Languor is a more efficient method of control.
Children believe that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault.
And what did I amount to, once the official version gained ground? An edifying legend. A stick used to beat other women with.
The palliative care nurses welcome him: he’s a spot of brightness, they claim he keeps the patients interested in life. “We don’t think of the clients here as dying,” one of them said to him on his first visit. “After all everyone’s dying, just some of us more slowly.
Words are so often like window curtains, a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance.
He has tried imagining her as a prostitute – he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters – but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like paying to be run over by a wagon, and would be, like that experience, a distinct threat to the health.
But they only run away. Run isn’t quite accurate. Their legs don’t move. Their still-twitching feet don’t touch the ground.
If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans, as used to be said; though in present day, the idea of God laughing is next door to blasphemy. An ultra-serious fellow, God is now.
It’s an event, a small defiance of rule, so small as to be undetectable, but such moments are the rewards I hold out for myself, like the candy I hoarded, as a child, at the back of a drawer. Such moments are possibilities, tiny peepholes.
You can see it in her eyes: I am not there. But she exists, in her white dress. She grows and lives. Isn’t that a good thing? A blessing? Still, I can’t bear it, to have been erased like that.
I prefer to be upright and contained – an urn in daylight.
I’d never gone out with anyone because I’d never met anyone I might want to go out with. There seemed to be no way that could happen. Boys from the Wyle School were not possible: I’d gone through grade school with them, I’d seen them pick their noses, and some of them had been pants-wetters. You can’t feel romantic with those images in your mind.
Sorprende comprobar con que rapidez se pierde la entereza en ausencia de otras personas.
There are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the prayer repeated.
The times when she was away were hard for Jimmy. He worried about her, he longed for her, he resented her for not being there.
Free love,” Aunt Beatrice said scornfully. “It’s never free. There’s always a price.
On the palm of my hand there’s a disaster. I must have been born with it. I carry it with me wherever I go.
It’s astonishing how folks can get so worked up over something that doesn’t exist.
He slides off into half-sleep and dreams of Oryx, floating on her back in a swimming pool, wearing an outfit that appears to be made of delicate white tissue-paper petals. They spread out around her, expanding and contracting like the valves of a jellyfish. The pool is painted a vibrant pink. She smiles up at him and moves her arms gently to keep afloat, and he knows they are both in great danger.
These kids could hardly burp without some adult pointing a camera at them and telling them to do it again – as if they lived their lives twice, once in reality and the second time for the photo.