You try to tell yourself that you’ve been lucky, most incredibly lucky, and usually that works because it’s true. Sometimes it doesn’t work, that’s all. Then you cry.
There were games and activities as well as sermons, because, as he pointed out regularly, most of Jesus’s preaching happened outside, and that meant there was more to Christianity than church.
He died of a heart attack two months later, in Tamazunchale’s open-air market, while dickering for fresh tomatoes. I thought there would be time, but we always think stuff like that, don’t we? We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.
It was as if the body disdained memory... or refused the responsibility of it.
When I made pictures, I fell in love with the world. When I made pictures, I felt whole.
Without Constant Reader, you are just a voice quacking in the void.
When rationality begins to break down, the circuits of the human brain can overload. Axons grow bright and feverish. Hallucinations turn real: the quicksilver puddle at the point where perspective makes parallel lines seem to intersect is really there; the dead walk and talk; a rose begins to sing.
She sat there all afternoon in her hot maiden’s bedroom, thinking and dreaming in the dark circle which the splinter spread around her, a darkness which was like the hood of a cobra.
A real drunk is only int’rested in two things: puttin paid to the jug in the hand, and huntin for the one still in the bush.
As the stranger came closer, Dud understood everything and welcomed it, and when the pain came, it was as sweet as silver, as green as still water at dark fathoms.
My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. I’ve always thought that was good advice.
Once you know what the story is and get it right – as right as you can, anyway – it belongs to anyone who wants to read it.
A particularly apropos Ben Franklin adage had come to mind: Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.
All I’m saying is that your happiness is in your hands and those of your nearest and dearest. And if you think I’m going to show up two decades or so down the line to collect your soul in my moldy old pocketbook, you’d better think again. The souls of humans have become poor and transparent things.
Out of the blue and into the black, yes, that was it. Where anything might be waiting. 3.
Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.
It occurred to him that spite was a kind of methadone for lovers, and better than going cold turkey.
He will hear this voice in uneasy dreams for the rest of his life, never quite remembering what he has dreamed, only knowing that the dreams leave him feeling ill somehow – walking restlessly, straightening pictures in loveless rooms, listening to the call to muzzein in alien town squares.
A hurt body and mind aren’t just like a dictatorship; they are a dictatorship. There is no tyrant as merciless as pain, no despot so cruel as confusion. That my mind had been as badly hurt as my body was a thing I only came to realize once I was alone and all other voices dropped away.
But grownups were always in a turmoil, every possible action muddied over by thoughts of the consequences, by self-doubt, by selfimage, by feelings of love and responsibility.