Ben Fountain

As if sorrow is the true reality? Without ever putting his mind to it, he's come to believe that loss is the standard trajectory.

So what does it mean for a person to devote himself or herself to, as you put it, __iterary reading and thinking_? I would argue this is a person who__ trying to see things for what they are. Who__ interested in distinguishing the truth from the lies, the real from the fake, the solid from the cheap. Those are the people who want to think for themselves, and I really question whether we can make good lives for ourselves if we aren__ doing our own thinking.

Why?' He kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, its tone as pure as marbles swirled around a crystal pail. Why him wun up the tree? Why him nest up theah? Why him gadder nuts? Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward universal knowledge.

You can deny him, he thought, watching his father across the table. You can hate him, love him, pity him, never speak to or look at him in the eye again, never deign even to be in his crabbed and bitter presence, but you're still stuck with the son of a bitch. One way or another he'll always be your daddy, not even all-powerful death was going to change that.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands the whole concept of boundaries, but there__ a point where this mania for normalizing turns toxic.

You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should be the most basic of all drives, that you would strive to protect and love one another, yet this bond that should be the big no-brainer was in fact the hardest thing.

If you could figure out how to live with family then you'd gone a long way toward finding your peace.

I like to kill my enemies and listen to the lamentations of their women

He decides he wants both more or less. He__ like to hang with Beyonce in a nice way, get to know her by doing small pleasant things together like playing board games and going out for ice cream, or how about this, a three-week trial run in some tropical paradise where they can hang together in that nice way and possibly fall in love, and meanwhile fuck each other__ brains out in their spare time. He wants both, he wants the entire body-soul connect because anything less is just demeaning.

But I am scared. Everybody's scared.""You know what I mean, like scared scared. Like coward scared, like if you never went to begin with. But with everything you've done nobody's going to doubt you." Then she made a somewhat frantic speech about a website she found that listed how certain people had avoided Vietnam. Cheney, Four education deferments, then a hardship 3-A. Limbaugh,4-F thanks to a cyst on his ass. Pat Buchanan, 4-F. Newt Gingrich, grad school deferment. Karl Rove, did not serve. Bill O'Reilly, did not serve. John Ashcroft, did not serve. Bush, AWOL from the Air National Guard, with a check mark in the "do not volunteer" box as to service overseas."You see where I'm going with this?'"Well, yeah.""I'm just saying, those people want a war so bad, they can fight it themselves. Billy Lynn's done his part.

It was the sixties, exactly, all we wanted to do was to smoke a lot of dope and ball a lot of chicks. Vietnam, excuse me? Why would I wanna go get my ass shot off in some stinking rice paddy just so Nixon can have his four more years? Screw that, and I wasn't the only one who felt that way. All the big warmongers these days who took a pass on Vietnam, look, I'd be the last person on earth to start casting blame. Bush, Cheney, Rove, all those guys, they just did what everybody else was doing and I was right there with 'em, chicken as anybody. My problem now is how tough and gung-ho they are, all that bring it on crap, I mean, Jesus, show a little humility, people. They ought to be just as careful of your young lives as they were with their own.

At the door to the locker room Dime asks [Ennis] to autograph his ball. Ennis rears back. He's chuckling but his eyes are wary. 'Why you want that? I'm just an old equipment hand, nobody cares about my autograph.''As far as I'm concerned you run the team,' Dime answers, so Ennis laughs and takes the Sharpie and signs his name to Dime's ball, and this will be the only autograph that Dime collects today.

Over the years I've come to realize that in a broad sense I'm interested in power and politics. I'm interested in how individuals try to eke out some wiggle room within these large institutions . . . how they eke out some measure of freedom and personal space and integrity . . . trying to negotiate their way toward some sort of, if not happiness, then at least accommodation or peace with themselves.

. . . any one episode, or even moment, in a person__ life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we__e found of approaching that kind of complexity.

I practiced law for five years and that gives you insight into a certain mind-set that maybe a lot of writers haven__ had firsthand access to. There__ an almost casual cruelty, a very low level of overall awareness, but sometimes there__ also knowledge that real damage is being done__his attitude of __h, what the hell,_ this kind of moral cognitive dissonance. These are people who have never missed a meal. It__ an unknowingness, an unawareness . . . Many people were operating from a very narrow range of experience, and yet they had complete faith in it. Their way was the correct way, the only way. They had virtually no awareness of any other way of life except in terms of demonizing things . . . It__ an extremely blindered experience of the world.

It's an important thing and a necessary thing as a writer to always be reaching outside of yourself. They say write what you know. But what you know is rarely enough. You need to know more. But you've got to approach it with a lot of respect and humility. You owe it to the people and experience you're trying to understand. It's not a casual thing.

There was no such thing as perfection in this world, only moments of such extreme transparency that you forgot yourself, a holy mercy if there ever was one.