God famously doesn't afflict Job because of anything Job has done, but because he wants to prove a point to Satan. Twenty years later, I am sympathetic with my first assessment; to me, in spite of the...
If the wrong reader comes across the words, they will remain just words. But for the right readers, your vision blooms off the page and is absorbed into their minds like smoke, where it will re-form,...
[E]very morning her body worked like the crew of a sinking ship, when all she had to do was get out the door in the morning.
Everybody wanted to be depressed. But your depression was supposed to be funny, too, and that was what had proved too much for Dolores.
There are no pure people.
But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality.
She was starved hurting limbs.
He was beginning to see her as a locked garden that he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off the flowers.
He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear.
Of course, Veronica had a lot of smart cracks stored up. She needed them. When she didn’t have them, she was naked and everybody saw.
I can see her mind beating around the closed car like a bird. Locked in with privileges and pleasures, but also with pain.
Everybody has their sadness. And most people are scared of it.
But prettiness is always about pleasing people. When you stop being pretty, you don’t have to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s my show now.
I viewed him romantically, but not with the expectation that anything sexual could happen between us; that didn’t occur to me. It was enough for me to be the recipient of his gallant attention, his sm...
I shared a dorm room with a beautiful neurotic who clung to her beauty as if it were a chance piece of debris keeping her afloat on a violent sea.
He realized what had been disturbing him about her. With other women whom he had been with in similar situations, he had experienced a relaxing sense of emptiness within them that had made it easy for...
He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt...
Dani said this woman, with whom she’d lived for two years, had never known her. I feel like people accept the first thing I show them, she said, and that’s all I ever am to them.
The place Joanne is building inside [herself] has rooms for all of this. Not just rooms. Beautiful ones. For Karl and Jerry and Karen and Nate in his cowboy hat and the hot-tub guy and movie directors...
I left the sadomasochist dump with a girl from the south of France named Simone. She was wearing a tight blue dress with red wine spilled down the front of it. She was so drunk, she didn't care. Fuck...