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IRVING: Well, yes, they’re all fathers of my work, in a way. The polite world calls them extremists, but I think they are very truthful, very accurate. I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range. They are all disturbed—both comically and tragically—by who the victims of a society (or of each other) are. You can’t copy that; you can only agree with it.
[...] In church I'd thought I couldn't live without him, but time was passing. I continued to live. That impression of indispensability was changing. Indispensable now seemed to me not his physical presence -- I imagined him far away in Milan, happy, engaged in countless fine and useful things, recognized by everyone for his merits -- but reorganizing myself around a goal: becoming a person who could earn his respect. I now felt him as an authority equally indeterminate -- would he approve if I acted in such and such a way, or would he be opposed -- and indisputable.
[...] I was amazed by a gesture, a look, the expression on a face. These were moments when everything seemed to have a secret depth and it was up to me to discover it. [...]
"God isn't easy."
"He should think about becoming easy, if he wants me to understand anything."
"An easy God isn't God. He is other from us. We don't communicate with God, he's so beyond our level that he can't be questioned, only invoked. If he manifests himself, he does it in silence, through small precious mute signs that go by completely common names. Doing his will is bowing your head and obligating yourself to believe in him."
I also reduced to a minimum my relations with my mother. I was curt, saying things like: I won't be here today, I'm going to Pascone, and when she asked why, I answered, because I feel like it. I behaved like that certainly to feel free from all the old bonds, to make it clear that I didn't care anymore about the judgment of relatives and friends, their values, their wanting me to be consistent with what they imagined themselves to be.
[...] They were scrappier out west, ex-hippie workaholics, who had their minds altered with LSD and combined that with gearheadedness. The Massachusetts computer scientists wore ties, went to church, had families, and prioritized their weekends. They accepted the world as it was and lacked the selfish that e-commerce demanded of them.
lol
"Once you get to Kinshasa, Verms, you'll love this," Blue Jeans says. "Chez Poetique. Phenomenal cuisine and still off the beaten path even by the humble standards of the Dee-ROC."
funny type of person
[...] Finally she understands why it is harder to get a job as you get older: it is not lack of motivation, but experience of the sort that a resume never reveals. She will never walk into a job interview with a look of someone hopeful and innocent, who believes the doors to the future are open to everyone and just.
What she had read had evidently made her impatient of the prime discrepancy between man as he might be, and as he was. She would impose her crude belief that there could be heroism, excellence on herself and others, until they, or she, gave in. Exceptions could arise, rare and implausible, to suggest she might be right. To those exceptions she would give her whole devotion. It was apparently for them she was reserving her humility.
When Sefton Thrale said the word "global" you felt the earth to be round as a smooth ball, or white and bland as an egg. And had to remind yourself of the healthy and dreadful shafts and outcroppings of this world. You had to think of the Alps, or the ocean, or a live volcano to set your mind at rest.
lol