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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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?

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?

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

The second crazy wife. Was there any other kind?

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

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

Yes, that’s what made my mother angry, no doubt about it. The ostentatious virility.

the perverse senselessness of just remaining, of not going.

The first man I’ve met since going to sea who doesn’t bore me stiff.

The last kiss is given to the void.

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

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.

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

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

Now, thanks to you, my beloved little darling, being dead is as awful as being alive was.

Ideological tyranny. It’s the disease of the century. The ideology institutionalizes the pathology.

Madamaska Falls, capital of caution, where the local population is content to be in raptures about changing the clock twice a year.

That we don’t perish of understanding everything too late, that is a miracle. But we do perish of that—of just that.

See, American boyfriend? Eventually I am not so stupid a Croatian Catholic shiksa woman. I even learn to say ‘ain’t.

In her laugh was the admission of her captivity: to Norman, to menopause, to work, to aging, to everything that could only deteriorate further.

The mercy there is in life, and none of it deserved.

One of the first rules of any marriage, (1) Don’t forget the benefits of her (his) stupidity. (2) She (he) cannot be taught anything by you, so don’t try.

(3) Take a vacation from your grievances. (4) The regularity of it isn’t totally worthless.

But now, except for a county in Alabama where the citizens voted no on a referendum, I believe the poor goy cannot elude the bagel anywhere in America.

Here, of course, in New York, you New Yorkers love the Japanese because they brought you raw fish.

Pills and pain. Aldomet for my blood pressure and Zantac for my gut. A to Z. Then you die.

Pyorrhea. Gingivitis. Swollen gums. One schmutzig mouth after another. Schmutz is her métier.

Educated bourgeoisie like to admire someone who’s escaped the bourgeois trammels—reminds them of their college ideals.

Calm.” “If Yahweh wanted me to be calm, he would have made me a goy. Four days. No. Now.” “We can’t,” she whispered. “Come Saturday—I’ll give you a periodontal probe.

You have the body of an old man, the life of an old man, the past of an old man, and the instinctive force of a two-year-old.

There is no punishment too extreme for the crazy bastard who came up with the idea of fidelity. To demand of human flesh fidelity.

He was to urine what a wet nurse is to milk.

Depraved? Officer Balich, you are too old to idealize your parents.

.. she was still drinking herself to death for her two unchallengeable reasons: because of all that had not happened and because of all that had.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Their naive fucking impertinence about carnal lusting! Seducer of the young. Socrates, Strindberg, and me.

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

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

What is the archetypal Bible story? A story of betrayal. Of treachery. It’s just one deception after another.

The mad desire to obliterate all! The mad desire to save all!

Estas siempre enfadada con tu mama?” “La odio.” “Por qué, Linda?” “Ella me odia a mí.” “Her pressure’s 120 over 100,” said Sabbath.

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.

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.

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

If I know anything about periodontists, she’s thought of strangling you more than once. In your sleep.

The deeper reasonability of seeking danger is that there is, in any event, no escaping it.

The immensity of your isolation is horrifying

I don’t think you ever gave isolation a real shot. It’s the best preparation I know of for death.

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.

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;

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.

In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system.

For a rabbi to officiate at the marriage of a person to an animal, the animal has to chew its cud and have a cloven hoof. A camel. A rabbi can marry a person to a camel. A cow. Any kind of cattle. Sheep. Can’t marry someone to a rabbit, however, because even though a rabbit chews its cud, it doesn’t have a cloven hoof.

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.

Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries! God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything. For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can't beat the nasty side of existence.

The drive was interminable. Had he missed a turn or was this itself the next abode: a coffin that you endlessly steer through the placeless darkness, recounting and recounting the uncontrollable events that induced you to become someone unforeseen. And so fast! So quickly! Everything runs away, beginning with who you are, and at some indefinable point you come to half understand that the ruthless antagonist is yourself.

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.

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.