I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.
But at the same time, Sandro understood that people only tended to allow their own contradictions, and not those of others. It was okay to be murky to yourself, to know you weren’t an angel, but other...
Because I didn't move here to fall in love. The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it's worthy of respect. it's not admirable to want love it just is.
Change was such an elusive thing. A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living,...
When the police came to San Lorenzo they were fired upon by children and grandmothers with rocks, buckets of water, rotten eggs. There was more of the proletarian shopping, as it was called, that I’d...
Lovers offered only what they offered and nothing more, and what they offered came with provisos.
I should get one of those T-shirts that says ORGASM DONOR, he said.
Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.
And then Giddle became cryptic, like, if you don’t already know, I can’t spell it out. That was when I first sensed, but then almost as quickly suppressed, something about Giddle, which was that there...
And it is easier to like difficult people when they are leaving, or already gone.
When I was little, skiing in the Sierras, I felt that I was drawing on the mountain’s face, making big sweeping graceful lines. That was how I had started to draw, I’d told Sandro, as a little girl, f...
What had actually been in Valera’s haversack: not a woman’s vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.
They toasted Gordon’s departure. To my rustication, Gordon said. Isn’t that when they boot you from Oxford? They just send you down to the country for a while.
She was going to drink after her shift was finished. That kind of drinking where you make a wilderness and tear a path in. You meet someone else there, deep in the woods. Go home together. Claw your w...
I remember a rainbow spectrum of men’s wing tips parked in rows, triple-A narrow, the leather dyed snake green, lemon yellow, and unstable shades of vermilion and Ditto-ink blue. All of humanity dress...
But since you bring it up, Didier, you know what I think of language? That it’s a fake horizon and there’s something else, a real truthful thing, but language is keeping us from it. And I think we sho...
At the end of Th Brother's K, Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child. Remember this...
At a health food store he and I had run into a girl I knew who was spaced out and scratching herself. She asked Jimmy if he knew whether the juice she’d chosen was organic, and he acted like he’d neve...
Before she was lost to the Tenderloin, north of Fascination, up in the boisterous and dirty hotels that formed the pearls on the chain of her bare life, barer even than mine.
You have time. Meaning don’t use it, but pass through time in patience, waiting for something to come. Prepare for its arrival. Don’t rush to meet it. Be a conduit. I believed him. I felt this to be t...