There were lockouts, bread riots. And absurdly, I turned seventeen right in the middle of it all. Ridiculous. An insult to celebrate such a thing when the whole country was sliding into the abyss.
When I’d been with Kolya, I’d been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me.
Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon’s charcoal neck.
I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.
She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn’t really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable.
I was more his child than he knew. But my womanhood had put a permanent barrier between us. He didn’t know how to be the father of a woman, and womanhood could not be undone. The future already a fact.
It’s the difference between a true artist and everybody else.” Claire sighed. “They can remake the world.
On the anvil of August, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat.
I hate people,” he said, wiping the urchin’s face with the rag. “Animals are more noble. Look at this boy. He’s poor and desperate, but can they see it? Can they pity him? No. They should embrace him. They should save their kicks and blows for the bastards who keep them so poor, who set them on each other like dogs.
My heart felt like a balloon that was filling too full, and I panicked. I might get the bends, the way scuba divers did when they surfaced too fast.
That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He’d have had to change his whole philosophy. The.
We tried not to be in the same room at the same time when Starr was home, we set the air on fire between us.
Never let a man stay the night,” she told me. “Dawn has a way of casting a pall on any night magic.
There was power in me now, where there had been none.
I was the center of my own universe it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around new, and I liked the way he looked at me l. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.
Those who love poetry, even my unreadable foreign brand, are a tender breed.
Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him. Not true. The hard things cam easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.
My mother was not herself in the time of the Santa Anas. I was twelve years old and I was afraid for her.
Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time. We.
She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, “It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.” Instead of one who showed him how to die.