Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ____.)Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.
An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends.
I was a fairy-minded kid, a comic book kid, and I had a bad habit of looking for augurs and protectors where there were none.
I think that different pleasures work for different readers - a friend of mine won't read anything that's not a cardiovascular sort of page-turner. I tend to care less about plot, but I'm a sucker for...
Even if she’d [Ossie] gotten away from him [her ghost fiancé] the prognostications were grim—alligators with unusual pigmentation can’t camouflage themselves in the dust-and-olive palette of the swamp...
This idea appealed to me—I was a quiet kid myself, branded mean, and I liked the idea of a mouth that nobody expected anything from, a mouth that was just red sewing.)