I never had a favourite letter that began my name - I for Iris - because I was everybody's letter.
I know I was alright on Friday when I got up; if anything I was feeling more stolid than usual.
I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastarde...
I intend to get out of here. It can't last forever. Others have thought such things, in bad times before this, and they were always right, they did get out one way or another, and it didn't last forev...
I had a boyfriend once who sent me--in a plastic bag, so it wouldn't drip--a real cow's heart with a real arrow stuck through it. As you may divine, he knew I was interested in poetry.
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.
I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.
I did not yet know that my lack of enjoyment - my distaste, my suffering even - would be considered normal and even desirable by my husband. He was one of those men who felt that if a woman did not ex...
I did not pity her at all. In a way I admired her. I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a r...
I began to forget myself in the middle of sentences.
He was entitled to his own versions, his own conjurings. as I am. I may have served his ends, but he served mine as well.
He slides off into half-sleep and dreams of Oryx, floating on her back in a swimming pool, wearing an outfit that appears to be made of delicate white tissue-paper petals. They spread out around her,...
He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.
He knows this by the way the girl stumbles, and it occurs to him for the first time that by taking her with him he'll be slowed down. He'll be hampered by her ability to see.
He has tried imagining her as a prostitute—he often plays this private mental game with various women he encounters—but he can’t picture any man actually paying for her services. It would be like payi...
He has been trying to singLove into existence againAnd he has failed.
He doesn't know which is worse, a past he can't regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there's the future. Sheer vertigo.
He considers me also a little fragile because artistic. I need to be cared for, like a potted plant.
He came to understand why serial killers sent helpful clues to the police.
Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.