Pepto-Bismol straight from the bottle.
People die, sure, my mother was saying. But it’s so heartbreaking and unnecessary how we lose things. From pure carelessness. Fires, wars. The Parthenon, used as a munitions storehouse. I guess that a...
Our large age difference made us shy with each other; there was a formality, a generational reserve;
No money, holes in my socks, living off oatmeal.
Minie balls and repeating rifles. That was why the body count was so high. We had trench warfare in America way before WW1. p128
La belleza altera la textura de la realidad.
Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a p...
It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand.
I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness a...
I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.
I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story.
Henry’s a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman — very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He’s a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he’s made himself what he is by sheer...
He had an orange stain on his mouth from the prawns, the old jabberwock.
Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones I did not.
Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle...
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across...
And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion ha...
And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn’t perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.
And there she was, turning and smiling at me, at me! and there were way too many people in the theater because it was the seven o'clock show, way more people than I was comfortable with my generalized...
Yet isn’t it always the inappropriate thing, the thing that doesn’t quite work, that’s oddly the dearest?