The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort.
Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.
What greater gift could you offer your children than an inherent ability to earn a living just by being themselves?
They thought to use and shame me but I win out by nature, because a true freak cannot be made. A true freak must be born.
I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.
Every doorway, every intersection has a story.
Suddenly the staggering love bursts away from me like milk from a smashed glass.
There are parts of Texas where a fly lives 10,000 years and a man can’t die soon enough.
I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.
In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.
It is, I suppose, the common grief of children at having to protect their parents from reality. It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
Women who pay their own rent don’t have to be nice.
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.