Let her go?′ asked Son, and he smiled a crooked smile. Let go the woman you had been looking for everywhere just because she was difficult? Because she had a temper, energy, ideas of her own and fought back? Let go a woman whose eyebrows were a study, whose face was enough to engage your attention all your life? Let go a woman who was not only a woman but a sound, all the music he had ever wanted to play, a world and a way of being in it? Let that go? ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t.
If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.
It never occurred to us that the Earth itself might have been unyielding.
We know you can never do it properly – once and for all. Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.
What does ‘poor’ mean? No television?” Steve raised his eyebrows. “It means no money,” said Bride. “Same thing,” he answered. “No money, no television.” “Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!” “Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?
The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes and makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favorable glances her way.
Pauline, what would you do if your own brother had a party and didn’t invite you?’ I said ifn I really wanted to go to that party, I reckoned I’d go anyhow. Never mind what he want. She just sucked her teeth a little and made out like what I said was dumb. All the while I was thinking how dumb she was. Whoever told her that her brother was her friend? Folks can’t like folks just ’cause they has the same mama.
She had been looking all along for a friend, and it took her a while to discover that a lover was not a comrade and could never be – for a woman.
She cannot be lost because no one is looking for her.
The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read it.
He fell for an eighteen-year old girl with one of those deepdown spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.
They could not save their friend from the world. She broke.
124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For.
Funny how you lose sight of some things and memory others.
The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.
Don’t love her too much. Don’t. Maybe it’s still in her the thing that makes it all right to kill her children. I have to tell her. I have to protect her.
She floated near but outside her own body, feeling vague and intense at the same time. Needing nothing. Being what there was.
Before and since, all her effort was directed not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible.
Now they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise.
I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it.