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...
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 was in an acute case of the present tense. P.30
I should get one of those T-shirts that says ORGASM DONOR, he said.
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...
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.
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.
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...
What had actually been in Valera’s haversack: not a woman’s vulva but grenades, a gas mask, a gun that constantly jammed.
To show you the uselessness of the truth, he said.
The woman senses that time is more purely hers if she squanders it and keeps it empty, holds it, feels it pass by, and resists filling it with anything that might put some too-useful dent in its open,...
The cause of whose tears... could not be found in the traces on her cheeks. ...even as he knew the source of her tears was endless. bottomless and endless and not to be found in their traces. p.194
La Mazière had met with El Extraño at a chicken-dinner-and-cockfight joint near the Havana airport, a place that proved even more vulgar than the concept had sounded.
It wasn’t quite a romantic infatuation. There are levels of readiness. Young girls don’t entertain the idea of sex, their body and another’s together. That comes later, but there isn’t nothing before...
It was only a motorcycle but it felt like a mode of being.
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...
Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.