What would that be like – to long, to yearn for someone who is right there before your eyes, day in and day out?
What were prizes but one more level of control imposed on Art by the establishment?
The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first.
Does she ever see him watching her through the picture window? Most likely. Does she think he’s a lecherous old man? Very probably. But he isn’t exactly that. How to convey the mix of longing, wistfulness, and muted regret that he feels? His regret is that he isn’t a lecherous old man, but he wishes he were. He wishes he still could be.
Everyone’s too sad for everything.
It’s as if some bored theatrical costume designer got drunk behind the scenes and raided the storage boxes:.
Mitch looks in her direction. He can’t meet her eyes. It’s as if she’s semi-invisible, a kind of hovering blur.
It is my opinion that they sometimes take what is intended for us, which would not surprise me in the least, as it is dog eat dog around here and they are the bigger dogs.
What do I want? I want you to talk about normal things. No I don’t. I want you to look me in the eye and say, I know you’re dying.
I’m such a mess,” he says. “Sometimes I think everyone’s dead.
Some people like to throw objects, such as glasses of water or rocks, but nail painting is more positive. If more world leaders would take it up there would be less overall suffering, in her opinion.
She found herself stepping into ritual as if into a pair of stone shoes.
The light flickers on all of us and makes us look softer and more beautiful than we really are. But sometimes it makes us darker and scarier too, when the faces go into shadow and you can’t see the eyes, only the eye sockets. Deep pools of blackness welling out of our heads. My.
I’d been reading modern French novels, and William Faulkner as well. I knew what love was supposed to be: obsession, with undertones of nausea.
Roz is telling a story. That’s what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.
It’s wonderful to hear his voice, even if she can’t depend on having any sort of a conversation with him. His interventions tend to be one-sided: if she answers him, he doesn’t often answer back. But it was always more or less like that between them.
Nothing helps gluttony along so well as eating food you don’t have to pay for yourself.
Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.
But when you cross over the border, it is like passing through air, you wouldn’t know you’d done it; as the trees on both sides of it are the same.
I had no faith in the wise choices of the Aunts: I feared that I would end up married to a goat on fire.