Abdication, a great brass bell, solemn, resonant, deafening.
I saw that miracles were shocking, as overwhelming as disasters.
Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately?
He could sense the ridiculousness of life even as it tore the guts out of him. She saw that now. And death lay coiled in the dark between the perception and the pain.
Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn’t twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right.
It’s magic, Astrid. You have to know how to reach up and pull beauty out of thin air.
Father turned on me as if blackbirds had flown out of my mouth.
This dumb show of privilege – the quartet, the stylized flowers of stained glass, the illumination of the skylights. Yet it was beautiful. Did beauty have to be shameful? I wished there was someone I could ask.
My freckles felt like they would burst into flame.
One death did not salve another.
That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone.
Do go on,” I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.
Nature was always there, no matter what.
But things coming out of her, visible to the world? It was in a strange way another loss. You gave things away you couldn’t afford to lose. Private things. You showed yourself and you couldn’t take it back.
I lay my Webster’s on the scrubbed table in the lantern light, to learn that flotsam is the debris left from shipwreck, while jetsam is merchandise thrown overboard from a ship in crisis to lighten the load.
I wanted to put words between us, like spikes, to keep myself from falling into him like a girl without bones.
Wait for me, you said. Then left me alone in the echoing world.
No one considered that a key might lock as well as unlock.
The pine shadows moved across my blanket, the wall behind me. People were just like that. We couldn’t even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.
The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived.