Francie is smart she thought.  She must go to high school and maybe beyond that.  She’s a learner and she’ll be somebody someday.  But when she gets educated, she will grow away from me.  Why she’s growing away from me now.  She does not love me the way the boy loves me.  I feel her turn away from me.  She does not understand me.  All she understands is that I don’t understand her.  Maybe when she gets educated she’ll be ashamed of me – the way I talk.  But she will have too much character to show it.  Instead she will try to make me different.  She will come to see me and try to make me live in a better way and I will be mean to her because I’ll know she’s above me.  She will figure out too much about things as she grows older; she’ll get to know too much for her own happiness. She’ll find out one day that I don’t love her as much as I love the boy.  I cannot help it that this is so. But she won’t understand that. Sometimes I think she knows that now. Already she is growing away from me; she will fight to get away soon. Changing over to that far-away school was the first step in her getting away from me. But Neeley will never leave me, that is why I love him best. He will cling to me and understand me. I want him to be a doctor. He must be a doctor. Maybe he will play the fiddle, too. There is music in him. He got that from his father. He has gone farther on the piano than Francie or me. Yes, his father has the music in him but it does him no good. It is ruining him. If he couldn’t sing, those men who treat him to drinks wouldn’t want him around. What good is the fine way he can sing when it doesn’t make him or us any better? With the boy, it will be different. He’ll be educated. I must think out ways. We’ll not have Johnny with us long. Dear God, I loved him so much once -  and sometimes I still do. But he’s worthless…worthless.  And God forgive me for ever finding it out.

Thus Katie figured everything out in the moments it took them to climb the stairs. People looking up at her – at her smooth pretty vivacious face – had no way of knowing abut the painfully articulated resolves formulating in her mind.

The constant battle with the reproductive process, a war in which her only allies were pharmaceutical robots, alien agents whose artificial assistance seemed more treacherous than trustworthy, was gnawing with plastic teeth at her very concepts of love. Was it entirely paranoid to suspect that all those stoppers, thingamajigs, and substances devised to prevent conception were intended not to liberate womankind from the biological and social penalties imposed on her natural passions but, rather, at the insidious design of capitalistic puritans, were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute its dark juices, to contain its wilder fires, to censor its sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean (clean as a laboratory autoclave, clean as a hospital bed), to order it uniform, to render it safe; to eliminate the risk of uncontrollable feelings, illogical commitments, and deep involvements (substituting for those risks the less mysterious, tamer risks of infection, hemorrhage, cancer, and hormone imbalance); yes, to make sexual love so secure and same and sanitary, so slick and frolicsome, so casual that it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch, an itch far removed from any direct relation to the feverish enigmas of Life and Death, and a scratching programmed so that it would in no way interfere with the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them?

Who does have a love life anymore? These days people have sex lives, not love lives. Lots of them are even giving up sex. I don’t have a love life because I’ve never met a man who knew how to have a love life. Maybe I don’t know how either.

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to “protect the revolution.” That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).

A book about 3 college friends in their 30’s coming to terms with being grown ups in NYC.

I’m not twenty-one, Mama. We don’t have time in life to start that kind of endless conversation (the “why don’t you like my boyfriend type”). Besides, I don’t know if I want to know. All my life people have been jealous of me for one thing or another, and I’m tired of pretending that I don’t notice, and I’m tired of feeling guilty about it. And the whole point about Danielle was that I never had to pretend before. I don’t want to be pretending.

Seriously. It’s narcissism, to love a wall and resent it for not loving you back. It’s perversity. Love is mutual, it flourishes in reciprocity. You can’t have real love without a return of affection – otherwise, it’s just an obsession, and projection. It’s childish.

Danielle reflected that growing up, coupling was a process of growing away from mirth, as if, like an amphibian, one ceased to breathe in the same way: laughter, once vital sustenance, protean relief and all that made isolation and struggle and fear bearable, was replaced by the stolid matter of stability: nominally content, resigned and unafraid, one grew to fear jokes and their capacity to unsettle. Where there had been laughter thre came a cold breeze. What, after all, was Julius doing shacked up with a golf-loving businessman? A year ago, he would himself guffawed at the notion. All of them, all three of them: a year ago, they’d been still linked, inexorably and, they’d thought, forever. It was supposedly better this way – each of them had found her heart’s desire – but did they laugh as they had done for so many years? Would they ever laugh that way again, or was it over now, in the Realm of Adult Sobriety?

Buy this book on amazon.

What changed your mind about Jax?
When the social worker asked Turtle about her family today, you know what she said? She said she didn’t have one.
Thats not right! She was confused.
Yeah. She’s confused, because I’m confused. I think of Jax and Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray, and of course you, and Mattie, all those people as my family. But when you never put a name on things, you’re just accepting that it’s okay for people to leave when they feel like it.
They leave anyway.
But you don’t have to accept it. That’s what your family is, the people you won’t let go of for anything.
Maybe.
Like, look at Mr. Stillwater. Cash. He’s still aching for Turtle after all this time. I hate to admit it, and I’m not going to say I think he should have her. Turtle is mine now. But he doesn’t accept that she’s gone. You can see it.
Alice has seen it in Cash. She saw it long before she knew what it was. A man who would go out of his way.

Logic only gives man what he needs.
Magic gives him what he wants.

She thought of Life, and said to herself, “It’s okay. I want more of it.”
She thought of Death, and said to herself, “If I fall out of this frigging treetop, I’ll soon enough learn it’s secrets.”

History is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.

Those folks who are concerned with freedom, real freedom – not the freedom to say shit in public or criticize their leaders or to worship God in the church of their choice, but the freedom to be free of languages and leaders and gods – well, they must use style to alter content. If our style is masterful, if it is fluid and at the same time complete, then we can recreate ourselves, or rather, we can re-create the Infinite Goof within us. We can live on top of content, float above the predictable responses, social programming and hereditary circuitry, letting the bits of color and electricity and light filter up to us, where we may incorporate them at will into our actions. That’s what the voices said. They said that content is what a man harbors but does not parade. And I love a parade.

As long as it’s done with honesty and grace, John Paul doesn’t mind if I go to bed with other men. Or with other girls, as is sometimes my fancy.
Then why the hell did you get married?
What the hell does marriage got to do with it? I married John Paul because I’m knocked out by his style. Because I love him and respect him and enjoy the transformations that take place as a result of our sharing the same dimensions. But, Marx, marriage is not a synonym for monogamy any more than monogamy is a synonym for ideal love. To live lightly on the earth, lovers and families must be more flexible and relaxed. The ritual of sex releases its magic inside or outside the marital bond. I approach that ritual with as much humility as possible and perform it whenever it seems appropriate. As for John Paul and me, a strange spurt of semen isn’t going to wash our love away.
Then why do you deny me?
Marx, you are as sensitive as you are stubborn. And, you’re well, shall we say – terribly impressionable. You also tend to be possessive. Those are basic characteristics of Cancerians. I know you have no use for astrology but you can’t deny those are your traits. And neither John Paul nor I feel that you could handle a simple, free relationship with me. No sooner would we begin than you’d be in love with me, which is beautiful except that you’d make it so complex. You’d demand more of me. You’d be possessive and play ego games. You’d be jealous of John Paul. Before long you would create tension…between all three of us. Then where would we be? Friction at the Captain Kendrick. No, I don’t think you’re ready.

You people, that fucking magician, I don’t know all it is you’ve got yourselves into. But you wouldn’t if somebody would have raised you with a little guts, if somebody had put the fear of God in you.
You’re talking about the fear of authority.
In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.
Oh? Our duly constituted authority isn’t respectable enough for you?
The only authority I respect is one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.
You mean God?
Not necessarily.
You can’t possibly question authority, said the agent, ignoring the implications of her last remark. Who are you to question it. You don’t remember the war against fascist aggression back in the forties, when America defended herself against Hitler, you weren’t even born. Young lady, I risked my life in order that you could have freedom and education and all the good things of our society; the authorities of this nation saved it as a free and decent place for you to live in, but you don’t remember that do you? I risked my life…
You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking one’s life. So you lose it, you go to your hero’s heaven and everything is milk and honey ’til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That’s no courage. Real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one’s cliches.
The agent was thoughtful for a moment. Then he spewed, “What the hell do you know? Who are you, one infantile weirdo girl, to make these charges?

I liked One Hundred Years of Solitude and decided to read this because I was in the mood for what I remembered his style to be: depth & reality of characters. Be aware, notice the word love in the title.

After a crazy description of Florentino Ariza making love with Ausencia Santander.
He would say to her: “You treat me as if I were just anybody.” She would roar with the laughter of a free female and say: “Not at all: as if you were nobody.” He was left with the impression that she took away everything with mean spirited greed, and his pride would rebel and he would leave the house determined never to return. But then he would wake for no reason in the middle of the night, and the memory of the self-absorbed love of Ausencia Santander was revealed to him for what it was: a pitfall of happiness that despised and desired at the same time, but from which it was impossible to escape.

The start of the affair of Dr Juneval Urbino & Barbara Lynch
So their love became impossible when the carriage at her door became too conspicuous, and after 3 months it became nothing less than ridiculous. Without time to say anything, Miss Lynch would go to the bedroom as soon as she saw her agitated lover walk in the door. She took the precaution of wearing a full skirt on the days she expected him, a charming skirt from Jamaica with red flowered ruffles, without underwear, nothing in the belief that this convenience was going to help him ward off his fear. But he squandered everything she did to make him happy. He was more concerned with leaving as soon as possible than with achieving pleasure. She was left dangling, barely at the entrance of her tunnel of solitude, while he was already buttoning up again, as exhausted as if he had made absolute love on the dividing line between life and death, when in reality he had accomplished no more than the physical act that is only a part of the feat of love. But he had finished in time: the exact time needed to give an injection during a routine visit. The he returned home ashamed of his weakness, longing for death, cursing himself for the lack of courage that kept him from asking Fermina Daza to pull down his trousers and burn his ass on the brazier.

By the time she had emptied the teapot and he the coffeepot, they had both attempted and then broken off several topics of conversation, not so much because they were really interested in them but in order to avoid others that neither dared to broach. They were both intimidated, they could not understand what they were doing so far from their youth on a terrace with checkerboard tiles in a house that belonged to no one that was still a redolent of cemetery flowers. It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. She thought that he would at last be convinced of the unreality of his dream, and that this would redeem his insolence.

Captain had an almost maternal affection for the manatees, because they seemed to him like ladies damned by some extravagant love, and he believed the truth of the legend that they were the only females in the animal kingdom that had no mates.

They talked to pass the time. They spoke of themselves, of their divergent lives, of the incredible coincidence of their lying naked in a dark cabin on a stranded boat when reason told them they had time only for death.
…
Florentino Ariza, for his part, suddenly asked himself what he would never have dared to ask himself before: what kind of secret life had she led outside of her marriage? Nothing would have surprised him, because he knew that women are just like men in their secret adventures: the same stratagems, the same sudden inspirations, the same betrayals without remorse. But he was wise not to ask the question.

At last they mode wholesome love of experienced grandparents, as she would keep as her best memory of that lunatic voyage. Contrary to what the Captain and Zenaida supposed, they no longer felt like newlyweds, and even less like belated lovers. It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

We present our society as being on of free initiative, individualism, and idealism, when in reality these are mostly words. We are a centralized managerial industrial society, of an essentially bureaucratic nature, motivated by materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly spiritual or religious concerns.

Life was masking the big fat drops out of Julian and Sissy. They had chipmunk festivals in their stomachs and the fillings in their teeth were picking up signals from sentimental radio. Life is forever pulling this number on men and women, and then acting surprised and innocent, as if it didn’t realize it was hurting anybody.

A pair of actors trapped in a recondite play with no hint of plot or narrative. Stumbling through their parts, nursing someone else’s sorrow. Grieving someone else’s grief. Unable somehow, to change plays. Or, purchase, for a fee, some cheap brand of exorcism from a couselor with a fancy degree, who would sit them down and say, in one of many ways: “You’re not the Sinners. Your the Sinned Against. You were only children. You had no control. You are the victims not perpetrators.”

If he held her, he couldn’t kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn’t see her. If he saw her, he couldn’t feel her. If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her, he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought, he couldn’t win.

The love laws lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much.

Around 10,000 years ago people gave up the foraging life and settled down to become farmers.

The lie in this is in the word people, Julie. It wasn’t people who did this, it was the people of your culture – one of tens of thousands cultures. The lie is that your actions are humanity’s actions. The lie is that you are humanity itself and that your history is human history. The truth is that 10,000 years ago on people gave up the foraging life and settled down to become farmers.

Erratic Retaliation: Give as good as you get, but don’t be too predictable. If another tribe isn’t bothering you, don’t bother them. but if they do, be sure to return the favor. Also, if another tribe isn’t bothering you, it will be no bad thing if you make a hostile move against them from time to time. They will retaliate, but this is the price to be paid for letting them know that you’re there and haven’t gotten soft. Then, once the score is even between you, you can get together for a reconciliation party to celebrate your undying friendship and do some matchmaking (because, of course, it doesn’t do to breed endlessly within a single tribe).