Fooling around Quotes

“Prison left me with some strange little tics.' She has taken all the door off their hinges in all the apartments she has lived in since. It's not that she has anxiety attacks about small spaces, she says, it's just that she starts to sweat and go cold. 'This apartment is perfect for me,' she says, looking around the open space.'How about elevators?' I ask, recalling the schlepp up the stairs. 'Exactly,' she replies, 'I don't like them much either.'One day, years later, her husband Charlie was fooling around at home, playing the guitar. Miriam said something provocative and he stood up suddenly, lifting his arm to take off the guitar strap. He was probably just going to say 'That's outrageous', or tickle her or tackle her. But she was gone. She was already down in the courtyard of the building. She does not remember getting down the stairs-it was an automatic flight reaction.”

“Not fooling around, not bothering nobody, just sitting here mending the Primus," said the cat with a hostile frown, "and, moreover, I consider it my duty to warn you that the cat is an ancient, inviolable animal.”

“Every time you worry that you could get trapped in some kind of work you don't care about, you're dealing with the problem of meaningfulness. I guarantee that in the back of your mind is the thought that somehow you have to make a contribution to something, be acknowledged, do something that matters--or you're just fooling around.”

“One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled, stooped to pull harder-when, sprung out of the earthon his glittering terriblecarriage, he claimed his due.It is finished. No one had heard her.No one! She had strayed from the herd. (Remember: go straight to school.This is important, stop fooling around!Don't answer to strangers. Stickwith your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)This is how easily the pitopens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.”

“Who doesn't have a dark place somewhere inside him that comes out sometimes when he's looking in a mirror? Dark and light, we are all made out of shadows like the shapes on a motion-picture screen. A lot of people think that the function of the projector is to throw light on the screen, just as the function of the story-teller is to stop fooling around and simply tell what happened, but the dark places must be there too, because without the dark places there would be no image and the figure on the screen would not exist.”