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.
There was a pot of boiling rage on a private stove behind their closed curtains:.
Unlike Laura, I have never had the courage of my convictions.
I never do such things, however. I only consider them. If I did them, they would be sure I had gone mad again. Gone mad is what they say, and sometimes Run mad, as if mad is a direction, like west; as if mad is a different house you could step into, or a separate country entirely. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in.
I didn’t like it when other people criticized Laura – her vagueness, her simplicity, her feckleness. Criticism of Laura was reserved for me.
So true,” said Miss Violence, with a sigh. But she sighed about everything. She fit into Avilion very well – into its obsolete Victorian splendours, its air of aesthetic decay, of departed grace, of wan regret. Her attitudes and even her faded cashmeres went with the wallpaper. Laura.