Home > Author > Josephine Humphreys
21 " Marry me,' he said. [...]'No,' she said. 'It scares me.' [...] 'What aspect of it scares you?' 'The loneliness. "
― Josephine Humphreys , Dreams of Sleep
22 " It dawned on him that the loneliness of marriage, the thing Alice had so feared, starts out of love itself, which can never deliver on its promises. "
23 " She knew what she looked like - someone at the edge of catastrophe, someone already flinching from a blow that had not yet been delivered. "
24 " Why do philosophers in the South so often end as newspapermen, poets as doctors? Maybe they crave what's found in pain and loss: a sense of living among other human beings. They'll give up dreams for that. "
25 " Nineteen and living a life not his own, he was sure enough of his worth to put his name to his work and let it stand for him. Did not even have a wife yet, according to Queen, so it was not love that set him to cutting the pine, but a trust and a longing. "
26 " He longed for a heart like the one his friend was getting, an unstoppable pump that would not falter. Danny might appear to be in trouble, but he never really is, he has this secret strength. Now, though he's lost fifty thousand dollars in a golf-course scheme and his ex-wife is suing him and he lives without furniture, these are minor details. The man is complete. Self-destructive to some extent, but whole enough to take it. "
27 " Growing up in an old city, you learn history's one true lesson: that history fades. Nothing sticks together for very long without immense effort. His own strong house is in a constant process of disintegration. He calls workmen to come repair the roof, paint the porches, replace sills; but even this work has no permanence, it will have to be done again in four or five years. Is this noble activity for a man? Patching, gluing, temporizing, begging for time? "
28 " But Iris walks through the project every day. Alice asked, "Isn't it dangerous?" Iris said, "I don't know. I guess it could be, if you're afraid. I'm not because it's just something I've always done. I mean, if you live in it you aren't scared of it. "
29 " Still, he's Emory. He doesn't have to walk her home, especially considering how snitty she was to him. He didn't have to come in and stop her cruelty to Fay, or watch over her as he has evidently been continuing to do, drawing those pictures on the Reeses' sidewalk. She knew the pictures were for her and her children. She and Emory did not always spell things out, but she knew, when he drew pictures, what they meant. "
30 " They sounded frantic; he imagined them driven into the night by a force stronger than hunger or love, flying blind, scared stiff but having no choice in the matter. "
31 " It isn't that nothing is left. It is that what remains is such an old sad ghost of the thing that used to be, and he can't bear lying down with the vestiges. "