Our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit
You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history
When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, Nostos
No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable,...
Leechfield Will Grease The Planet!
I think about the story of Job I heard in Carol Sharp's Sunday school. How he sort of learned to lean into feeling hurt at the end, the way you might lean into a heavy wind that almost winds up suppor...
Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there is suffering involved.p. xx
A pool game mixes ritual with geometry.
Nothing matters but the quality of the affection— in the end—that has carved the trace in the mind dove
Why is it that everybody else is traffic?
The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.
The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.
Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don’t use foreign expressions. It’s elitist.)
One can’t mount a stripper pole wearing a metal diving suit.
Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.
If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.
I get so lonely sometimes, I could put a box on my head and mail myself to a stranger.
I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound:...
How much smaller the large places are once we're grown up, when we have car keys and credit cards.