The moment I saw her, a part of me walked out of my body and wrapped itself around her. And there it still remains.
Enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.
She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.
She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know.
Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
Even in the most uneventful of our lives, we are called upon to choose our battles...
If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.
Love, after all, is the ingredient that separates a sacrifice from ordinary, everyday butchery.
Sleep came to them, quick and easy, like money to millionaires.
In a while he reached across the table and took her hand in his. He could not have known that he was trying to comfort a building that had been struck by lightning.
Destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.
She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.
I use the word love loosely, and only because my vocabulary is unequal to the task of describing the precise nature of that maze, that forest of feelings.
But eventually, the Elixir of the Soul that had survived wars and the bloody birth of three new countries, was, like most things in the world, trumped by Coca-Cola.
Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.
She could hear her hair growing. It sounded like something crumbling. A burnt thing crumbling. Coal. Toast. Moths crisped on a light bulb. She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died. Like cities. Fizzy, effervescent, simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them.
The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair.
She wasn’t a woman who smiled and said hello.
It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete – a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.