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21 " I am something of a crank about sleep, for if I get seven and a quarter hours instead of eight I feel afflicted and drag myself around, although there's nothing really wrong with me. It's just another idea. That's how it is with my ideas; they seem to get strong while I weaken. "
― Saul Bellow , Henderson the Rain King
22 " Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe. "
23 " Well, what o you want?" I said. "I am the type of guy who couldn't survive without disfigurement. Life has worked me over. It wasn't just the war, either.... I got a bad wound, you know. But the shots of life..." I gave myself a bang on the breast. "Right here! You know what I mean, King? "
24 " My soul is like a pawn shop. I mean it's filled with unredeemed pleasures, old clarinets, and cameras, and motheaten fur. "
25 " And I prayed and prayed, ‘Oh, you…Something,’ I said, ‘you Something because of whom there is not Nothing. Help me to do Thy will. Take off my stupid sins. Untrammel me. Heavenly Father, open up my dumb heart and for Christ’s sake preserve me from unreal things. Oh, Thou who tookest me from pigs, let me not be killed over lions. And forgive my crimes and nonsense and let me return to Lily and the kids. "
26 " Io? Io amo la vecchia troia così com'è e mi piace pensare di esser pronto ad accogliere anche il peggio che essa abbia da offrirmi. Io veramente adoro la vita, e se non posso raggiungerla in faccia, lascio andare il mio bacio un poco più in basso. "
27 " The earth is a huge ball which nothing holds up in space except its own motion and magnetism, and we conscious things who occupy it believe we have to move too, in our own space. We can't allow ourselves to lie down and not to do our share and imitate the greater entity. "
28 " It's wasted on dummies." (Life is). "They give it to dummies and fools. "
29 " More of fear than of any other thing has been created. "
30 " Quickly, I too bent and bowed in the short pants and corky white helmet with my overheated face and great nose. My face can be like the clang of a bell, and because I am hard of hearing on the right side I have a way of swinging the left into position, listening in profile and fixing my eyes on some object to help my concentration. So I did. I waited for him to say more, sweating boisterously, for I was confounded down to the ground. I couldn't believe it; I was so sure that I had left the world "
31 " I might have added, as it entered my mind to do, that some people found satisfaction in being. Being. Others in becoming. Being people have all the breaks. Becoming people are very unlucky, always in a tizzy. The Becoming people are always have to make explanations or offer justifications of the Being people. While the Being people provoke these explanations. "
32 " Humankind is still fooling around with hypocrisy, I thought. They don’t realize that it’s too late even for that. "
33 " And when I say that he lost his head, what I mean is not that his judgement abandoned him but that his enthusiasms and visions swept him far out. "
34 " Disease is a speech of the psyche....the psyche is a polyglot, for if it converts fear into symptoms it also converts hope. "
35 " I am giving up the violin. I guess I will never reach my object through it,” to raise my spirit from the earth, to leave the body of this death. I was very stubborn. I wanted to raise myself into another world. My life and deeds were a prison. "
36 " told him a lot, right then and there. What? Well, for instance, that chaos doesn’t run the whole show. That this is not a sick and hasty ride, helpless, through a dream into oblivion. No, sir! It can be arrested by a thing or two. By art, for instance. The speed is checked, the time is redivided. Measure! That great thought. Mystery! The voices of angels! "
37 " feel like a lousy impostor. The only decent thing about me is that I have loved certain people in my life. "
38 " One of the bonds between Lily and me is that we both suffer with our teeth. She is twenty years my junior but we wear bridges, each of us. Mine are at the sides, hers are in front. She has lost the four upper incisors. It happened while she was still in high school, out playing golf with her father, whom she adored. The poor old guy was a lush and far too drunk to be out on a golf course that day. Without looking or given warning, he drove from the first tee and on the backswing struck his daughter. It always kills me to think of that cursed hot July golf course, and this drunk from the plumbing supply business, and the girl of fifteen bleeding. Damn these weak drunks! Damn these unsteady men! I can't stand these clowns who go out in public as soon as they get swacked to show how broken-hearted they are. But Lily would never hear a single word against him and wept for him sooner than for herself. She carries his photo in her wallet. "
39 " But this was more mental… mental deceit; dream. My head was out of order, as I realized even then. I was most aware of it at night, under the influence of fever, when mountains and idols and cattle and lions, and gross black women, the amazons, and the face of the king and the thatch of the hopo visited my mind, coming and going unannounced. "
40 " True. All too true. I have never been at home inlife. All my decay has taken place upon a child. "