But there’s something missing in them, even the nice ones. It’s like they’re permanently absent-minded, like that can’t quite remember who they are.
Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.
Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother thinks was merely cute may have been lethal.
I remember Queen Victoria’s advice to her daughter. Close your eyes and think of England.
The witch is absolutely necessary.
There was also, as it turned out, the dismay of my parents to be reckoned with: their tolerance about caterpillars and beetles and other non-human life forms did not quite extend to artists.
It took me a long time to figure out that the youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon from the point of view of those who find dragons alarming.
She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.
Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another. How could we have made such light of it? Sneered even. As if it was trivial for us, a frill, whim. It was, on the contrary, heavy going.
I will never be that old, thinks Joanne. I will die before I’m thirty. She knows this absolutely. It’s a tragic but satisfactory thought. If necessary, if some wasting disease refuses to carry her off, she’ll do it herself, with pills. She is not at all unhappy but she intends to be, later. It seems required.
Language is not morally neutral because the human brain is not neutral in its desires. Neither is the dog brain. Neither is the bird brain: crows hate owls. We like some things and dislike others, we approve of some things and disapprove of others. Such is the nature of being an organism.
He manages to appear puzzled, as if he can’t quite remember how we all got in here. As if we are something he inherited, like a Victorian pump organ, and he hasn’t figured out what to do with us. What we are worth.
Backward glances are not encouraged.
This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it’s always best to go with someone who’s been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.
He can see the point of venison, of killing to eat, but to have a cut-off head on your wall? What does it prove, except that a deer can’t pull a trigger?
I want to be held and told my name. I want to be valued, in ways that I am not; I want to be more than valuable.
I want to keep on living, in any form. I resign my body freely, to the uses of others. They.
Death is a beautiful woman, with wings and one breast almost bare; or is that Victory? I can’t remember. They.
Winter is not so dangerous. I need hardness, cold, rigidity; not this heaviness, as if I’m a melon on a stem, this liquid ripeness.
In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there’s ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?