'And then say what? Say, "Forget you're hungry, forget
you got shot inna back by some racist cop - Chuck was here?
Chuck come up to Harlem - '".
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Opening lines. Prologue. |
At that very moment, in the very sort of Park Avenue co-op
apartment that so obsessed the Mayor . . . twelve-foot ceilings
. . . two wings, one for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who
own the place and one for the help . . . Sherman McCoy was kneeling
in his front hall trying to put a leash on a dachshund.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
First sentence, Chapter 1. |
On Wall Street he and a few others - how many? - three hundred,
four hundred, five hundred? - had become precisely that …
Masters of the Universe.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Referring to bond dealer Sherman McCoy
and his colleagues. |
The phase pops into his head at that very instant: social
X-rays … They keep themselves so thin, they look like X-ray
pictures … You can see lamplight through their bones …
while they're chattering about interiors and landscape gardening
… and encasing their scrawny shanks in metallic Lycra tubular
tights for their Sports Training classes.
The Bonfire of the Vanities |
But the smile on her face was obviously genuine, altogether
pleasant...a lovely smile, in fact...Still a very good-looking
woman, my wife...with her fine thin features, her big clear
blue eyes, her rich brown hair...But she's forty years old!...No
getting around it...Today good-looking...Tomorrow they'll
be talking about what a handsome woman she is...Not her fault...But
not mine, either!
The Bonfire of the Vanities |
Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their
fathers sooner or later that the man before him was not an aging
father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up
and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense
of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called 'Being a Father'
so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely
important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic
and catastrophic possibilities of life.
The Bonfire of the Vanities |
A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
The Bonfire of the Vanities |
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