Do you still miss Gran?” I ask him as we head toward New Clairmont. “Because I miss her. We never talk about her.” “A part of me died,” he says. “And it was the best part.
I never got an explanation. I just know he left me.
Three flowers for you. You should have three.” He looks pitiful. He looks powerful. I love him, but I am not sure I like him. I take his hand and lead him inside.
Isaac liked me because I was ignorant and that meant he could teach me, right? That made him feel like a man.
And in the end, after he broke up with me and I was sad and mental, I came to the Vineyard and one day I thought: Eff you, Mr. Isaac. I’m not so very ignorant. I just know stuff about stuff that you dismiss as unimportant and useless. Does that make sense?
The question is: how to be a good person if I don’t believe anymore.
The fact that I couldn’t understand his life experience very well, combined with how he was a year ahead of me and really into all his academics, the literary magazine, et cetera – that meant that all the time, he got to be the big man and I was looking up at him with wide eyes. And that was what he liked about me. And why he despised me.
A lot of times, I wish I were dead, I truly do, just to make the pain stop.
I do not suffer fools.
But also, he doesn’t like to let us off easy. He wants to make us think – even when we don’t feel like thinking.
Immie put on her sunglasses. “Forrest’s writing a novel.” “What kind of novel?” asked Jule. “A little Samuel Beckett meets Hunter S. Thompson,” said Forrest. “And I’m a big fan of Pynchon, so he’s an influence.
Tragedy is ugly and tangled, stupid and confusing.
You better live this life of yours while you can – real living, the kind where you get a little dirt on your halo – ’cause, babe, not one of us knows how long we got.
Like, in Vanity Fair, Becky Sharp is one big ambition machine. She’ll stop at zero. Jane Eyre has temper tantrums, throws herself on the floor. Pip in Great Expectations is deluded and money hungry. All of them want a better life and go after it, and all of them are morally compromised. That makes them interesting.
And yet, there was a witch. There is always a witch.
My feelings leak out my eyes, crumpling my face, heave through my frame.
I grew up with very normal, stable people,” Brooke continued. “We acted normal all day long in my family. So normal I wanted to stab my eyes out. So I’m like an expert. And you? You are not normal. You should think about getting help for it, is what I’m saying.
I don’t want to forget I’m trying to remember.
My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss, then, for an hour or two. My grandmother, my grandmother. Gone forever, though I could smell her Chanel perfume on the fabrics.
Still, she has an aura of mystery that stops her from being teased or singled out for typical high school unpleasantness. Her mother is a Sinclair.