You don’t have anything, you don’t know anything, you’re just a noise like a fart in somebody’s pants, Segura said.
What Victor Charles and the NVA couldn’t do to him, or the Mob or his enemies inside NOPD, Clete had done to himself with fried food, booze, weed, whites on the half shell, and calamitous affairs with...
We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have...
We get hurt worse by the people whom we care about. And they seldom mean to do it. That’s what makes it so painful, kiddo.
We all got human weaknesses, noble mon. All I got to do is see her on TV and my Johnson starts barking.
WHEN ISHMAEL WOKE, the walls of his trench were seeping water and the dawn was colder than it should have been, the sky an unnatural and ubiquitous pale color that had less to do with the rising of th...
Varina was breathing hard through her nose, her face pinched, not unlike a child’s. You don’t know how mad you can make people, she said. I had tender feelings for you once, whether you knew it or not...
Tomorrow has no more existence than yesterday, but you can always control now. We live in a series of nows. Think about now.
There are events you witness, or in which you participate, that forever remain sacrosanct and inviolate in memory, no matter how painful that memory is, because of the cost that you or others paid in...
The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts. CHAPTER 2 The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I wen...
The band played La Jolie Blon a second time. For me, there is no more haunting ballad in the world. Its origins go back to the eighteenth century, but the rendition by Harry Choates is the one that ne...
If you have attended the dying, you know what their last moments are like. They anticipate the separation of themselves from the world of the living before you do, and they accept it with dignity and...
But perhaps age has taught me that the earth is still new, molten at the core and still forming, that black leaves in the winter forest will crawl with life in the spring, that our story is ongoing an...
But as William Faulkner said, and as I was about to learn, the past is not only still with us, the past is not even the past. The warning call from Wally,
Barbara Shanahan, sometimes known as Battering Ram Shanahan. She was over six feet tall and had freckles and wore her light red hair cut short and wore a blue suit with white hose. She worked hard and...
A wet cigarette butt clung to my cheek like a mashed cockroach. I could smell whiskey and beer in my clothes and Gable’s blood on my knuckles and I swore I could taste whiskey surging out of my stomac...
Spent the rest of the afternoon in my room. A faucet was ticking in the bathroom as loudly as a mechanical clock, with the same sense of urgency and waste. I tried to tighten the
Felt foolish and wondered if I had entered that self-deluded stage in an aging man’s life when others have to protect him from knowledge
We are the sum total of what we have done and where we have been, and I sincerely believe that in many ways the world in which I grew up was better than the one in which we live today.
This is Louisiana, Dave. Guatemala North. Quit pretending it’s the United States. Life will make a lot more sense, he said.