Good-bye, Room. I wave up at Skylight. Say good-bye, I tell Ma. Good-bye, Room. Ma says it but on mute. I look back one more time. It’s like a crater, a hole where something happened. Then we go out t...
But the thing is, slavery’s not a new invention. And solitary confinement—did you know, in America we’ve got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells?
And the flames are every colour of the rainbow.They can't be, observed Daffy.Well, they are, she said cheekily. Have you been there, that you know so much about it?No, said Daffy, very calm, but I'd w...
You, she thought. Every flawed, scrawny,
You must feel an almost pathological need—understandably—to stand guard between your son and the world. Yeah, it’s called being a mother. Ma nearly snarls it.
Writing stories is my way of scratching that itch: my escape from the claustrophobia of individuality. It lets me, at least for a while, live more than one life, walk more than one path. Reading, of c...
Why are places to eat called coffee shops? I ask him. Well, coffee’s the most important thing they sell because most of us need it to keep us going, like gas in the car. Ma only drinks water and milk...
When Jack just rescued her Ma's, just succeeded doing the Great Escape:Want to go to Bed.They'll find us somewhere to sleep in a little while. No. .You mean in Room? Ma's pulled back, she's staring in...
We're standing on the deck that's all wooden like the deck of a ship. There's fuzz on it, little bundles. Grandma says it's some kind of pollen from a tree.Which one? I'm staring up at all the differe...
We go in a skyscraper that's Paul's office, he says he's crazy busy but he makes a Xerox of my hands and buys me a candy bar out of the vending machine. Going down in the elevator pressing the buttons...
The hammock hangs on hooks in two trees at the very back of the yard, one is a shortish tree that’s only twice my tall and bent over, one is a million times high with silvery leaves.
That's tree persons in the room now and two of us, that equals five, it's nearly full of arms and legs and chests. They're all saying till I hurt. Stop all saying at the same time.
She struggled to think of one day in more than fifteen years of life when instead of drifting along like a leaf on the river she’d simply grabbed what she wanted. The
People have no idea of the things that don't happen to them—the lives they're not living, the deaths stalking them—and thank Christ for that. Hard enough to get through each day without glimpsing all...
One of them asked what was in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again.
No entiendo por qué el dolor significa que te curas
It came to Mary now that her mother had been right, after all; Mary had been born for this. In sixteen years she'd shot along the shortest route she could find between life and death, as the crow flew...
It came to Daffy then, how easily the worst in oneself could rise up and strike a blow. How even the most enlightened man had little power over his own darkness.
In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country.
I pray for John the Baptist and Baby Jesus to come around for a playdate with Dora and Boots.