“In the spirit of the Alpha and the Omega, in the way the Alpha was theOmega, and vice versa, he knew the beginning was also the end—and that the end was just another beginning.”
— Sol Luckman
“Nothing bonds two solitary individuals like a good shared drunk. This is a scientific fact. It’s important, even necessary for the long-term welfare of the planet to get good and shit-faced with your neighbor every now and then.”
— Sol Luckman
“The fireworks went on for nearly half an hour, great pulsing strobes, fiery dandelions and starbursts of light brightening both sky and water. It was hard to tell which was reality and which was reflection, as if there were two displays, above and below, going on simultaneously—one in space-time, mused Max, and the other in time-space.”
— Sol Luckman
“Down below people were clipping by going nowhere fast. You could feel the long despairing history of the place. You could actually hear it, a low hum like the buzz of a sick bee that resonated with the fragments of a million broken dreams.”
— Sol Luckman
“Nobody ever goes to that store to shop because it’s too crowded.”
— Sol Luckman
“I knew I was in deep shit. I didn’t know how deep—just that I still hadn’t touched bottom.”
— Sol Luckman
“When it rains it pours and when it shines you get melanoma.”
— Sol Luckman
“Flying in his dreams was an exhilarating, breathtaking experience, sometimes literally, that tended to leave reality wanting, like riding a roller coaster compared to mowing the lawn.”
— Sol Luckman
“The feeling was less like chemical intoxication than being drunk on life. Spinning round and round, he experienced absolute bliss— unadulterated and unconfined—in which he transcended his own personality and became one with everything he perceived.”
— Sol Luckman
“I wouldn’t be caught dead sacrificing myself for this country.”
— Sol Luckman
“I wondered about my inner child. In fact, I was troubled. Did I even have an inner child, I asked myself, given that, in essence, I’d just been born?”
— Sol Luckman
“The simple act of sitting here sipping this cappuccino is its own testament to my commitment to living the writer’s life. Which is to say: doing nothing but doing it exceedingly well.”
— Sol Luckman
“With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before—simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.”
— Sol Luckman
“So it was a crossroads summer, when the universe seemed to stand perilously still like an egg wobbling on a precipice, a regular rite of passage summer that saw us traverse the hazardous divide between the illusions of boyhood and the far more pernicious deceptions of maturity, et cetera.”
— Sol Luckman
“True, beneath the human fac?ade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.”
— Sol Luckman
“Have you ever noticed how good things go to those who hate?”
— Sol Luckman
“Spanish—how shall I say this?—is likePortuguese spoken with a speech impediment.”
— Sol Luckman
“I should think a dead language would be rather boring, sociallyspeaking.”
— Sol Luckman
“Begging is much more difficult than it looks. Contrary to popular belief, it’s a high art form that takes years of dedicated practice to master.”
— Sol Luckman
“It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger’s bleeding to death beside the road, most people won’t stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you’ve got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.”
— Sol Luckman
“Worry wasn’t an emotion to which he was particularly accustomed—and it worried him.”
— Sol Luckman
“Unhealthy behavior is actually common among doctors, who tend to know a lot about medicine but very little about health.”
— Sol Luckman
“The biggest question, transcending physics and the realm of how he was able to do the extraordinary things he did, remained firmly rooted in the realm of metaphysics and begged an answer to why he could do these things.”
— Sol Luckman
“He knew perfectly well (even if he wasn’t inclined to admit it) that the material body had a spiritual aspect. He knew that “spirit,” however explained, was real, because of his own undeniable experiences—which, though he might suppress them, he couldn’t altogether erase from memory.”
— Sol Luckman
“I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing—as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it’s the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence.”
— Sol Luckman
“Recalling his first dreams of flight when he was a small child, Max acknowledged that his entire existence had been building up to this tipping point where he could finally choose to release his self-imposedlimitations.”
— Sol Luckman
“Over the years most of my peers had come to hate me—I never understood why. I guess I was just different and, like dogs, they could smell it. So I never had many friends.”
— Sol Luckman
“The scene sucker-punched Max. He never saw it coming. It encapsulated in one poignant instant the tragic beauty of his family history.”
— Sol Luckman
“Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a “zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations.”
— Sol Luckman
“Well, enough of this introspection. It’s depressing, quite frankly.”
— Sol Luckman