What art is for

He shook his head. “It wouldn’t seem like anything!”

     “Now wait,” she said. “It seems like something, doesn’t it? when they scare poor Falstaff in the woods? When Madame Butterfly kills herself? When the stone man, the man of white marble, comes clomping into Don Giovanni’s dining room, bump bump bump? That’s what art is for, isn’t it? to take something measly—measly in comparison with the universe—and make it count for something?”
     --From Variation West

Ardyth at her best

The holidays were so filled with social engagements—how odd for us!—that there was not even a half an hour to sit down and recollect. Ardyth was throughout at her best. She looked, with the additional ten pounds put on in the past two months, at her very, very best. Calm, enchanting, endearing and beautiful as ever a woman, and so witty. Not one single outbreak of Irish anger in all these days, full of plans and good intentions. Whenever people fall for her charms, she becomes frightened and confides later that she really does not love them as much as they might think she does and is afraid that some time sooner or later might be caught in anger and spoil the picture. Actually she never does, because what little of the deep, ever-whirling emotional pool of her comes to the surface, I am absorbing like a shock absorber, and she always makes up.

     --From her husband Egon's journal, New Year's Day 1948

Not picky readers

They read anything, as a goat eats tin cans, apples or underwear off the line.
     --From Variation West

"And what of insouciance then?"

He said that according to his friend Dr. F. Avery Jones, pathological fermentation in the stomach may generate enough methane gas to cause a pretty big explosion if a person should belch while lighting a cigarette. As a comparable microbic effect in the lower intestine generates inflammable and explosive hydrogen sulphide and plain hydrogen, if God had not in his mercy arranged for evolution to place the anus quite far away from the mouth, smoking would never have become popular. And what of insouciance then?
     --From Variation West

Showing your collection

He loved to quote, the way other people like to show their coin or stamp collections.
     --From Variation West

How to be saved

But what was “saved”? . . . Well, “saved” might be to learn to bear what happens to you. Because how you bear it is more important than what it is. To line up the unchangeable amid constant change. To protect your freedom with a certain amount of discipline, the way a rancher fences in his grazing lands. To mark your pivots through the abyss, and (order being heaven’s first law) run a course of action through the formless void. But because the biggest part of the entire universe of space and time can never be apprehended by direct, first-hand experience, you’ve got to get at it in other ways, he said. By such as the mechanism of Wyandra’s perception and her memory, and by books. But books that give rise to something, like a steam engine produces steam.
     From Variation West

Never a day

But never a day, all should remember who are fretted, or corrupt, corroded and consumed in secret, but what somewhere in the world the most astounding truths like opals in a mine are being found.
     --From Variation West