Home > Author > Ward Just
1 " What brings us anywhere? You take one turn instead of another, you meet one woman instead of another, you have good health or you don't, luck vies with misfortune, you break down and arrive at Bellevue in your bathrobe on a Saturday morning or - what was his father's antique phrase - you pulled up your socks and got on with things. Your heart adapted to changing times. Your body did. Or it did not and you passed your days in a muffler of regret. And that was what they called intelligent design. "
― Ward Just , Forgetfulness
2 " You think such an attitude is admirable. Manly, heroic even. 'Lived harmlessly.' 'Kept to himself.' Hide away somewhere and your past will cease to exist. You won't have to account for it. You'll feel no obligation to explain your actions or justify them because you've gone away and you expect your victims to go away too. It's like leaving the scene of an accident . . . Or a marriage. Even a field of battle. "
3 " ...it was easy to forget that Washington was just another glum city of government, like Albany or Sacramento, legislators and lobbyists and bureaucrats and their clerks working and reworking the sodden language of government in order to distribute the spoils. "
― Ward Just
4 " He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual. "
5 " You could never know what transpired beneath another's skin. "
6 " He believed something that he could hardly explain, even to himself. He thought it was a tragedy that would have to be played out, in the sense that water always seeks its own level. In some ultimate sense, there was no one at the controls. The war ran on its own motion...But the thing would not be stopped, because to stop it, simply to end it, would be to repudiate too much. Too many words to eat, too many unforeseen consequences, too much shame, too many unrequited dead. So the war was a force of nature, a wand of the gods... "
7 " This was one of the unfortunate consequences of exaggerating the enemy's evil. You were obligated to exaggerate your own virtues as well. To counter the enemy's fiendish subversion, you wielded a blunt instrument of righteousness. And then you got a congressional committee of yahoos with subpoena power and God on their side...If only, Axel thought. If only they weren't so god damned dumb. "
8 " The Just and the unJust inhabiting the same body, so close you can’t pry us apart, but we are not friends. He speaks, I edit. He plays, I work. He is famously convivial, I am a recluse. And at the end of the evening, when I’m exhausted and yearning for bed, knowing there’s an assignment to complete, he stays on, anything to keep me in the closet a little longer. And when the inevitable question comes, he answers it with aplomb, holding his glass — Don’t mind if I do. "
9 " The country was in a hell of a mess, altogether better off if both coasts were amputated and allowed to drift away, the East in the direction of Soviet Russia and the West to Red China, allowing the heartland to manage its own affairs. "
10 " The childhood of our parents is forever inscrutable, the cave within the cave of our own. The light’s too dim, the dancing shadows unreliable, fundamentally unstable, even the impromptu photographs and private letters somehow contrived. "
― Ward Just , An Unfinished Season
11 " Axel smiled. "They say that good judgment comes from experience. And experience come from bad judgment." Alec laughed... "
