Last night I felt the approach of nothing. Not too close but on its way, like a wingbeat, like the cooling of the wind, the slight initial tug of an undertow.
Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Center motto, warning us away from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal. The.
To go through all that and give birth to a shredder: it wasn’t a fine thought. We didn’t know exactly what would happen to the babies that didn’t get passed, that were declared Unbabies. But we knew they were put somewhere, quickly, away.
Time is going faster and faster; the days of the week whisk by like panties.
A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended.
Don’t think that way, Moira would say. Think that way and you’ll make it happen.
In the dark parlor we move away from each other, slowly, as if pulled towards each other by a force, current, pulled apart also by hands equally strong. I.
The fact is that I hate this city. I’ve hated it so long I can hardly remember feeling any other way about it.
You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
Charis tried not to mind, since nothing that was or had been would perish, and the farm was still inside her, it was still hers because places belonged to the people who loved them.
She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.
Toast was a pointless invention from the Dark Ages. Toast was an implement of torture that caused all those subjected to it to regurgitate in verbal form the sins and crimes of their past lives. Toast was a ritual item devoured by fetishists in the belief that it would enhance their kinetic and sexual powers. Toast cannot be explained by any rational means.
Art is what you can get away with, said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shoplifting or some other minor crime. And maybe that’s all it ever was, or is: a kind of stealing. A hijacking of the visual.
The penalty for rape, as you know, is death. Deuteronomy 22:23–29. I.
Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.
I hear where you’re coming from, as if the voice itself were a traveler, arriving from a distant place. Which it would be, which it is.
That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Heaven, for the Presbyterians, must resemble a banking establishment, with each soul tagged and docketed, and placed in the appropriate pigeonhole.
What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true;.
And if I talk to him, I’ll say something wrong, give something away. I can feel it coming, a betrayal of myself.