It’s a wonder I’m even alive. Sometimes I think that. I think that I can’t believe I haven’t killed myself. But there’s something in me that just keeps going on. I think it has something to do with tomorrow, that there is always one, and that everything can change when it comes.
I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead.
So that’s what I’m here to become. And suddenly, this word fills me with a brand of sadness I haven’t felt since childhood. The kind of sadness you feel at the end of summer. When the fireflies are gone, the ponds have dried up and the plants are wilted, weary from being so green.
Think of your head as an unsafe neighborhood; don’t go there alone.
The past does not haunt us. We haunt the past. We allow our minds to focus in that direction. We open memories and examine them. We reexperience emotions we felt during the painful events we experienced because we are recalling them in as much detail as we can.
If you hate your life, you haven’t’ seen enough of it. If you hate your life, it’s because your life is too small and doesn’t’ fit you.
I love you,” she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.
He likes people because he likes to share in conversations. I like people when they have large checks for me.
Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don’t end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with.
I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin.
The year I snuck an interracial lesbian couple into the background of an American Airlines commercial, I was feeling particularly flush.
Because all of us are made not only of what we have but what we lost. And loss is not a subtraction. As an experience, it is an addition.
I had always had the oddest feeling, consider it knowledge, that if I were ever to find myself inside the cockpit of a 767 with two dead piolets and afew hundred passengers in the cabin behind me, I would absolutely be able to land the ninety-thousand-pound jet.
I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror.
I wish I had a tray table in my bedroom and I wish I smoked, just so I could extinguish my smoking materials.
My life came complete with a factory-installed biological brother seven years my senior.
It wasn’t like he was holding me so much as trying to hold onto something.