Nothing should be carelessly thrown away, not even wine from sinful places. There was no such thing as garbage, trash, or dirt, only matter that hadn’t been put to a proper use.
Some women had nightmares, as you’d assume. They would groan and thrash about during them, or sit bolt upright with modified shouts. I’m not criticizing: I had nightmares myself. Shall I describe one for you? No, I will not. I’m fully aware of how easily one can become fatigued by other people’s nightmares, having heard a number of recitals of these by now. When push comes to shove, only one’s own nightmares are of any interest or significance.
However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.
I took care not to react. It’s a skill, not reacting.
Then they’d brought in some top designers to consult on an overall look and feel. The fifties was chosen for the visual and audio aspects, because that was the decade in which the most people had self-identified as being happy. Which is one of the goals here: maximum possible happiness. Who wouldn’t tick that box?
The Serpent is wise in that it lives in immediacy, without the need for the elaborate intellectual frameworks Humankind is.
I meant it for the best, or for the best available, which is not the same thing.
I remain deeply grateful that I have never learned to knit.
In the gap between desire and enactment, noun and verb, intention and infliction, want and have, compassion begins.
I’d felt like crying, but cry once and it’s all over: if you cry, the reliable men will despise you, and then they will not be reliable any more.
What he craved was not her body as such. He wanted to be transformed by her, into someone he was not.
Right now I’m not afraid of him. It’s hard to be afraid of a man who is sitting watching you put on hand lotion. This lack of fear is dangerous.
In any case, time is not a thing that passes, said Pilar: it’s a sea on which you float.
Sk my dk, it’s organic!
Axiom: that illness isn’t productive. In itself, it generates no commodities and therefore no money. Although it’s an excuse for a lot of activity, all it really does moneywise is cause wealth to flow from the sick to the well. From patients to doctors, from clients to cure-peddlers. Money osmosis, you might call it.
The pain gave me something definite to think about, something immediate. It was something to hold on to.
Cats of all kinds will set ambushes: one frisks around in the open to distract your attention while another one slips quietly up behind.
Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds.
But now I must end our conversation. Goodbye, my reader. Try not to think too badly of me, or no more badly than I think of myself.
Like many other art forms of vanished civilizations, the techniques for this one have been lost and cannot quite be duplicated.