Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

Any more than a person who hasn’t had a car door slammed on his fingers knows what that is

She hadn’t wanted to take the fifty dollars a month alimony. It was the lawyer’s idea. She found herself reliving the moment when Clarence picked up the poker and started for her. And other moments like it.

so that instead of being stuck there he could go on and by the grace of God lead his own life, undestroyed by what was not his doing.

Daybreak was a comfort. The birds. A rooster crowing. It meant that time existed. At night everything stood still. The milkman, clinking his bottles. People went about

She was not going to divorce him, and he had no grounds for divorcing

give way to it as if it was a sexual temptation. The house we lived in has changed hands several times, and some fairly recent owner sheared off the whole back part—the pantry, the back stairs, the kitchen, the

but for some reason love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. One would almost think it didn’t exist.

When his father was Cletus’s age he was milking fifteen cows morning and night.