Gladys had seen all of this, and she made it his to know. She'd lost her future to death, and lost her child to life.
Frost had built on the dead grass, and it skirled beneath his feet. If not for this sound he’d have thought himself struck deaf, owing to the magnitude of the surrounding silence. All the night’s nois...
Before this moment I'd lived as a mind. Body, heart, soul, intellect, so we care ourselves into parts. But the whole of us, what can it be?
AFTER MAYAKOVKSY by Denis JohnsonIt's after one. You're probably alone.All night the moon rings like a telephonein an empty booth above our separateness.Now is the hour one answers. I am home.Hello, m...
I felt the stirring even of parts of me that had been dead since childhood, that sense of the child as a sort of antenna stuck in the middle of an infinite expanse of possibilities.
You’ve never felt good. Your suffering protects you. Pain is the ransom you have gladly paid not to be free.
You bury a friend—that gives you an enemy. It calls you more deeply into the cause. Then the time comes when you kill a friend. And that might drive you away. It can also have the opposite result—to d...
Write naked. That means to write what you would never say.
With each step my heart broke for the person I would never find, the person who'd love me.
Well, you were sad about the kids for a while, for a month, two months, three months. You’re sad about the kids, sad about the animals, you don’t do the women, you don’t kill the animals, but after th...
Well, it’s very much for each person to experience alone, he said, and whatever truth he meant to get at, his eyes were the visible scars of it.
We parked under a strange sky with a faint image of a quarter-moon superimposed on it. There was a little woods beside us. This day had been dry out and hot, the buck pines and what-all simmering pati...
We can’t always tell the whole story about ourselves.
We Vietnamese have two philosophies to sustain us. The Confucian tells us how to behave when fate grants us peace and order. The Buddhist trains us to accept our fate even when it brings us blood and...
This moment, this very experience of it, seemed only the thinnest gauze. She sat in the audience thinking - someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone's soul is lost, someone feels n...
This life is but the childhood of our immortality.
There’s nothing wrong with me—I’m surprised I let those words out. But it’s always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.
There was nothing of his I wanted in particular. I wanted it all.
The Vine had no jukebox, but a real stereo continually playing tunes of alcoholic self-pity and sentimental divorce Nurse, I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail...
Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.