olivieri-highlights/data/kindle/Kindle.Highlights_Eleven.Kinds.of.Loneliness.Stories_1663759209797.json

Initial attempt to create a package that returns quotations selected specifically by me

{"asin":"B00L73NIWG","title":"Eleven Kinds of Loneliness: Stories","authors":"Richard Yates","highlights":[{"text":"as if symmetry might make him less conspicuous—","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=33","value":33},"note":null},{"text":"the city was an awesome, adult place that swallowed up their fathers every day, and which they themselves were permitted to visit only rarely, in their best clothes, as a treat.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=39","value":39},"note":null},{"text":"here was a unique chance for retaliation.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=47","value":47},"note":null},{"text":"craning her pretty head forward and to one side so that a heavy lock of hair swung free of one shoulder.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=52","value":52},"note":null},{"text":"called for intelligent supervision—the shy children had to be drawn out and the show-offs curbed—","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=66","value":66},"note":null},{"text":"Warren Berg and Bill Stringer were great friends, and their reports often overlapped.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=85","value":85},"note":null},{"text":"“Vincent,” she began, “I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I enjoyed those pictures of yours. They’re really very good.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=136","value":136},"note":null},{"text":"It was as simple and as gratifying as stroking a cat.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=140","value":140},"note":null},{"text":"What I mean is, you mustn’t mind if the others seem a little rude to you at first. Actually, they’re just as anxious to make friends as you are, but they’re shy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=151","value":151},"note":null},{"text":"It was probably a lucky thing that she stood up when she did, for if she’d stayed on that desk a minute longer Vincent Sabella would have thrown his arms around her and buried his face in the warm gray flannel of her lap, and that might have been enough to confuse the most dedicated and imaginative of teachers.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=161","value":161},"note":null},{"text":"Their faces were stunned, either with disbelief or admiration, and it began to look more and more like admiration as they listened.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=278","value":278},"note":null},{"text":"“Well, so listen, honey. What time ya want me to come over tonight?” “Oh, I don’t know. Soon as you can, I guess.” “Well listen, I gotta go over to Eddie’s house and pick up that bag he’s gonna loan me, so I might as well do that, go on home and eat, and then come over to your place around eight-thirty, nine o’clock. Okay?”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=344","value":344},"note":null},{"text":"That was a time when she had been ready to agree with Martha on practically anything—when it often seemed, in fact, that finding a girl like Martha from an ad in the Times was just about the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=355","value":355},"note":null},{"text":"Oh, and all those friends of his, his Eddie and his Marty and his George with their mean, ratty little clerks’ lives and their mean, ratty little … It’s just that they’re all alike, those people.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=363","value":363},"note":"Seinfeld"},{"text":"They had gone to a dance somewhere in Queens, one of the big American Legion dances that Ralph’s crowd was always going to, and when the band played “Easter Parade” he held her very close, hardly moving, and sang to her in a faint, whispering tenor. It was the kind of thing she’d never have expected Ralph to do—a sweet, gentle thing—and it probably wasn’t just then that she decided to marry him, but it always seemed so afterwards. It always seemed she had decided that minute, swaying to the music with his husky voice in her hair:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=372","value":372},"note":null},{"text":"(her eyes stung at the thought of her mother’s plain, happy face),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=395","value":395},"note":null},{"text":"door would lock behind her and there would be a wild, fantastic silence, and nobody in all the world but Ralph to lead the way.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=397","value":397},"note":null},{"text":"the best of everything.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=403","value":403},"note":"Hey, that’s the name of the story."},{"text":"it was one of the few times Grace had ever seen her look shy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=410","value":410},"note":null},{"text":"Half the fun of every date—even more than half—had been telling Eddie about it afterwards, exaggerating a little here and there, asking Eddie’s advice on tactics.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=451","value":451},"note":null},{"text":"batter struck out; the inning was over and the commercial came on.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=462","value":462},"note":null},{"text":"This was the way things usually turned out in his life; he could never own a bag like that until he made a better salary, and he accepted it—just as he’d accepted without question, after the first thin sigh, the knowledge that he’d never possess his bride until after the wedding.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=485","value":485},"note":null},{"text":"She closed the door and leaned against it with both hands holding the doorknob at the small of her back, the way heroines close doors in the movies.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=528","value":528},"note":null},{"text":"She sat down beside him, leaned close, and gave him Martha’s special smile.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=535","value":535},"note":null},{"text":"“Nice,” he said, feeling the flimsy material between thumb and index finger, like a merchant.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=564","value":564},"note":null},{"text":"we probably would not be called on to fight with bayonets","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=642","value":642},"note":null},{"text":"It would be too much to say that he kindled our admiration, but there is an automatic pleasure in watching a thing done well.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=655","value":655},"note":null},{"text":"You might march and shoot and learn to perfection your creed of disciplined force, but Jody was a force beyond control,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=695","value":695},"note":null},{"text":"It was almost a disappointment when he gave us route step on the outskirts of camp and we became individuals again,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=702","value":702},"note":null},{"text":"but Reece took it all straight-faced, with that air of unlimited self-assurance that is the first requisite of good leadership. And he was as fair as he was strict, which must surely be the second requisite.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=719","value":719},"note":null},{"text":"But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can’t last long—not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=724","value":724},"note":null},{"text":"It made us feel close to Reece in a proud soldierly alliance, and once or twice he granted us the keen compliment of a wink behind the lieutenant’s back, but only once or twice.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=731","value":731},"note":null},{"text":"If he had ever reminisced with us about his home, for instance, or related the conversations of his PX friends, or told us of a bar he liked in town, I think we would all have been touchingly grateful, but he never did.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=738","value":738},"note":null},{"text":"The town was a small, dusty maze of clapboard and neon, crawling with soldiers, and to most of us it yielded only loneliness, however we may have swaggered down its avenues. There wasn’t enough town to go around; whatever delights it held remained the secrets of those who had found them first, and if you were young, shy, and not precisely sure what you were looking for anyway, it was a dreary place.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=740","value":740},"note":null},{"text":"You could hang around the USO and perhaps get to dance with a girl long hardened against a callow advance; you could settle for the insipid pleasures of watermelon stands and penny arcades, or you could prowl aimlessly in groups through the dark back streets, where all you met as a rule were other groups of soldiers on the aimless prowl.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=743","value":743},"note":null},{"text":"It was probably not surprising, then, that our emotional life became ingrown. Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other’s discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=747","value":747},"note":null},{"text":"very nearly as fast as we’d have done it under Reece’s supervision.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=769","value":769},"note":null},{"text":"He was bullying us without reason and without relief, and he was destroying everything he had built up so carefully in the many weeks before; the whole delicate structure of our respect for him crumbled and fell.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=794","value":794},"note":null},{"text":"He was a slack drillmaster, and on the road he never made us count cadence except when we passed an officer, never made us chant or sing anything except a ragged version of “Give My Regards to Broadway,” which he led with fervor although he didn’t know all the words.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=830","value":830},"note":null},{"text":"our very defiance would dignify the attitude.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=860","value":860},"note":null},{"text":"It meant, I guess, that at the end of our training cycle the camp delivered up a bunch of shameless little wise guys to be scattered and absorbed into the vast disorder of the Army, but at least Reece never saw it happen, and he was the only one who might have cared.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=861","value":861},"note":null},{"text":"walking the chair slowly with his feet, as all TB patients did to avoid the chest strain of turning the wheels with their hands.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=952","value":952},"note":null},{"text":"much better looking, for instance, than a too stocky, too solid man like Jack.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1006","value":1006},"note":null},{"text":"“Good,” Harry said, but the magazine was winning.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1013","value":1013},"note":null},{"text":"scratching the sole of one socked foot with the curled toe of the other.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1016","value":1016},"note":null},{"text":"Having found that the only truly rewarding part of any cops-and-robbers game was the moment when you pretended to be shot, clutched your heart, dropped your pistol and crumpled to the earth, they soon dispensed with the rest of it—the tiresome business of choosing up sides and sneaking around—and refined the game to its essence.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1076","value":1076},"note":null},{"text":"Then the performer would stop, turn, stand poised for a moment in graceful agony, pitch over and fall down the hill in a whirl of arms and legs and a splendid cloud of dust, and finally sprawl flat at the bottom, a rumpled corpse.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1081","value":1081},"note":null},{"text":"When he got up and brushed off his clothes, the others would criticize his form (“Pretty good,” or “Too stiff,” or “Didn’t look natural”), and then it would be the next player’s turn.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1083","value":1083},"note":null},{"text":"while he sat at his desk pretending to work and waiting to be fired.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1089","value":1089},"note":null},{"text":"There was certainly no denying that the role of good loser had always held an inordinate appeal for him. All through adolescence he had specialized in it, gamely losing fights with stronger boys, playing football badly in the secret hope of being injured and carried dramatically off the field (“You got to hand it to old Henderson for one thing, anyway,” the high-school coach had said with a chuckle, “he’s a real little glutton for punishment”).","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1103","value":1103},"note":null},{"text":"The several jobs he’d held before this had been the beginner’s kind at which it isn’t easy to fail;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1108","value":1108},"note":null},{"text":"chronic, compulsive failure, a strange little boy in love with the attitudes of collapse.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1115","value":1115},"note":null},{"text":"And the amazing thing, he thought—the really amazing thing—was that he himself had never looked at it that way before.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1115","value":1115},"note":null},{"text":"Crowell leaned back, and when he raised his hands their moisture left two gray, perfect prints on the glass, like the hands of a skeleton. Walter stared at them, fascinated, while they shriveled and disappeared.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1130","value":1130},"note":null},{"text":"The camera had opened the action from Crowell’s viewpoint and dollied back to take the entire office as a frame for Walter’s figure in lonely, stately passage; now it came in for a long-held close-up of Walter’s face, switched to other brief views of his colleagues’ turning heads (Joe Collins looking worried, Fred Holmes trying to keep from looking pleased), and switched again to Walter’s viewpoint as it discovered the plain, unsuspecting face of Mary, his secretary, who was waiting for him at his desk with a report he had given her to type.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1146","value":1146},"note":null},{"text":"they had probably never told her in secretarial school that it was possible for your boss to get fired.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1153","value":1153},"note":null},{"text":"A man could drive himself crazy trying to psychoanalyze himself in the middle of Lexington Avenue, in the middle of the afternoon.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1181","value":1181},"note":null},{"text":"He was feeling faint by the time he saw the address book right in front of him, on top of the coin box, where he’d left it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1192","value":1192},"note":null},{"text":"The phrase “Pull yourself together” occurred to him, and there was more than determination in the way he pulled himself together there in the phone booth, the way he gathered up his coins and straightened his tie and walked out to the street: there was a kind of nobility.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1212","value":1212},"note":null},{"text":"It would call for the constant vigilance and cunning of an outlaw.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1218","value":1218},"note":null},{"text":"intolerably slow-moving pedestrians who had no idea of how urgent his mission was.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1233","value":1233},"note":null},{"text":"his pocket, and took the steps with such an easy, athletic nonchalance that nobody could have guessed at the hours of anxiety, the days of strategic and tactical planning this particular moment had cost him.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1236","value":1236},"note":null},{"text":"her wide shining eyes were seeing him exactly as he most wanted to be seen.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1241","value":1241},"note":null},{"text":"The things he said, whatever they were, struck her as witty, and the things she said, or the sound of her voice when she said them, made him feel taller and stronger and broader of shoulder than ever before in his life.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1241","value":1241},"note":null},{"text":"When they turned and started down the steps together he took hold of her upper arm, claiming her, and felt the light jounce of her breast on the backs of his fingers with each step.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1243","value":1243},"note":null},{"text":"it seemed a much longer walk alone—","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1252","value":1252},"note":null},{"text":"The orderly rotation of many careful moods was her life, or rather, was what her life had become. She managed it well, and it was only rarely, looking very closely at her face, that he could see how much the effort was costing her.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1283","value":1283},"note":null},{"text":"He turned on her with a false grin. “Nothing’s the matter,” he said in the echo-chamber voice, and the movie camera started rolling again. It came in for a close-up of his own tense face, then switched over to observe her movements as she hovered uncertainly at the coffee table.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1306","value":1306},"note":null},{"text":"She looked severe and competent and suddenly much older, not even very pretty anymore—a woman used to dealing with emergencies, ready to take charge.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1319","value":1319},"note":null},{"text":"the shape of his back was an eloquent statement of impending defeat.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1321","value":1321},"note":null},{"text":"spilled easily out of your hands and was very hard to put together again in the right order;","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1333","value":1333},"note":null},{"text":"think he enjoyed this occasional chance to play the man of affairs.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1346","value":1346},"note":null},{"text":"Half the applicants would go away when he got to the part about the salary structure, and most of those who remained offered little competition to anyone who was sober, clean and able to construct an English sentence.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1349","value":1349},"note":null},{"text":"His eyebrows were always in motion when he talked, and his eyes, not so much piercing as anxious to pierce, never left the eyes of his listener.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1359","value":1359},"note":null},{"text":"And now his hands came into play, as they always did sooner or later.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1377","value":1377},"note":null},{"text":"hands fell limp on his thigh, to rest until he needed them again.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1379","value":1379},"note":null},{"text":"he was only saying that out of politeness, to minimize my envy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1484","value":1484},"note":null},{"text":"He could afford to express doubt because he felt none, and I could tell he was already planning the way he’d tell his wife about it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1484","value":1484},"note":null},{"text":"Lamely Howard murmured, “Sure, if I feel like it,” but it was a clear point for the twins.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1643","value":1643},"note":null},{"text":"trumpet-barreled muskets,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1664","value":1664},"note":null},{"text":"Every day the halls became more thickly festooned with Christmas trimmings, until finally it was the last week before vacation.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1666","value":1666},"note":null},{"text":"elaborate surprise","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1719","value":1719},"note":null},{"text":"ragged unison:","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1744","value":1744},"note":null},{"text":"UNTIL HE GOT his name on the police blotter, and in the papers, nobody had ever thought much about John Fallon.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1753","value":1753},"note":null},{"text":"(he had called the previous week’s performance “a damn good bout” when in fact it had been fifteen rounds of clinches and cream-puff sparring, with the mockery of a decision at the end),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1774","value":1774},"note":null},{"text":"jabbing his breastbone with a manicured thumb in the windup of his third long story,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1778","value":1778},"note":null},{"text":"mouth shut. “The B.A.R.,” Fallon said, laying down his fork, “is the Browning Automatic Rifle. It’s a thirty-caliber, magazine-fed, fully-automatic piece that provides the major firepower of a twelve-man rifle squad. That answer your question?”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1800","value":1800},"note":null},{"text":"while he ponderously wheeled the wire-mesh cart behind her he kept turning his head to follow the churning hips and full breasts of other young women in the store.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1826","value":1826},"note":null},{"text":"“Well, my point of view is this: maybe you can argue with McCarthy’s methods, but son of a bitch, you can’t argue with him on principle. Am I right?”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1877","value":1877},"note":null},{"text":"all three of their heads were drawn to watch her buttocks shift and settle, shift and settle until she disappeared into the ladies’ room.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1884","value":1884},"note":null},{"text":"“Man, that’s rough,” the shorter of the two soldiers said, and his grin included Fallon, who grinned back.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1885","value":1885},"note":null},{"text":"to whom all jazz sounded the same, took on the look of a connoisseur as he slouched in the doorway,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1908","value":1908},"note":null},{"text":"snapping and unsnapping the clasp of the handbag in her lap.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1924","value":1924},"note":null},{"text":"(she was wearing the short soldier’s overseas cap now).","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1938","value":1938},"note":null},{"text":"And the images that tortured him now, while he stood in line at the makeshift bar, were intensified by rage: there would be struggling limbs and torn clothes in the taxi; there would be blind force in the bedroom, and stifled cries of pain that would turn to whimpering and finally to spastic moans of lust. Oh, he’d loosen her up! He’d loosen her up!","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1951","value":1951},"note":null},{"text":"Then, after the drums built up a relentless, brutal rhythm that grew all but intolerable until it ended in a cymbal smash and gave way to the blare of the brass section, the crowd went wild.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=1956","value":1956},"note":null},{"text":"It could have been either a colored or a white man’s voice, but Carson assumed he was colored, mostly from the slight edge of self-consciousness or pride in the way Ken had said, “He’s a friend of mine.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2038","value":2038},"note":null},{"text":"They were each other’s best friends, but it had never been an equal friendship, and they both knew it. At Yale Ken would probably have been left out of everything if it hadn’t been for his status as Carson’s dull but inseparable companion, and this was a pattern that nothing in Europe had changed.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2091","value":2091},"note":null},{"text":"The bartender was peeling a lemon, neatly pinching and pulling back a strip of its bright flesh between thumb and knife blade, and the fine citric smell of it, combining with the scent of gin in the faint smoke of crushed ice, gave flavor to a full restoration of their ease.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2103","value":2103},"note":null},{"text":"strong again with a sense of the old camaraderie, the familiar, buoyant wealth of Ken’s admiration.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2106","value":2106},"note":null},{"text":"stump of bread","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2118","value":2118},"note":null},{"text":"room. He fingered the keys idly for a while to make stray phrases and chords, a craftsman fondling his tools,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2145","value":2145},"note":null},{"text":"The compelling beat emerged, and out of it the climb and waver of the melody,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2146","value":2146},"note":null},{"text":"In the space of a few hours it filled all the emptiness of his past month, the time that had begun with Carson’s saying, “Go, then. Can’t you go to Cannes by yourself?” It atoned for all the hot miles walked up and down the Croisette on blistered feet to peek like a fool at girls who lay incredibly near naked in the sand; for the cramped, boring bus rides to Nice and Monte Carlo and St. Paul-de-Vence; for the day he had paid a sinister druggist three times too much for a pair of sunglasses only to find, on catching sight of his own image in the gleam of a passing shop window, that they made him look like a great blind fish; for the terrible daily, nightly sense of being young and rich and free on the Riviera—the Riviera!—and of having nothing to do.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2153","value":2153},"note":null},{"text":"Once in the first week he had gone with a prostitute whose canny smile, whose shrill insistence on a high price and whose facial flicker of distaste at the sight of his body had frightened him into an agony of impotence; most other nights he had gotten drunk or sick from bar to bar, afraid of prostitutes and of rebuffs from other girls, afraid even of striking up conversations with men lest they mistake him for a fairy.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2159","value":2159},"note":null},{"text":"One minute the girls were sullen strangers, wiping scented oil on their bodies and looking as if any intrusion would mean a call for the police, the next minute they were weak with laughter at the things Carson was saying, moving aside their bottles and their zippered blue TWA satchels to make room for unexpected guests.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2210","value":2210},"note":null},{"text":"small one for Ken—a cute, freckled good-sport of a girl whose every cheerful glance and gesture showed she was used to taking second best.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2213","value":2213},"note":null},{"text":"nobody from Building Seven was allowed in the hospital canteen unless he hid his face in a sterile paper mask.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2363","value":2363},"note":null},{"text":"Many of the men were a revelation in one way or another when they appeared in their street clothes. McIntyre had grown surprisingly humble, incapable of sarcasm or pranks, when he put on his scarcely worn accounting clerk’s costume of blue serge, and Jones had grown surprisingly tough in his old Navy foul-weather jacket. Young Krebs, whom everybody called Junior, had assumed a portly maturity with his double-breasted business suit, and Travers, who most people had forgotten was a Yale man, looked oddly effete in his J. Press flannels and his button-down collar.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2431","value":2431},"note":null},{"text":"And Uncle Harold gathered her in his arms, putting his big face over her shoulder so she couldn’t see that his eyes were blurred with tears.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2451","value":2451},"note":null},{"text":"It wasn’t just that she was a woman—the kind of withdrawn, obliquely smiling woman that had filled him with intolerable shyness and desire in his own youth—it was something more disturbing even than that.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2498","value":2498},"note":null},{"text":"the window was a black mirror now and gave back only the lights, the bright bedsheets and pajamas of the ward.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2588","value":2588},"note":null},{"text":"shriveling ghost of his breath on the glass,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2593","value":2593},"note":null},{"text":"don’t worry: this is going to be a straight, no-nonsense piece of fiction about a cabdriver, a movie star, and an eminent child psychologist, and that’s a promise.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2658","value":2658},"note":null},{"text":"Battered” is the way I would have described it then, and I’m grateful that I know a little more now about honesty in the use of words. It was a handled hat, handled by endless nervous pinchings and shapings and reshapings; it wasn’t battered at all).","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2667","value":2667},"note":null},{"text":"for those few minutes each day, walking up the slight hill of the last hundred yards between the subway exit and the News building, I was Ernest Hemingway reporting for work at the Kansas City Star.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2669","value":2669},"note":null},{"text":"(What in the name of God are puts and calls, and what is a sinking fund debenture? I’m still damned if I know),","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2678","value":2678},"note":null},{"text":"But it was here, of course, under the white stare of that lamp, that the tenuous parallel between Hemingway and me endured its heaviest strain.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2684","value":2684},"note":null},{"text":"won’t bother giving you the dry, witty, Hemingway dialogue that took place when I came out from behind the screen that night and Joan turned around from the sink, with her hands dripping soapsuds on the open magazine, and we can also skip my cordial, unenlightening chat with Bernard Silver on the phone.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2693","value":2693},"note":null},{"text":"His head must have been half again the size of mine, with thinning black hair washed straight back, as if he’d stood face-up in the shower; and his face was one of the most guileless and self-confident faces I’ve ever seen.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2699","value":2699},"note":null},{"text":"I don’t know what you’d call it—a credenza?—but whatever it was it seemed to go on forever, chest-high in some places and waist-high in others, made of at least three different shades of polished brown veneer. Part of it was a television set, part of it was a radio-phonograph; part of it thinned out into shelves that held potted plants and little figurines; part of it, full of chromium knobs and tricky sliding panels, was a bar.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2705","value":2705},"note":null},{"text":"he squinted cannily at me while pronouncing it, as if my recognizing it or not would be an index of my general educational level. “Dr. Alexander Corvo.”","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2744","value":2744},"note":null},{"text":"“Read it!” he insisted, as if the check were a prose work of uncommon merit in its own right,","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2774","value":2774},"note":"Lernastic"},{"text":"It took him a long time to get through the first page of the first story, and I watched him, wondering if this might turn out to be the very lowest point in my literary career.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2789","value":2789},"note":null},{"text":"At last the first page turned, and the second page followed so closely after it that I could tell he was skipping.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2791","value":2791},"note":null},{"text":"A very slight, hesitant, then more and more judicial nodding set in as he made his way toward the end.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2793","value":2793},"note":null},{"text":"Supposing somebody writes you a letter and says, ‘Bob, I didn’t have time to write you a short letter today, so I had to write you a long one instead.’ Would you know what they meant by that?” Don’t worry, I played this part of the evening pretty cool. I wasn’t going to let twenty-five bucks get away from me without some kind of struggle; and my answer, whatever sober-sided nonsense it was, could have left no doubt in his mind that this particular writing candidate knew something of the difficulty and the value of compression in prose. He seemed gratified by it, anyway.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2801","value":2801},"note":null},{"text":"And he was so pleased with his own creation of this image that he didn’t even wait to take in the careful, congratulatory nod I awarded him for it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2807","value":2807},"note":null},{"text":"I remember looking down into his big, dumb, flabby face and trying to find the bugler’s features somewhere inside it.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2837","value":2837},"note":null},{"text":"(and maybe we wouldn’t meet any Gertrude Steins or Ezra Pounds there, maybe I wouldn’t produce any Sun Also Rises, but the earliest possible expatriation was nothing less than essential to my Hemingway plans).","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2842","value":2842},"note":null},{"text":"Besides, it might even be fun—or at least it might be fun to tell people about: I would be the hackie’s hack, the builder’s builder.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2844","value":2844},"note":null},{"text":"(and he was right about that: another heavy half-page of that tiresome old man’s lament and the story would have ruptured the hell out of its foundation).","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=2965","value":2965},"note":null},{"text":"My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=3060","value":3060},"note":null},{"text":"shabby victory.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=3064","value":3064},"note":null},{"text":"Why is it that wives are nearly always blamed for what must at least as often as not be their husbands’ fault in matters like that?","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=3077","value":3077},"note":null},{"text":"I got up and began dramatically pacing the floor, the way people in Hollywood story conferences are supposed to do.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=3126","value":3126},"note":null},{"text":"And great God, what a sickly, intricate thing a writer’s heart is! Because do you know what I felt when he said that? I felt a twinge of jealousy. “Artist,” was he? I’d show them who the hell the artist was around this little writing establishment.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=3238","value":3238},"note":null},{"text":"when they were done with him there wasn’t an awful lot of eminence left.","isNoteOnly":false,"location":{"url":"kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00L73NIWG&location=3291","value":3291},"note":null}]}