I thought of myself as an itinerant brain – the equivalent of a strolling player of Elizabethan times, or else a troubadour, clutching my university degree like a cheap lute.
Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won’t make that mistake again.
You don’t understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?
Nothing is ever settled,” says Jocelyn. “Every day is different. Isn’t it better to do something because you’ve decided to? Rather than because you have to?
So that made me happy but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That’s what Thank you means.
I don’t think they’ll ever replace the living and breathing,” says Gary. “They said that about e-books,” says Kevin. “You can’t stop progress.
The ways of God are not the ways of man, and they are most emphatically not the ways of woman.
What we consider real is also imagined; every life lived is also an inner life, a life created.
She stood for a long time, breathing in and breathing in, the scent of the trees and dogs and night flowers and water, because this was the best thing, it was what she wanted, to be outside in the night by herself. She wasn’t sick any longer.
The pile of stones thus marks both an act of deliberate remembrance, and an act of deliberate forgetting. They’re fond of paradox in that region.
Keep steady, I told myself. Don’t share too much about yourself, it will be used against you. Listen carefully. Save all clues. Don’t show fear.
Think of me as a guide. Think of yourself as a wanderer in a dark wood. It’s about to get darker.
I shiver: whose feet are walking on my grave? Time, I plead to the air, just a little more time. That’s all I need.
It’s always an imprudence to step between a man and the reflection of his own cleverness.
I’m beginning to feel that I’ve discovered something worth knowing. There’s a way out of places you want to leave, but can’t. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.
There is indeed something delightful about being able to combine obedience and disobedience in the same act.
Well. Its the penises.
Penises,” I said thoughtfully. “Them again.
That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.
There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew.