You know,” he laughed easily, “with all the goddam drinkin’ Ah’ve done, Ah still can’t remember the taste of it unless Ah got the bottle right with me.
Norman MailerThe best they could? I don’t think so.” He paused as if to edit his woes and select the most telling ones. “Did you notice how they treated the officers? They slept in staterooms when we were jammed in the hold like pigs. It’s to make them feel superior, a chosen group. That’s the same device Hitler uses when he makes the Germans think they’re superior.” Roth felt as if he were on the edge of something profound.
Norman MailerRoth was feeling a gentle warmth as he thought of his son. He was remembering the way his son used to awaken him on Sunday mornings. His wife would put the baby in bed with him, and the child would straddle his stomach and pull feebly at the hairs on Roth’s chest, cooing with delight. It gave him a pang of joy to think of it, and then, back of it, a realization that he had never enjoyed his child as much when he had lived with him. He had been annoyed and irritable at having his sleep disturbed, and it filled him with wonder that he could have missed so much happiness when he had been so close to it. It seemed to him now that he was very near a fundamental understanding of himself, and he felt a sense of mystery and discovery as if he had found unseen gulfs and bridges in all the familiar drab terrain of his life. “You know,” he said, “life is funny.
Norman MailerThe Anti-Semiten. Why don’t they ever learn? Why does God permit it?” Roth sneered. “God is a luxury I don’t give myself.
Norman MailerRoth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was one, but that was unfair; it wasn’t as if he took an interest, it was just an accident of birth.
Norman MailerYou’ve seen too many movies. If you’re holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you’re a poor creature, a dastardly person. That’s a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you’re holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It’s a product of everything you’ve achieved, it assumes that if you’re . . . you’re aware enough, you have the gun when you need it.
Norman MailerThe more things you own, the more things you need to keep you comfortable.
Norman MailerI HATE EVERYTHING WHICH IS NOT IN MYSELF
Norman MailerHe knew that again now. Hennessey’s death had opened to Croft vistas of such omnipotence that he was afraid to consider it directly. All day the fact hovered about his head, tantalizing him with odd dreams and portents of power.
Norman MailerAnd they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated English attitude which was completely phony. It came from books they had never read, and movies they shouldn’t have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseas. Its origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfields. But nevertheless they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with them. And they did magical things like pouring whisky on each other’s hair, or setting mattresses afire, or grabbing hats on the fly from the heads of established businessmen. Of all the parties those were perhaps the best, but he had come to them too old.
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