Amerikanska romaner
Dessa vackra hästar
”Vad han älskade hos hästar var vad han älskade hos människor, blodet och blodets värme som drev dem. Hela hans vördnad och hela hans tillgivenhet och hela hans böjelser gällde de i hjärtat brinnande och så skulle det alltid vara och aldrig på något annat vis.”
”Han knöt ihop tygstycket och reste sig och började klä av sig och sen gick han naken genom gräset förbi hästarna och vadade ut i vattnet och satte sig i det till midjan. Han bredde ut armarna och la sig bakåt i vattnet och försvann. Hästarna iakttog honom. Han satte sig upp ur vattnet och strök håret bakåt och torkade sig i ögonen. Sen satt han bara där.”
The Bonfire of the Vanities
”Yes! It`s the truth! You see, in a criminal trial you learn to look at things from a different perspective, but it´s the nature of the beast. I na case like this one –you´re – well, you added up as too bright, too well educated, too removed from the world of a character like Herbert 92X, and thereforee – and this is the irony of it – too capable of understanding his problems, and like the French say, ” ”To understand all is to forgive all.”
Underworld
”Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains … ”
”He was waiting for Chuckie Wainwright. The broad-backed work of the waterfront went on around him, a sense of enormous tonnage and skyhook machinery, tractor-trailers crooking into marked slots and containered goods stacked on the decks of tremendous ships, you almost can´t belive how big, and the what-do-you-call, the booms of dockside cranes swinging cargo through the mist.”
Att uppfinna ensamheten
”Poängen är: hans liv var inte förlagt till den plats där han bodde. Hans hus utgjorde bara en av många hållplatser i en rastlös, oförtöjd existens, och denna brist på samlingspunkt gjorde honom till en ständig utomstående, en turist i sitt eget liv. Man hade aldrig känslan av att han kunde placeras.”
”I avsknad av hängivenhet, antingen det var för en sak, människa eller idé, oförmögen eller ovillig att avslöja sig själv under några som helst omständigheter, hade han lyckats hålla sig på avstånd från livet, undvikit att hamna i händelsernas mitt.”
The Corrections
”Living under presidents as crooked as Nixon and as stupid as Reagan and disgusting as Clinton, she`d lost interest in American flagwaving, and not one of the of the miracles she`d ever prayed to God for hade come ta pass; but at a Saturday wedding in the lilac season, from a pew of the Paradise Valley Presbyterian Church, she could look around and see two hundreds nice people and not a single bad one.”
”I need somebody who tells the truth.”
”you want the truth? You want me to tell you why I`m not going?”
Caroline sat up and leaned forward at the funny angle that her backache dictated. ”You really want to know?”
The Postman Always Rings Twice
” She was standing there, in a red kimono, as pale as milk, staring at me, with a long Knife in her hand. I reached out and took it away from her. When she spoke, it was in a wisper that sounded like a snake licking its tongue in and out.
”Why did you have to come back?”
”I hade to, that`s all.”
”No you didn`t. I could have gone through with it. I was getting so I could forget you. And now you have to come back. God damn you, you have to come back!”
”Go through with what?”
Play it as it lays
”and now it was the hour when all houses all around the pretty women were putting on perfume and enameled bracelets and kissing the pretty children goodnight, the hour of apparent grace and promised music, and even here in Maria`s own garden the air smelled of jasmine and the water in the poo was 85. The water in the pool was always 85 and it was always clean. It coame with the rent.”
”There was a silence. Something real was happening: this was, as it were, her life. If she could keep that in mind she would be able to play through, do the right thing, whatever that meant.”
Fat City
”Writhing in the darkness, he pines finally for any woman, other than the one beside him. On other, easier nights, he enjoyed her with indifferent flamboyant gratitue he hade felt for Lynn. He lay quietly, oppressed by a sense of dwindling life, of his youth dwindling away as he rested beside a woman he should never have known, here so far off the course he knew should have been his that he wondered with panic if it hade been lost forever. He could feel no love and the anguish of life without it was greater now than when he had lived alone-”
Fay
”Not knowing he was home she come naked from the bathroom with the ends of her hair wet, rubbing at herself with a towel, and he was standing ther in his bedroom door unbuttoning a striped shirt. Her heart leaped and she froze, and clutched the towel to her breats for a moment, and then, slowly, her heart beating faster, pulled it down with her hands and went ahead and let him look, thinking: I`m sorry, Amy, I am, but I need him and I`ll take good care of him.
He tried to avoid it. He turned his head and tried not to look at her. But she dropped the towel on the floor and moved toward him. He was a good man and she wouldn`t find one better, so why not be like a wife to him?”