Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

" 'I wonder if anybody saw it there. While I was asleep, did you hear anything around town?' For in the vast blank of his freedom Rabbit remembered a few imperfections, his home, his wife's, their apartment, clots of concern."

"Once inside, as she reaches for the light switch, he knocks her arm down, pulls her around, and kisses her. It's insanity, he wants to crush her, a little gauge inside his ribs doubles and redoubles his need for pressure, just pure pressure, there is no love in it, love that glances and glides along the skin, he is unconscious of their skins, it is her heart he wants to grind into his own, to comfort her completely."

"Eccles asks, 'What did she do that made you leave?' 'She asked me to buy her a pack of cigarettes.' Eccles doesn't laugh as he had hoped; he seems to dismiss the remark as impudence, a little over the line. But it was the truth. 'It's the truth. It just felt like the whole business was fetching and hauling, all the time trying to hold this mess together she was making all the time. I don't know, it seemed like I was glued in with a lot of busted toys and empty glasses and television going and meals late and no way of getting out. Then all of a sudden it hit me how easy it was to get out, just walk out, and by damn it was easy.'"

" 'What do you think?' Rabbit asks. 'About what?' 'What shall I do?' Eccles glances up nervously. He is very tired; Harry has never seen him look so tired. His face has that pale babyish look of someone who has not slept enough. 'Do what you are doing,' he says. 'Be a good husband. A good father. Love what you have left.' 'And that's enough?' 'You mean to earn forgiveness? I'm sure it is, carried out through a lifetime.' "

" 'Go away,' she says. 'Go away.' 'Don't you need me?' "Need you,' she cries, and he squints in pain at the straining not of hysteria; he feels she has imagined this encounter so often she is determined to say everything, which will be too much. He sits down in an easy chair. His legs ache. She says, 'I needed you that night you walked out. Remember how much I needed you? Remember what you made me do?' 'She was in the hospital,' he says. 'I had to go.'"

For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

"So if your life trades its seventy years for seventy hours I have that value now and I am lucky enough to know it. And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it. Now, ahora, maintentant, heute."

"You ask for the impossible. You ask for the ruddy impossible. So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity. Do you hear that? In the old days people devoted a lifetime to it. And now when you have found it if you get two nights you wonder where all the luck came from. Two nights. Two nights to love, honor, cherish. For better and for worse. In sickness and in death. No that wasn't it. In sickness and in health. Til death do us part. In two nights. Much more than likely."

"No one could prove from the bodies of three wounded men, one with three bullet wounds in his abdomen, one with his jaw shot away and his vocal cords exposed, one with his femur smashed to bits by a bullet and his hands and face so badly burned that his face was just an eyelashless, eyebrowless, hairless blister that they were Russians. No one could tell from the bodies of these wounded men he would leave in beds at the Palace, that they were Russians. Nothing proved a naked dead man was a Russian. Your nationality and your politics did not show when you were dead."