Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them.
She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away.
The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.
That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.
How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray – here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.
On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.
Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the words suggest.
Sick? – What’s sick? Who is ‘well’? Do you imagine, if you or I were minutely examined, we would be one hundred percent ‘well’?
Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.
I can manifest my neurotical emotions, emancipate an epicureal instinct, and elaborate on my heterosexual tendencies.
Recently she had been going through a period of adolescent melancholia, often talking with her mother, a nurse, about death. She would, she hoped, be some day reincarnated as a cat.
For once a truth is known it cannot be unknown, it can only be denied.
But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me.
A jury is as bright as the dumbest member of the jury.
On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.
In marriage, the most intense conversations are often with oneself.
Never can you climb over this wall, you’re not strong enough; girls aren’t strong enough; girls aren’t big enough; your body is fragile and breakable, like a doll; your body is a doll; your body is for others to admire and to pet; your body is to be used by others, not used by you; your body is a luscious fruit for others to bite into and to savor; your body is for others, not for you.
Josiah feel that, for a moment, he’d been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to care too much about too little.
Maybe he’d been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it’s always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others.
I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts. Particularly if it hurts.