The penalty for rape, as you know, is death. Deuteronomy 22:23–29. I
The past is a great darkness, and filled with echos. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cann...
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date.
The imprint left on her mind by the long famished body that had seemed in the darkness to consist of nothing by sharp crags and angles, the memory of its painfully-defined almost skeletal ribcage, a p...
The human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there's nothing you can play on it that hasn't been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
The heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
The cicadas pierce the air with their searing one-note calls; dust eddies across the roads; from the weedy patches at the verges, grasshoppers whir. The leaves of the maples hang from their branches l...
The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we th...
The French are connoisseurs of sadness, they know all kinds. This is why they have bidets.
That was the trouble with Blood and Roses: it was easier to remember the Blood stuff. The other trouble was that the Blood player usually won, but winning meant you inherited a wasteland.
That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled...
That is what you have to do before you kill, I thought. You have to create an it, where none was before. You do that first in your head, and then you make it real.
Tell what is yours to tell. Let others tell what is theirs.
Sucked into the well of knowledge, you could only plummet, learning more and more, but not getting any happier.
Sometimes when I am dusting the mirror with the grapes I look at myself in it, although I know it is vanity. In the afternoon light of the parlour my skin is a pale mauve, like a faded bruise, and my...
Sometimes these flashes of normality come at me from the side, like ambushes. The ordinary, the usual, a reminder, like a kick.
Some of the best things are done by those with nowhere to turn, by those who don't have time, by those who truly understand the word helpless. They dispense with the calculation of risk and profit, th...
So many crucial events take place behind people’s backs, when they aren’t in a position to watch: birth and death, for instance. And the temporary oblivion of sex.
She would be invisible, of course. No one would hear her. And nothing has happened, really, that hasn't happened before.
She who does not hesitate is lost.