I try to conjure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won...
I tried to visualize my jealousy as a yellowy-brown cloud boiling around inside me, then going out through my nose like smoke and turning into a stone and falling down into the ground. That did work a...
I thought everyone would be familiar with this figure: if I'd studied a thing in school I assumed it was general knowledge. I hadn't yet discovered that I lived in a sort of transparent balloon, drift...
I tell, therefore you are.
I sit at the little table, eating creamed corn with a fork. I have a fork and a spoon, but never a knife. When there's meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I'm lacking manual skills or teet...
I should have married Constance, he says. That’s his ace: plonk! Right down on the table. Those five words are usually very effective: he might score a barrage of hostility, and maybe even some tears.
I guess you get all my money, I said. And I'm not even dead. I was trying for a joke, but it came out sounding macabre.Hush, he said. He was still kneeling on the floor. You know I'll always take care...
I feel angry. I'm not proud of myself for this, or for any of it. But then, that's the point.
I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
I do not say making love, because this is not what he's doing. Copulating too would be inaccurate, because it would imply two people and only one is involved. Nor does rape cover it: nothing is going...
I didn’t want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don’t see the body, it’s easier to believe nobody’s dead.
I can’t believe in my own sadness, I can’t take it seriously. I watch myself crying in the mirror, intrigued by the sight of tears.
I am not your justification for existence.
How strange to remember typewriters, with their jammed keys and snarled ribbons and the smudgy carbon paper for copies.
How can I teach hersome way of being human that won't destroy herI would like to tell her, Loveis enough, I would like to say,Find shelter in another skin.I would like to say, Danceand be happy. Inste...
He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.
Here's a health to our Captain, so gallant and freeWhether stuck on a rock or asleep 'neath a treeOr rolled in the arms of some nymph of the seaWhich is where we would all like to be, man!
Here is a handfulof shadow I have brought back to you:this decay, this hope, this mouth-ful of dirt, this poetry.
He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tinfoil-halo shitnosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn't stupid.
For so much time, our historywas written in bones only.