The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.
None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others.
Help is what they offer but gratitude is what they want, they roll around in it like cats in the catnip.
In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.
I’ve learned to do without a lot of things. If you have a lot of things, said Aunt Lydia, you get too attached to this material world and you forget about spiritual values. You must cultivate poverty of spirit. Blessed are the meek.
It’s simple,′ Kat told them. ‘You bombard them with images of what they ought to be, and you make them feel grotty for being the way they are. You’re working with the gap between reality and perception. That’s why you have to hit them with something new, something they’ve never seen before, something they aren’t. Nothing sells like anxiety.
I don’t want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds’ worth of half babies.
I’d wanted to leave home, but have it stay in place, waiting for me, unchanged, so I could step back into it at will.
It’s fun to be different, but not too different!
Boys by nature require these silences; they must not be startled by too many words, spoken too quickly. What they actually say is not that important. The important parts exist in the silences between the words. I know what we’re both looking for, which is escape. They want to escape from adults and other boys, I want to escape from adults and other girls. We’re looking for desert islands, momentary, unreal, but there.
I don’t give a glance to what’s still on the walls, I hate those neo-expressionist dirty greens and putrid oranges, post this, post that. Everything is post these days, as if we’re all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.
When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too – leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.
Stupid, stupid, stupid: I’d believed all that claptrap about life, liberty, democracy, and the rights of the individual I’d soaked up at law school. These were eternal verities and we would always defend them. I’d depended on that, as if on a magic charm.
He owes me, but that could prove a liability. Some people do not enjoy being indebted.
The future is in your hands, she resumed. She held her own hands out to us, the ancient gesture that was both an offering and an invitation, to come forward, into an embrace, an acceptance. In your hands, she said, looking down at her own hands as if they had given her the idea. But there was nothing in them. They were empty. It was our hands that were supposed to be full, full of the future; which could be held but not seen.
I am a blank, here, between parentheses. Between other people.
Why should the other ones in this play get a second chance at life, but not him? Why’s he have to suffer so much for being what he is? It’s like he’s, you know, black or Native or something. Five strikes against him from Day One. He never asked to get born.
One detaches oneself. One describes.
Life sucks, end of story,” said Ada.
The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains.