Dreams: the place most of us get what we need.
I sleep with a glass of water on the nightstand so I can see by its level if the coastal earth is trembling or if the shaking is still me.
I know that homes burn and that you should think what to save before they start to. Not because, in the heat of it, everything looks as valuable as everything else. But, because nothing looks worth the bother, not even your life.
I get rational when I panic.
As soon as I knew that I would be all right, I was sure that I was dead and didn’t know it. I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence. I waited for the moment that would snap me out of my seeming life.
And I see that not touching for so long was a drive to the beach with the windows rolled up so the waves feel that much colder.
I often feel the effects of people only after they leave me.
I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
I leave a lot out when I tell the truth.
It is possible to imagine a person so entirely that the image resists attempts to dislodge it.
When my mother died, my father’s early widowhood gave him social cachet he would not have had if they had divorced. He was a bigger catch for the sorrow attached.
Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We’ve read our Shakespeare.
The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?
I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it’s true – nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.
Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good?
I would like to go for a ride with you, have you take me to stand before a river in the dark where hundreds of lightning bugs blink this code in sequence: right here, nowhere else! Right now, never again!
A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.
He could not wait to get rid of them so he could enjoy remembering them.
There’s no such thing as luck. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity.
I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you’d find in a cartoon bubble.