I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman's cigarette. That's all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I'm normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see...
I am a twentiethcentury individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there's a ch...
He writes about mud and death and he makes me hungry.
He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas basket...
He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.
Grass: I’ve invested heavily in blood futures. I have a direct line to the trading floor for polyester blood. There’s a heaving mass of men crying out their bids. The blood arrives at the warehouse in...
Exile in a real place, a place of few bodies and many stones, is just an extension (a packaging) of the other exile, the state of being separated from whatever is left of the center of one’s own histo...
Every lost moment is the life. It's unknowable, except to us, each of us inexpressibly...
Even as he printed the words, he imagined people reading them, people moved by his loneliness and disappointment, even by his wretched spelling, the childish mesh of his composition. Let them see the...
Devices make us pliant. We want to please them. The machine was his only hope of deliverance after what he'd done, what he'd loosed into the crowd. A way out of death. - (362)
And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundame...
A sunset is the story of the world's day.
A Catholic gets it early. Incense, organ music, ashes on the forehead, wafer on the tongue. The best things shimmer with fear.
How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep a...
I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity.
You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen.
Would you ask a man who bags groceries if he fears death not because it is death but because there are still some interesting groceries he would like to bag?
Why shouldn't the death of a person you love bring you into lurid ruin? You don't know how to love the one you love until they disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from their s...
Why is it so hard to be serious, so easy to be too serious?