Hotel New Hampshire Quotes

You've got to get obsessed and stay obsessed.

Keep passing the open windows.

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day, the opportunities stop, you know.

Sorrow floats.

Just when you begin thinking of yourself as memorable, you run into someone who can't even remember having met you

Human beings are remarkable - at what we can learn to live with. If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough, could we? What else makes us strong?

Safer than we are.” I told Franny. “Safer than love.” “let me tell ya kid,” Franny said to me, squeezing my hand. “Everything’s safer than love.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.

If we couldn't get strong from what we lose, and what we miss, and what we want and can't have, then we couldn't ever get strong enough.

Lilly was not crazy. She left a serious suicide note. 'Sorry,' said the note. 'Just not big enough.

Don’t you understand?” he would say, “You imagine the story better than I remember it.

Nothing moves at the Hotel New Hampshire! We're screwed down here-for life!

But I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

Sell my old clothes - I'm off to heaven

What she might have told him was that taxidermy, like sex, is a very personal subject; the manner in which we impose it on others should be discreet.

But I often think that so-called glamorous people are just very busy people.

And Father said, “There are no happy endings.” “Right!” cried Iowa Bob – an odd mixture of exuberance and stoicism in his cracked voice. “Death is horrible, final, and frequently premature,” Coach Bob declared. “So what?” my father said. “Right!” cried Iowa Bob. “That’s the point: So what?” Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.

Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too!

I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them.

...the single ingredient in American literature that distinguishes it from other literatures of the world is a kind of giddy, illogical hopefulness. It is quite technically sophisticated while remaining ideologically naïve.

Hang in there, Frank!' Freud called - to the entire lobby. 'Don't let anyone tell you you're queer! You're a prince, Frank!' Freud cried. 'You're better than Rudolf!' Freud yelled to Frank. 'You're more majestic than all the Hapsburgs, Frank!' Freud encouraged him. Frank couldn't speak, he was crying so hard.

Of course: because it was in one of the camps that he went blind. They had performed some failed experiment on his eyes in the camp. ‘No, not summer camp,’ Franny had to tell Lilly, who had always been afraid of being sent to summer camp, and was unsurprised to hear that they tortured the campers.

Franny’s Hollywood name, her acting name, is one you know. This is our family’s story, and it’s inappropriate for me to use Franny’s stage name – but I know that you know her. Franny is the one you always desire. She is the best one, even when she’s the villain; she always the real hero, even when she dies, even when she dies for love – or worse, for war. She’s the most beautiful, the most unapproachable, but the most vulnerable too, somehow – and the toughest. (She’s why you go to the movie, or why you stay.)

But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not. And because that is what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear.

A terrorist, I think, is simply another kind of pornographer. The pornographer pretends he is disgusted by his work; the terrorist pretends he is uninterested in the means. The ends, they say, are what they care about. But they are both lying. Ernst loved his pornography; Ernst worshiped the means. It is never the ends that matter -- it is only the means that matter. The terrorist and the pornographer are in it for the means. The means is everything to them. The blast of the bomb, the elephant position, the Schlagobers and blood -- they love it all. Their intellectual detachment is a fraud; their indifference is feigned. They both tell lies about having ‘higher purposes.’ A terrorist is a pornographer.

Love also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.

It was as if all the books in her room had been feeding on her, had consumed – not nourished – her.

A what?” said Egg. No doubt he thought that an inferiority complex was a weapon; sometimes, I guess, it is.

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day the opportunities stop, you know?

But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That's what happens, like it or not.

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day the opportunities stop, you know?

I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.

I made some fresh pasta with a neat machine Frank brought from New York; it flattens the dough in sheets and cuts the pasta into any shape you want. It’s important to have toys like that, if you live in Maine.

When somebody touches you...and you really don’t wanna be touched, that’s not really being touched. You still got you inside of you. And nobody has touched you. Not really. You still got you inside of you. You believe that.

Why does it seem to take more than half a lifetime to get to be a lousy teenager? Why does childhood take forever – when you’re a child? Why does it seem to occupy a solid three-quarters of the whole trip? And when it’s over, when the kids grow up, when you suddenly have to face facts…well,” Frank said to me, just recently, “you know the story. When we were in the first Hotel New Hampshire, it seemed we’d go on being thirteen and fourteen and fifteen forever. For fucking forever, as Franny would say. But once we left the first Hotel New Hampshire,” Frank said, “the rest of our lives moved past us twice as fast. That’s just how it is,” Frank claimed, smugly. “For half your life, you’re fifteen. Then one day your twenties begin, and they’re over the next day. And your thirties blow by you like a weekend spent with pleasant company. And before you know it, you’re thinking about being fifteen again.

I walked all the way through the Heldenplatz – the Plaza of Heroes – and stood where thousands of cheering fascists had greeted Hitler, once. I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.

People are like that .... They need to make their own worst experiences universal. It gives them a kind of support.’ And who can blame them? It is just infuriating to argue with someone like that; because of an experience that has denied them their humanity, they go around denying another kind of humanity in others, which is the truth of human variety -- it stands alongside our sameness.

Even before she started talking to Franny, I could see how desperately important this woman’s private unhappiness was to her, and how—in her mind—the only credible reaction to the event of rape was hers. That someone else might have responded differently to a similar abuse only meant to her that the abuse couldn’t possibly have been the same.

Why does everyone have to hurt you to stop you?

I thought that fanatics would always have an audience; all one might hope to influence was the size of the audience.

When you write vaguely, you are always vulnerable.

But in her first days with us, Susie was a bear on the rape issue—and on a lot of other issues, too.

Mother and Egg would meet us in Vienna the next day; Sorrow would fly with them.

We tell him, now, that he might have helped her that time, but in the long run, we know, doom floats.

Тренер Боб знал это с самого начала: ты должен стать одержимым и не растерять одержимости. Ты должен и дальше проходить мимо открытых окон.

And I? With Egg and Mother gone—and Sorrow in an unknown pose, or in disguise—I knew we had arrived in a foreign country.

We had learned this fact of Sorrow, previously, from Frank: Sorrow floats.

You can see why we children asked so many questions. It is a vague story, the kind parents prefer to tell.

She shot from the sky to the bottom of the sea with her son beside her screaming, Sorrow hugged to his chest.

Семь лет мы все не более чем дрейфовали по течению, но и не тонули.

you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows.

Every misunderstanding has at its center a breakdown of language.

My God,” Franny would say later. “They would bring their daughter to see a murder, but they wouldn’t even let her hear about an orgasm. Americans sure are strange.

But this is what we do: we dream on, and our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them. That’s what happens, like it or not.

Add doom to the list, then. Especially in families, doom is “altogether common.” Sorrow floats; love, too; and – in the long run – doom. It floats, too.

It would always amaze me, how Frank could make pure idiocy sound logical.

smelled of cigars extinguished in puddles of beer.

Sorrow,” Frank kept repeating, until he fell asleep. “It’s Sorrow,” he murmured. “You can’t kill it,” Frank mumbled. “It’s Sorrow. It floats.

LOVE also floats. And, that being true, love probably resembles Sorrow in other ways.

According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.

I guess that’s just one of the reasons it’s the most beautiful bar in the world, in my opinion: it has the grace to make no one feel self-conscious about any unhappiness.

He seemed only slightly intimidated by my muscles; he had an arrogance larger than most people’s hearts and minds.

Add doom to the list, then. Especially in families, doom is “altogether common.” Sorrow floats; love, too; and—in the long run—doom. It floats, too.

Franny was awful to him, but Franny was not awful; and Frank was not really awful to any of us, except he (himself) was, somehow, awful.

Retrieving Sorrow is a kind of religion, too.

heard all the grown-ups kiss Franny good night and I thought: Families must be like this—gore one minute, forgiveness the next.

In this world,” Franny once observed, “just when you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that they’ve met you.

В любой сказке, когда ты думаешь, что уже выбрался из леса, оказывается, что ты в еще более глухом лесу; только ты начинаешь думать, что лес уже позади, выясняется, что ты по-прежнему там.

There is at least one terrible thing about lovers – real lovers, I mean: people who are in love with each other, even then they will relish their every physical contact in a sexual way; even when they’re supposed to be in a kind of mourning, they can get aroused. Franny and I simply couldn’t have gone on holding each other on the stairs: it was impossible to touch each other, at all, and not want to touch everything.

In my arms, which I realized had grown very strong, I held the former Big Ten star, who was as heavy and meaningful, to me, as our family bear, and I stared into the short distance that separated us from Sorrow.

HERE is the epilogue; there always is one. In a world where love and sorrow float, there are many epilogues—and some of them go on and on. In a world where doom always muscles in, some of the epilogues are short.

...руководящий принцип нашей семьи сводился к тому, что осознание неизбежности печального конца не должно мешать жить полнокровной жизнью. Это базировалось на уверенности в том, что других концов, кроме печальных, не бывает.

We would note that ruins don’t change a lot: what capacity for change is in a ruin has usually been exhausted in the considerable process of change undergone in order for the ruin to become a ruin. Once becoming a ruin, a ruin stays pretty much the same.

…She was intimidating to me in the way someone who never remembers your name can be intimidating. ‘In this world,’ Franny once observed, ‘just when you’re trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that they’ve met you.

Or maybe Frank founded it,” Lilly said, once. Meaning nihilism, meaning anarchy, meaning trivial silliness and happiness in the face of gloom, meaning depression descending as regularly as night over the most mindless and joyful of days. Frank believed in zap! He believed in surprises. He was in constant attack and retreat, and he was equally, constantly, wide-eyed and goofily stumbling about in the sudden sunlight—tripping across the wasteland littered with bodies from the darkness of just a moment ago.

Frank, tell us what sex is,” Franny would say, but Father would rescue us all by saying, in his dreamy voice, “I can tell you: it couldn’t have happened today. You may think you have more freedom, but you also have more laws. That bear could not have happened today.

То, как устроен этот мир, не может служить основанием для слепого цинизма или незрелого отчаяния; миром — так верили они, Айова Боб и мой отец, — двигает, как бы скверно это у него ни получалось, страстное желание обрести какую-то цель, и мир просто обречен стать лучше.

When my mother felt my father take her hand into his—they were not clapping—she did not resist him; she gave back equal pressure, both of them never taking their eyes from the bulky bear performing below them, and my mother thought: I am nineteen and my life is just beginning.

Then I got up and went to the bathroom door and asked her if there was anything I could get her. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Just go out and get me yesterday and most of today,” she said. “I want them back.” “Is that all?” I said. “Just yesterday and today?” “That’s all,” she said. “Thank you.

Doris Wales was a woman with straw-blond hair whose body appeared to have been dipped in corn oil; then she must have put her dress on, wet. The dress grabbed at all her parts, and plunged and sagged over the gaps in her body; a lover’s line of hickeys, or love bites – ‘love-sucks,’ Franny called them – dotted Doris’s chest and throat like a violent rash; the welts were like wounds from a whip. She wore plum-covered lipstick, some of which was on her teeth, and she said, to Sabrina Jones and me, ‘You want hot-dancin’ music, or slow-neckin’ music? Or both?’ ‘Both,’ said Sabrina Jones, without missing a beat, but I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believe it would be no less complete.

Nowadays, of course, with the precautionary tests they take—especially with a woman Franny’s age—they already know the sex of the child; or someone knows. Not Franny—she didn’t want to know. Who wants to know such things in advance? Who doesn’t know that half of pleasure lies in the wonder of anticipation?

Thirty today, I saw The trees flare briefly like The candles upon a cake As the sun went down the sky, A momentary flash, Yet there was time to wish Before the light could die, If I had known what to wish, As once I must have known, Bending above the clean, Candlelit tablecloth To blow them out with a breath.

One thing,” Father said. Susie the bear put her paw on my hand, as if even Susie knew what was coming. “Just one thing,” Father said. We were very quiet, waiting for this. “It mustn’t look like Sorrow,” Father said. “And you’ve got the eyes, so you’ve got to pick out the dog. Just make sure it in no way resembles Sorrow.” —

До конца моих дней у меня останется ощущение, что я держу Чиппера Доува под мышки, и его ноги висят в нескольких дюймах над Седьмой авеню. Ничего больше с ним и нельзя было сделать — только поставить на место; с ним никогда ничего нельзя будет сделать: наших Чипперов Доувов мы только приподнимаем и ставим на место, раз за разом.

…it insisted to her that she was a writer, when perhaps she was only a sensitive and loving reader, a lover of literature who thought she wanted to write. I think it was the writing that killed Lilly, because writing can do that. It just burned her up; she wasn’t big enough to take the self-abuse of it, to take the constant chipping away – of herself.

THE summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born—we weren’t even conceived: not Frank, the oldest; not Franny, the loudest; not me, the next; and not the youngest of us, Lilly and Egg. My father and mother were hometown kids who knew each other all their lives, but their “union,” as Frank always called it, hadn’t taken place when Father bought the bear.

It’s what all the great agents do: they make the most incredible and illogical advice sound reasonable, they make you go ahead without fear, and that way you get it, you get more or less what you want, or you get something, anyway; at least you don’t end up with nothing when you go ahead without fear, when you lunge into the darkness as if you were operating on the soundest advice in the world.

Father was pretty good on the telephone; he counted the holes. Even so, Father still got a lot of wrong numbers, and they made him so cross that he invariably shouted to the persons on the receiving end of his calls—as if the wrong numbers had been their fault. “Jesus God!” he would holler. “You’re the wrong number!” Thus, in this small way, did my Father and his Louisville Slugger terrorize a portion of New York.

He accelerated his courses as much as possible, to graduate sooner; he was able to do this not because he was smarter than the other Harvard boys (he was older, but not smarter, than most of them) but because he spent little time with friends. He had a pregnant wife and two babies; he hardly had time for friends. His only recreation, he said, was listening to professional baseball games on the radio. Just a few months after the World Series, Father listened to the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Our father seemed to have lost his character when our mother was lost to him. In seven years, I believe, he grew to be more of a presence and less of a person—for us children. He was affectionate; he could even be sentimental. But he seemed as lost to us (as a father) as Mother and Egg, and I think we sensed that he would need to endure some more concrete suffering before he would gain his character back—before he could actually become a character again: in the way Egg had been a character, in the way Iowa Bob had been one.

My father maintained that latter ability all his life; we felt around him, always, the sense that he’d been observing us closely and affectionately—even if, when we looked at him, he seemed to be looking elsewhere, dreaming or making plans, thinking of something hard or faraway. Even when he was quite blind, to our schemes and lives, he seemed to be “observing” us. It was a strange combination of aloofness and warmth—and the first time my mother felt it was on that tongue of bright green lawn that was framed by the gray Maine sea.

And Father will say, “Of course I know what you mean, dear. We’ve been in the business for years, and that’s just what a good hotel does: it simply provides you with the space, and with the atmosphere, for what it is you need. A good hotel turns space and atmosphere into something generous, into something sympathetic—a good hotel makes those gestures that are like touching you, or saying a kind word to you, just when (and only when) you need it. A good hotel is always there,” my father will say, the baseball bat conducting both his lyrics and his song, “but it doesn’t ever give you the feeling that it’s breathing down your neck.

So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives. We give ourselves a sainted mother, we make our father a hero; and someone’s older brother and someone’s older sister – they become our heroes too. We invent what we love and what we fear. There is always a brave lost brother – and a little lost sister, too. We dream on and on: the best hotel, the perfect family, the resort life. And our dreams escape us almost as vividly as we can imagine them… That’s what happens, like it or not. And because that’s what happens, this is what we need: we need a good, smart bear… Coach Bob knew it all along: you’ve got to get obsessed and stay obsessed. You have to keep passing the open windows

I couldn't change enough, and I knew it. All I could do was something that would have pleased mo t h e r . I could give up swearing, I could clean up my language which had upset mother so. And so I did. "You mean you're not going to say 'fuck' or 'shit' or 'cocksucker' or even 'up yours' or 'in the ear' or anything, anymore?" Franny asked me. that's right," I said. "Not even 'asshole'?" Franny asked. "Right," I said. "You asshole," Franny said. "It makes as much sense as anything else," Frank reasoned. "You dumb prick," Franny baited me. "i think it's rather noble," Lilly said. "Small, but noble." "He lives in a second-rate whorehouse with people who want to start the world over and he wants to clean up his language," Franny said. "Cunthead," she told me. "You wretched fart," Franny said. "Beat your meat all night and dream of tits, but you want to sound nice, is that it?" she

She wanted me to go to college, and then she wanted me to go to California and be an actress. She wanted me to have everything I ever thought of wanting. “Look at her getting up on that stage like it was nothing,” she said to her friends. I went off to the University of New Hampshire, and after that I got on a plane to California and checked into a hotel room all by myself. I amazed her. She never once made me feel bad about leaving. I don’t know that I would have gone if I’d thought she’d be lonely. But she was so cheerful about everything, so happy for me. She had plenty of family around her still, and she knew everyone in town, so off I went. I don’t regret that. She would never have wanted me hanging around for her sake. She meant for me to do something with my life, the kinds of things she hadn’t been able to do herself. But when I think about what those years away added up to, I would rather have spent them with her. My

President Obama drilled this point home when I was getting ready to run. He reminded me that when we faced off in 2008, we would often end up staying at the same hotel in Iowa or New Hampshire. He said his team would be finished with dinner and getting ready to call it a night when we finally got there, completely spent. By the time he woke up the next morning, we’d be long gone. In short, he thought we overdid

Kelley gives the planning everything he’s got, both strategically and financially. He rents a Jaguar, the height of luxury (and fast, Kelley thinks). They will drive to Boston, have dinner at Alden and Harlow in Cambridge, and stay at the Langham, Mitzi’s favorite hotel—then in the morning, after breakfast in bed, they’ll drive to Deerfield, Massachusetts, and meander through the three-hundred-year-old village. From Deerfield, they’ll head to Hanover, New Hampshire, to have lunch at Dartmouth (Mitzi’s father, Joe, played basketball for Dartmouth in 1953 and Mitzi has always felt an affinity for the place), and then they’ll drive to Stowe, Vermont, and stay at the Topnotch, a resort. From Stowe, it’s up to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom to spend the night in St. Johnsbury. From there, they’ll go to Franconia Notch State Park, where they’ll ride the Cannon Mountain Aerial Tramway for the ultimate in foliage viewing. They’ll end with a night in charming Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town Kelley thinks is possibly the best-kept secret in America. He has arranged for a couple’s massage in front of the fire, for them to go apple-picking, on a hayride, out to dinners at fine country inns where bottles of champagne will be chilled and waiting on the tables, and for a personal yoga instructor in Stowe and then again in Portsmouth. He has made a mix of Mitzi’s favorite songs to play on the drive, and he’s packing up pumpkin muffins and his famous snack mix (secret ingredient: Bugles!) in case they get hungry on the road.

Reaching for his water glass, Jack rubbed his thumb over the film of condensation on the outside. Then he shot me a level glance as if taking up a challenge. “My turn,” he said. I smiled, having fun. “You’re going to guess my perfect day? That’s too easy. All it would involve is earplugs, blackout shades, and twelve hours of sleep.” He ignored that. “It’s a nice fall day—” “There’s no fall in Texas.” I reached for a cube of bread with little shreds of basil embedded in it. “You’re on vacation. There’s fall.” “Am I by myself or with Dane?” I asked, dipping a corner of the bread into a tiny dish of olive oil. “You’re with a guy. But not Dane.” “Dane doesn’t get to be part of my perfect day?” Jack shook his head slowly, watching me. “New guy.” Taking a bite of the dense, delicious bread, I decided to humor him. “Where are New Guy and I vacationing?” “New England. New Hampshire, probably.” Intrigued, I considered the idea. “I’ve never been that far north.” “You’re staying in an old hotel with verandas and chandeliers and gardens.” “That sounds nice,” I admitted. “You and the guy go driving through the mountains to see the color of the leaves, and you find a little town where there’s a crafts festival. You stop and buy a couple of dusty used books, a pile of handmade Christmas ornaments, and a bottle of genuine maple syrup. You go back to the hotel and take a nap with the windows open.” “Does he like naps?” “Not usually. But he makes an exception for you.” “I like this guy. So what happens when we wake up?” “You get dressed for drinks and dinner, and you go down to the restaurant. At the table next to yours, there’s an old couple who looks like they’ve been married at least fifty years. You and the guy take turns guessing the secret of a long marriage. He says it’s lots of great sex. You say it’s being with someone who can make you laugh every day. He says he can do both.” I couldn’t help smiling. “Pretty sure of himself, isn’t he?” “Yeah, but you like that about him. After dinner, the two of you dance to live orchestra music.” “He knows how to dance?” Jack nodded. “His mother made him take lessons when he was in grade school.” I forced myself to take another bite of bread, chewing casually. But inside I felt stricken, filled with unexpected yearning. And I realized the problem: no one I knew would have come up with that day for me. This is a man, I thought, who could break my heart.