Then the pain and the haze. "Ill get the paper-clips later,she said, as if this was a question which must already have occurred to him.
What — "No questionshe said hoarsely. Then, distantly, he heard the clock chime, and understood that it was chiming from beyond the wall of sleep. He had asked his mother where the bird came from and when she said Africa he had understood it was doomed to die in the cage where it lived, far away from wherever God had meant it to be, and he cried and his mother bought him an ice-cream cone and for awhile he had stopped crying and then he remembered and started again and so she had taken him home, telling him as they rode the trolley back to Lynn that he was a bawl-baby and a sissy. Creativity or the lack of it had no bearing on these things; to do them was as foolish as issuing a proclamation revoking the law of gravity or trying to play table-tennis with a brick.
When the rain began to fall, he had two hundred and sixty-seven pages of Miserys Return — first-draft stuff, sure, but he had scanned through it and thought it amazingly clean for a first. Over one arm she held a wicker basket.
""Annie, if you spend your whole life thinking the worst thing you can imagine is going to happen, you have to be wrong some of the time. The reason authors almost always put a dedication on a book, Annie, is because their selfishness even horrifies themselves in the end.