Sublime

She came up here for college, but her daddy got cancer, and the farm got sold, and ends stopped meeting, and she had to drop out.

shivering twelve-year-old and suddenly had no taste for a public fight, agreeing with the boy’s flaky-scalped lawyer, Doc Solomon, that this was essentially a mercy killing and, so, made a quick deal for manslaughter—a two- or three-year jolt at the most for, as the ADA described him, “an otherwise decent kid like this one.”

His grandfather was a Scottish immigrant who made his drinking money by boxing in bars. The Scotsman trained his son, Walter’s dad, to slip jabs and throw mean right hooks, hoping the boy would one day fight for a real title. But Walter’s dad was an asthmatic and, instead of going the distance, he ended up repairing refrigerators for a living.

The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance.

I think if God were to say to me: “Kenneth, I’m going to let you take your pick and live again any incident in your life that gave you a particular bang,” I’d pick that one on the edge of the hole when, after forcing ourselves to look into it, we felt as if we’d rid ourselves of some loathsome disease. I remember the only thing that worried me then

picked him up, and stuffed him in a trash can somewhere in the [school] building. I know all this only secondhand, Kurt never told me, but it was common knowledge. It was no lighthearted joke but seemed to fester with time, because it surfaced at our fiftieth reunion.” Two of the “jocks” of the class opposed having Vonnegut give the main speech at

childhood, a son was already a disappointment;

Like my father, Abe Trillin had a fundamental reserve, partially Midwestern in origin, that was at odds with his personable qualities. He did not regard a long drive in a car or a fishing outing as an opportunity to catch up. He did not linger on the telephone. His son eventually came to marvel at “how much my father managed to get across to me wit

The best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story. The hair stands up all over her papery skin. That’s what he has tried to make. That’s why he let the state put him away for two lifetimes and still incriminated no one. He has traded his life for a fable that might light up the minds of st