Homer was "the Bible of the Greeks" is misleading – his was in no way a sacred or unquestionable text – he was central to their basic education, and at least as familiar as Shakespeare is to us, if not more so."