Only, sometimes, in the text of a book here and there, we tap the page with a finger and say, This is what my lost days were like. Something like this. But even as we turn to the fellow in the bed bes...
One day he would finish the job of dying he'd begun in childhood/
One May, oh, cook poorly, or be socially graceless, or invest unwisely, or fail to achieve the best personal hygiene. But one doesn’t want to live wrong – from breath to breath, from start to finish,...
Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.
No doubt Noah offered his wife that olive branch. Forty days in a boat with those animals to clean up after? A peace offering likely all that stood between their marriage and bloody murder.
If you’re ever dragged from your chambers at midnight, blindfolded and gagged, without being told whether you’re off to a firing squad or a surprise birthday party, you’ll find that you turn and retur...
I rarely trust myself to make statements about truth.
I learned to fly on a broom, he said, rolling up his sleeves. I can learn to milk a goat, I bet. Though flying on a broom proved to be the easier task, he found.
I am a forgettable leaf on a tree.
Horrors.
He was not so lucky. He hadn't yet had enough experience with humans to know that the thing the hold dearest to their hearts, the last thing they relinquish when all else is fading, is the consoling b...
Children played at those stories; they dreamed about them. They took them to heart and acted as if to live inside them. We live in our tales of ourselves, she thought, and ignore as best we can the co...
Are you the dart? he said. Are you the knife? The fuse? She said (though he wasn't convinced): My deane, my poppet, I am too green to walk into a public place and do something bad...
And there the wicked witch stayed for a long long time.'
A story in a book has its own intentions, even if unknowable to the virgin reader, who just lollops along at her own pace regardless of the author’s strategies, and gets where she will. After all, a b...
There is no backstory in dream. Time slips all its handcuffs. So:
[after discussion about what evil is, a question asked to Elphaba on why she killed Madame Morrible]Why did you do it? asked the hostess with spirit.The Witch shrugged. For fun? Maybe evil is an art f...
Your name is Rain, isn’t it? Rain slips in the cracks and slides through the seams. You can do it? Can’t you?
Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. Rather the opposite, maybe. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like...
Why were memories so independent? So jealous of corroborating detail?