12 quotes
I’d hate to have you running hell, the lost souls would never get fried!
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
You’re a has-been that never was. And you’re going to stay that way, spoiled and narcissistic and small and mean and rotten.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
I have hit forty, forty has hit me, like a locomotive.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
“Off the mount, Nolan,” said the priest, “and enough of the sermon. What’s your point?”
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
There’s too much chance for shock. And yet I must tell her the truth. A doctor gets nowhere by lying to his patient.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
But all the little inside-people sitting around in her head would rock back in their tiny rockers and cackle and say, “You ain’t foolin’ us none, Grandma.”
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
“You move against my ethics,” said the priest.
“A drowning man clutches at anything,” said Nolan, “and ethics may drown with him if that’s what he grabs instead of a life belt.”
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
Oh, oh. Here he comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
You know and I know, I am Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do.
The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
In sum, my contact lenses had made me fifteen years old again. That is: festering, self-crucified bundle of doubt, horror, and absolute imperfection. The worst age in all one’s life had returned to haunt me with its pimpled, bumpy ghost.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory—you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he’s all out of kilter.
I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)