Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own.
To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead – either you are, or you are not.
As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.
Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.
I’d like to be your friend – but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me.
To claim – to claim repeatedly – that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numberous others, will say it for you.
Marianne laughed. But you can’t disappoint me! I don’t love you.
The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem.” This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.
The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for ‘serious literary’ fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Then the noise faded and Legs squinted up at the sky, the moon so bright you’d never think it could be merely rock like the earth’s common rock and lifeless, merely reflected light from an invisible sun and not a powerful living light of its own...
But so like Hollywood people, who played at the emotions they truly felt. Or maybe the emotions they truly felt could only be expressed in play?
I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others’ eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.
At such rare times you can feel the electrically charged neurons of the prefrontal brain realigning themselves like iron fillings drawn by a magnet.
It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.
The hard part of humanity is history. All that’s been done to human beings by other human beings. In the Rocky River Nature Preserve you didn’t have to think of such things.
It was a very American story, somehow. ‘Lost.’ Each community had such stories. Possibly, each family.
There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.
It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It is very hard to prevail in any case but without this love, it is close to impossible.
A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons – Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.
How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.