Murderess, murderess, he whispers to himself. It has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but also furtive. He imagines himself breathing it as he draws Grace towards him, pressing hi...
Mouth to mouthI'm bringing you back to life.Why did you drown like thatwithout telling?What numbed you? Whatrose over your headwas gradual and onlyeverybody's air,standard & killing.Your head floats o...
More often than not, she acted as if she wanted to protect him, from the image of herself--herself in the past. She liked to keep only the bright side of herself turned towards him. She liked to shine...
Maybe they’ll just take her someplace else, like an island, with the other people on it who are like her. People who don’t fit in, but not criminal elements. Surely that’s what they’ll do.
Maybe the life I think I'm living is a paranoid delusion...Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to k...
Malum quidem nullum esse sine aliquo bono, Tin noted in the journal he was sporadically keeping then. Every cloud has a silver lining.
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too...
Love is not a professiongenteel or otherwisesex is not dentistrythe slick filling of aches and cavitiesyou are not my doctoryou are not my cure,
Laura was flint in a nest of thistledown.I say flint, not stone: a flint has a heart of fire.
Language, like the mouths that hold and release it, is wet & living, each word is wrinkled with age, swollen with other words, with blood, smoothed by the numberless flesh tongues that have passed a...
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
Jack quit his advertising job and devoted himself to the life of the pen. Or rather, to the life of the Remington, soon to be replaced with an IBM Selectric, with the bouncing ball that let you change...
It's wrong to give so much time over to mourning, she tells herself. Mourning and brooding. There's nothing to be accomplished by it.
It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be fully described, too many flavours, in the air or on the tongue, half-colours, too many. But if you happen to b...
It's fun to be different, but not too different!
It's clear, it's fresh, like a mint candy.
It's a lifelong failing: she has never been prepared. But how can you have a sense of wonder if you're prepared for everything? Prepared for the sunset. Prepared for the moonrise. Prepared for the ice...
It's Janine, telling about how she was gang-raped at fourteen and had an abortion. She told the same story last week. She seemed almost proud of it, while she was telling. It may not even be true. At...
It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. Was it consolation he’d had in mind,...