There're no answers when it comes to the Buick
"This story became - I suppose - a meditation on the essentially indecipherable quality of life's events, and how impossible it is to find a coherent meaning in them." - Stephen King, Author's Note on From a Buick 8
(1) None of the talk was about his father; all of the talk was about his father. You understand.
(2) You don’t always talk with your mouth. Sometimes what you say with your mouth hardly matters at all. You have to signify.
(3) But, I remember thinking, we all of us look younger and sweeter when we smile our real smiles - the ones that come when we’re genuinely happy and not just trying to play some dumb social game.
(4) I thought of telling him I didn’t know about reasons, only about chains - how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you’re lucky. Fucking strangled, if you’re not.
(5) People can get used to just about anything. That’s the best of our lives, I guess. Of course, it’s the horror of them, too.
(6) I don’t know why success often leaves us feeling lower-spirited than failure, but I know it’s true.
(7) True love always happens in a flash, they say.
(8) “They see what they look at with youth’s wonderful twenty-twenty vision and don’t see it at the same time,” he said. “Young people are such wonderful idiots.”
(9) When his eyes cleared a little, I saw the same look of fascination I had seen on his father’s face. <…> It’s how we most often appear when we confront the deep and authentic unknown, I think - when we glimpse that place where our familiar universe stops and the real blackness begins.
(10) “I am made the destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer muttered during the first successful detonation of atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, and then went on to start work on the H-bomb with hardly a pause for tea and scones.
(11) I was no part of it, just a gal minding her own business, getting a cup of coffee. Not paying attention, and isn’t that mostly when they get you? Men, I mean. They’ll be all right for a while, so you relax, even get lulled into thinking they might be basically sane after all, and then they just break out.
(12) And that’s also men as I’ve come to know them, pardon the philosophy. If they say they’re sorry, you’re supposed to go all mellow, because that takes care of everything. Doesn’t matter if they broke a window, blew up the powerboat, or lost the kids’ college fund playing blackjack in Atlantic City. It’s like Hey, I said I was sorry, do you have to make a federal case out of it?
(13) One thing I’d like to know is why you never have a series of good days in which one thing goes wrong. Because it’s not that way, at least in my experience. In my experience the bad shit gets saved up until you have a day when everything comes due at once.
(14) “Do you know why the past is the past, darling?”
Ned shook his head.
“Because it doesn’t work.”
(15) I’m almost sure not, I had replied, but I’d been troubled. Because almost covers a lot of territory, doesn’t it? Maybe the only word in the language that covers more than if.
(16) “What did he say then?”
“What any man says when things are all right at home,” I told him. “He said he was a lucky man.”
(17) <…> just time marching on, that shuffling, rueful tread.
(1) None of the talk was about his father; all of the talk was about his father. You understand.
(2) You don’t always talk with your mouth. Sometimes what you say with your mouth hardly matters at all. You have to signify.
(3) But, I remember thinking, we all of us look younger and sweeter when we smile our real smiles - the ones that come when we’re genuinely happy and not just trying to play some dumb social game.
(4) I thought of telling him I didn’t know about reasons, only about chains - how they form themselves, link by link, out of nothing; how they knit themselves into the world. Sometimes you can grab a chain and use it to pull yourself out of a dark place. Mostly, though, I think you get wrapped up in them. Just caught, if you’re lucky. Fucking strangled, if you’re not.
(5) People can get used to just about anything. That’s the best of our lives, I guess. Of course, it’s the horror of them, too.
(6) I don’t know why success often leaves us feeling lower-spirited than failure, but I know it’s true.
(7) True love always happens in a flash, they say.
(8) “They see what they look at with youth’s wonderful twenty-twenty vision and don’t see it at the same time,” he said. “Young people are such wonderful idiots.”
(9) When his eyes cleared a little, I saw the same look of fascination I had seen on his father’s face. <…> It’s how we most often appear when we confront the deep and authentic unknown, I think - when we glimpse that place where our familiar universe stops and the real blackness begins.
(10) “I am made the destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer muttered during the first successful detonation of atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, and then went on to start work on the H-bomb with hardly a pause for tea and scones.
(11) I was no part of it, just a gal minding her own business, getting a cup of coffee. Not paying attention, and isn’t that mostly when they get you? Men, I mean. They’ll be all right for a while, so you relax, even get lulled into thinking they might be basically sane after all, and then they just break out.
(12) And that’s also men as I’ve come to know them, pardon the philosophy. If they say they’re sorry, you’re supposed to go all mellow, because that takes care of everything. Doesn’t matter if they broke a window, blew up the powerboat, or lost the kids’ college fund playing blackjack in Atlantic City. It’s like Hey, I said I was sorry, do you have to make a federal case out of it?
(13) One thing I’d like to know is why you never have a series of good days in which one thing goes wrong. Because it’s not that way, at least in my experience. In my experience the bad shit gets saved up until you have a day when everything comes due at once.
(14) “Do you know why the past is the past, darling?”
Ned shook his head.
“Because it doesn’t work.”
(15) I’m almost sure not, I had replied, but I’d been troubled. Because almost covers a lot of territory, doesn’t it? Maybe the only word in the language that covers more than if.
(16) “What did he say then?”
“What any man says when things are all right at home,” I told him. “He said he was a lucky man.”
(17) <…> just time marching on, that shuffling, rueful tread.