The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.
Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for trade, we thrive on bones; without them there’d be no stories.
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
We battled in secret, undeclared, and after a while I no longer fought back because I never won. The only defense was flight, invisibility.
A language is everything you do.
Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel – a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they’d always longed for but couldn’t ever grasp.
The internet is 95 percent porn and spam.
Pink is supposed to weaken your enemies, make them go soft on you, which must be why it’s used for baby girls. It’s a wonder the military hasn’t got on to this.
A hot wind was blowing around my head, the strands of my hair lifting and swirling in it, like ink spilled in water.
And consider: it is loss to which everything flows, absence in which everything flowers.
The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds.
It made him feel invisible – not that he wanted to feel anything else.
I didn’t want him to become gray and multi-dimensional and complicated like everyone else. Was every Heathcliff a Linton in disguise?
I am not a saint or a cripple, I am not a wound; now I will see whether I am a coward.
Without the protection of surliness and levity, all children would be crushed by the past – the past of others, loaded onto their shoulders. Selfishness is their saving grace.
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope. In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
I am afraid of falling into hopeless despair, over my wasted life, and I am still not sure how it happened.
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.
Even an obvious fabrication is some comfort when you have few others.