Sabbath's Theater Quotes

Either foreswear fucking others or the affair is over.

Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that -- of just that.

Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the mania of lust.

You don't have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives.

I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.

As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn't touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

Nothing keeps its promise.

And he couldn’t do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

We are immoderate because grief is immoderate, all the hundreds and thousands of kinds of grief.

you will make mistakes on a scale you can’t even dream of now—because there is no other way to reach the end.

He couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

And he couldn't do it. He could not fucking die. How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.

Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who’d discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer—life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading.

I can’t really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don’t give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted.” “Everything is acted.” “Whatever. With me there’s some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don’t have. My life never seems real to me.

Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath’s sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense.

Which only goes to show what everyone learns sooner or later about loss: the absence of a presence can crush the strongest people.

But what affords the one with happiness affords the other with disgust. The interplay, the ridiculous interplay, enough to kill all and everyone

Two hundred and sixty miles round-trip, but it was worth it for Drenka’s breasts.

Emotions, when they’re revved up, don’t change, they’re the same, fresh and raw. Everything passes? Nothing passes. The same emotions are here!

You can store us like shoes or ship us like lettuce. The simpleton who invented the coffin was a poetic genius and a great wit.

Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

she hopped and darted to and fro like a bird in a berry bush, trilling and twittering a series of notes as liquidly bright as a cardinal’s song,

You want monogamy outside marriage and adultery inside marriage

Oh Mickey, it was wonderful, it was fun - the whole kitten and kaboozle. It was like living. And to be denied that whole part would be a great loss. You gave it to me. You gave me a double life. I couldn't have endured with just one." I'm proud of you and your double life." All I regret", she said, crying again, crying with him, the two of them in tears..."is that we couldn't sleep together too many nights. To commingle with you. Commingle?" Why not." I wish tonight you could spend the night." I do, too. But I'll be here tomorrow night." I meant it up at the Grotto. I didn't want to fuck any more men even without the cancer. I wouldn't do that even if I was alive." You are alive. It is here and now. It's tonight. You're alive." I wouldn't do it. You're the one I always loved fucking. But I don't regret that I have fucked many. It would have been a great loss to have had otherwise. Some of them, they were sort of wasted times. You must have that, too. Haven't you? With women you didn't enjoy?" Yes." Yes, I had experiences where the men would just want to fuck you whether they cared about you or not. That was always harder for me. I give my heart, I give my self, in my fucking." You do indeed." And then, after just a little drifting, she fell asleep and so he went home - "I'm leaving now" - and within two hours she threw a clot and was dead. So those were her last words, in English anyway. I give my heart, I give my self, in my fucking. Hard to top that. To commingle with you, Drenka, to commingle with you now.

But from within the carton, Morty's American flag - which I know is folded there, at the very bottom, in the official way - tells me, "It's against some Jewish law," and so, on into the car he went with the carton, and then he drove it down to the beach, to the boardwalk, which was no longer there. The boardwalk was gone. Good-bye, boardwalk. The ocean had finally carried it away. The Atlantic is a powerful ocean. Death is a terrible thing. That's a doctor I never heard of. Remarkable. Yes, that's the word for it. It was all remarkable. Good-bye, remarkable. Egypt and Greece good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!

Clothes are a masquerade anyway. When you go outside and see everyone in clothes, then you know for sure that nobody has a clue to why he was born and that, aware of it or not, people are perpetually performing in a dream.

Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it - that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostate like a billiard ball. If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out.

She had been stopped when Morty was killed, stopped from going forward, and all the logic went out of her life. She wanted life, as all people do, to be logical and linear, as orderly as she made the house and her kitchen and the boy's bureau drawers. She had worked so hard to be in control of a household's destiny. All her life she waited not only for Morty but for the explanation from Morty: Why? The question haunted Sabbath. Why? Why? If only someone will explain to us why, maybe we could accept it. Why did you die? Where did you go? However much you may have hated me, why don't you come back so we can continue with our linear, logical life like all the other couples who hate each other?

Husbands and wives are very common, Mickey. The whore said that’s what she does all the time.

Alienated her completely, managed even to arouse her repugnance by overplaying how unmenacing, unfrightening an old fuddy-duddy he was. And deprived her of the spotlight.

Hard to determine from the way she tackled her tasks whether it was she who was serving necessity or necessity that was serving her.

You want monogamy outside marriage and adultery inside marriage.

Guys with small dry lips, they turn me off, or if they smell bookish—you know, this dry pencil smell of men.

But he was in his fifties and there I always question how hard can they get. With a younger guy you know it’s an easier thing. With an older one you don’t know.

Everybody masturbates in libraries. That’s what they’re for.

Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the manias of lust.

Someone to whom the tangible and the immediate are repugnant, to whom only the illusion is fully real.

Puppets can fly, levitate, twirl, but only people and marionettes are confined to running and walking.

Dostoyevsky—everybody going around with grudges and immense fury, rage like it was all put to music, rage like it was two hundred pounds to lose.

Rascal Knockoff. I thought: Dostoyevsky fell in love with him.

I am more of a menace than I realize. This is serious. Premature senility. Senilitia, dementia, hell-bent-for-disaster erotomania.

Mishima. Rothko. Hemingway. Berryman. Koestler. Pavese. Kosinski. Arshile Gorky. Primo Levi. Hart Crane. Walter Benjamin. Peerless bunch. Nothing dishonorable signing on there.

Ava Gardner. Blessed Ava. Wasn’t much about men could astonish Ava. Elegance and filth, immaculately intertwined. Dead at sixty-two, two years younger than me.

The law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counter-thought, for every urge a counterurge. No wonder you either go crazy and die or decide to disappear.

This is aging, pure and simple, the self-destroying hilarity of the last roller coaster.

Quimper. Beyond quimper.

Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else.

Then why do you go around with an alte kocker’s beard and wearing your playground clothes—and with whores!

That is about the strongest bond in the world, the mother and the little boy. There couldn’t be anything stronger.

Nothing illegal is achieved without patience.’ Benjamin Franklin.

Neither a philo- nor an anti-Semite be; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.

I’ll take your case, son. I believe in your innocence no less than my own.” “Thanks, man. You a lawyer?” “No, a Hindu. And you?” “I’m Jewish. But I studied Buddhism.

Chekhov: ‘The important thing is to find the right smile.

Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

If he no longer gave a shit, why did he give a shit?

Whores. Played a leading role in my life. Always felt at home with whores. Particularly fond of whores.

Sabbath had the power, and he knew it, of being no one with anything much to lose.

It’s never been easy to say what you really are, Mickey.” “Oh, failure will do.” “But at what?” “Failure at failing, for one.

The last kiss is given to the void.

Nearly everybody has at least one good feature, and in mammals it’s usually the eyes.

Homeless, wifeless, mistressless, penniless . . . jump in the cold river and drown.

I was suddenly alarmed about leaving this attractive forty-five-year-old woman alone with him, dead though she was.

across the truck’s tailgate were painted the words “Barrett Electric Co. ‘We’ll fix your shorts.

Sabbath was a realist, ferociously a realist, so that by sixty-four he had all but given up on making contact with the living, let alone discussing his problems with the dead.

an aging man imprisoned on Goli Otok as an enemy of the regime

In the days of the Romance Run, each time you went back to the same whorehouses and you brought nylons to your favorite girls.

Anyhow, I took out my glasseye to sleep, and when I woke up I couldn’t remember where I’d put it.

And she was game. They’re all game, if you take your time and use your brains—and aren’t sixty-four years old.

Rosa was kneeling next to the bed now, stroking his scalp with one of her warm little hands. “Sick?” she asked. “Low self-esteem.

Su madre? Dónde, señor?” “Muerto.” “Hoy?” “Sí. This morning. Questo auroro. Aurora?” Italian again. Italy again, the Via Veneto, the peaches, the girls!

How do you have one eyes?” asked Rosa, gently rocking him to and fro. “Por qué?” “La guerra,” he moaned. “It cry, glasseye?” “I told you, it wasn’t cheap.

Never gave anybody any trouble. A bit of a loner, but always with a kind word for everyone.

He is survived by the ghost of his mother; Yetta, of Beth Something-or-other Cemetery, Neptune, New Jersey, who haunted him unceasingly during the last year of his life.

It is from his mother that Mr. Sabbath inherited his own ability never to get over anything.

The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing.

Another of the women in Sabbath’s life who reckoned her father a flop.

Wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless . . . and now, to top things off, on the run.

if there weren’t war, lunacy, perversity, sickness, imbecility, suicide, and death, chances were he’d be in a lot better shape.

He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.

I never think in terms of expectations. My expectation is how to deal with bad news.

These questions are futile to answer. Behind the answer there is another answer, and an answer behind that answer, and on and on.

Hi, my name is Mitchell. I’m an alcoholic.’ ‘Hi, I’m Flora. I’m cross-addicted.’” “Cross-addicted?” Sabbath asked. “Who knows—some Catholic thing.

Aside from how I look, I act younger than I am, too.” “That you can expect to get worse.

The messiness of marriage and children and career and all that—I’ve already realized the futility of it all without having had to go through it all.

What a paradox. Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.

They were not the only couple on earth for whom mistrust and mutual aversion furnished the indestructible foundation for a long-standing union.

You don’t want to be a pauper’s wife, though it is all right to be a pauper’s girlfriend, especially when you are able, with the pauper’s encouragement, to fuck everybody else on the side.

In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence—precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.

lamppost sex sale naked girl silhouette phone number whats that say I speak Hindi Urdu and Bangla well that leaves me out shiksa Mount Rushmore Ava Gardner Sonja Henie Ann-Margret Yvonne de Carlo strike Ann-Margret Grace Kelly she is the Abraham Lincoln of the shiksas So Sabbath passeth the time, pretending to think without punctuation, the way J. Joyce pretended people thought,

you’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets;

First you make a farce of suicide, now again you make a farce of life.” “I don’t know any other way to do it, Mother. Leave me be. Shut up. You don’t exist. There are no ghosts.” “Wrong. There are only ghosts.

As a self-imposed challenge, repressive puritanism is fine with me, but it is Titoism, Drenka, inhuman Titoism, when it seeks to impose its norms on others by self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex.

If he weren't too old to go back to sea, if his fingers weren't crippled, if Morty had lived and Nikki hadn't been insane, or he hadn't been - if there weren't war, lunacy, perversity, sickness, imbecility, suicide, and death, chances were he'd be in a lot better shape. He'd paid the full price for art, only he hadn't made any. He'd suffered all the old-fashioned artistic sufferings - isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical obstruction - and nobody knew or cared. And though nobody knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it had no artistic meaning. He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.

I tremendi punti di riferimento dell'infanzia: dagli otto ai tredici anni, ci zavorriamo per sempre. E la zavorra è buona o cattiva. La mia era buona. La zavorra originaria, un attaccamento a chi ti è vicino nel momento in cui scopri i sentimenti, un attaccamento che forse non è più strano ma è più forte di quello erotico. È bello riuscire a contemplare per l'ultima volta invece che attraversarli di corsa e uscire dal gioco, certi momenti culminanti, certi massimo livelli di umanità

You are America. Yes, you are, my wicked boy. When we flew to New York and drove in on the highway, whatever the highway is, and those graveyards that are surrounded by cars and the traffic, and that was very confusing and frightening to me. I said to Matija, 'I don't like this'. I was crying. Motorized America with all the endless cars that never stop, and then, suddenly, the place of rest is between that. And they are thrown a little here and a little there. It's so very scary to me, so extremely opposite and different that I couldn't understand it. Through you it is all different now. Do you know? Through you I can think of those stones with understading now. I only wish now I went places with you. I was wishing today, all day, thinking of the places." "Which places?" "To where you were born. I would have liked to go to the Jersey shore." "We should have gone. I should have taken you." Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda. The three blind mice. "Even to New York City. To show it to me through your eyes. I would have liked that. Wherever we went, we always went to hide. I hate hiding. I wouldn't mind to go to New Mexico with you. To California with you. But mainly to New Jersey, to see the sea where you grew up." "I understand." Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle.

You are America. Yes, you are, my wicked boy. When we flew to New York and drove in on the highway, whatever the highway is, and those graveyards that are surrounded by cars and the traffic, and that was very confusing and frightening to me. I said do Matija, 'I don't like this'. I was crying. Motorized America with all the endless cars that never stop, and then, suddenly, the place of rest is between that. And they are thrown a little here and a little there. It's so very scary to me, so extremely opposite and different that I couldn't understand it. Through you it is all different now. Do you know? Through you I can think of those stones with understading now. I only wish now I went places with you. I was wishing today, all day, thinking of the places." "Which places?" "To where you were born. I would have liked to go to the Jersey shore." "We should have gone. I should have taken you." Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda. The three blind mice. "Even to New York City. To show it to me through your eyes. I would have liked that. Wherever we went, we always went to hide. I hate hiding. I wouldn't mind to go to New Mexico with you. To California with you. But mainly to New Jersey, to see the sea where you grew up." "I understand." Too late, but I understand. That we don't perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle.

Even from behind the screen, it was possible from certain angles for Sabbath to catch a glimpse of the audience, and whenever he spotted an attractive girl among the twenty or so students who had stopped to watch, he would break off the drama in progress or wind it down, and the fingers would start in whispering together. Then the boldest finger - a middle finger - would edge nonchalantly forward, lean graciously out over the screen, and beckon her to approach. And girls did come forward, some laughing or grinning like good sports, others serious, poker-faced, as though already mildly hypnotized. After an exchange of polite chitchat, the finger would begin a serious interrogation, asking if the girl had ever dated a finger, if her family approved of fingers, if she herself could find a finger desirable, if she could imagine living happily with only a finger... and the other hand, meanwhile, stealthily began to unbutton or unzip her outer garment. Usually the hand went no further than that; Sabbath knew enough not to press on and the interlude ended as a harmless farce. But sometimes, when Sabbath gauged from her answers that his consort was more playful than most or uncommonly spellbound, the interrogation would abruptly turn wanton and the fingers proceed to undo her blouse. Only twice did the fingers undo a brasserie catch and only once did they endeavor to caress the nipples exposed. And it was then that Sabbath was arrested.

And so now you will get rid of me? Overnight? Like that? After thirteen years?” “I am confused by you. I can’t follow you. What exactly is happening here today? It’s not I but you who proposed this ultimatum out of the fucking blue. It’s you who presented me with the either/or. It’s you who is getting rid of me overnight . . . unless, of course, I consent to become overnight a sexual creature of the kind I am not and never have been. Follow me, please. I must become a sexual creature of the kind that you have yourself never dreamed of being. In order to preserve what we have remarkably sustained by forthrightly pursuing together our sexual desires—are you with me?—my sexual desires must be deformed, since it is unarguable that, like you—you until today, that is—I am not by nature, inclination, practice, or belief a monogamous being. Period. You wish to impose a condition that either deforms me or turns me into a dishonest man with you. But like all other living creatures I suffer when I am deformed. And it shocks me, I might add, to think that the forthrightness that has sustained and excited us both, that provides such a healthy contrast to the routine deceitfulness that is the hallmark of a hundred million marriages, including yours and mine, is now less to your taste than the solace of conventional lies and repressive puritanism. As a self-imposed challenge, repressive puritanism is fine with me, but it is Titoism, Drenka, inhuman Titoism, when it seeks to impose its norms on others by self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex.