A wall that cannot be defended is no sooner built than ended.
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.
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.