Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.
After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body’s final trick is simply to absent itself. Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made of snow, leaving nothing much. Two lumps of coal, an old hat, a grin made of pebbles. The bones dry sticks, easily broken.
To be a man, watched by women. It must be entirely strange. To have them watching him all the time. To have them wondering, What’s he going to do next?
By extension, anyone who liked smelling the daisies, and having daisies to smell, and eating mercury-free fish, and who objected to giving birth to three-eyed infants via the toxic sludge in their drinking water was a demon-possessed Satanic minion of darkness, hell-bent on sabotaging the American Way and God’s Holy Oil, which were one and the same.
You think you can get rid of things, and people too – leave them behind. You don’t know yet about the habit they have, of coming back.
We are two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.
But remember that forgiveness too is a power.
But then it came to me that who I really am is a person who doesn’t need to know who he really is, in the usual sense. What does it mean, anyway – family background and so forth? People use it mostly as an excuse for their own snobbery, or else their failings. I’m free of the temptation, that’s all. I’m free of the strings. Nothing ties me down.
Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.
So when time had begun to run out on Adelia with no really acceptable husband in sight, she’d married money – crude money, button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil.
Nothing takes place in the bed but sleep; or no sleep. I try not to think too much. Like other things now, thought must be rationed. There’s a lot that doesn’t bear thinking about. Thinking can hurt your chances, and I intend to last.
His mother said that all children were arsonists at heart, and if not for the lighter he’d have used matches.
I lie flat, the damp air above me like a lid. Like earth. I wish it would rain. Better still, a thunderstorm, black clouds, lightning, ear-splitting sound.
One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy.
It would be nice to believe that love should be dished out in a fair way so that everyone got some. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for me.
The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.
They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; so you do, and you think, Now I’m going to find out the real truth. But you don’t find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it’s like anything else: you’ve got stuck in it and you can’t get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place.
Any forced change of leadership is always followed by a move to crush the opposition. The opposition is led by the educated, so the educated are the first to be eliminated.
I didn’t want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don’t see the body, it’s easier to believe nobody’s dead.
Fraternize means to behave like a brother. Luke told me that. He said there was no corresponding word that meant to behave like a sister. Sororize, it would have to be, he said. From the Latin.