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.
Certain women were best viewed from the window of a speeding car, the exaggeration of their makeup and their tight clothes. Maybe women were meant to speed past, just a blur. Like China girls. Flash,...
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...
His ridiculousness was a form of vitality.
When I was twelve, Flip came through Reno and gave out autographs at a casino. I didn't have a glossy photo for him to sign, so I had him sign my hand. For weeks I took a shower with a plastic bag ove...
Through the familiar orbit east of Reno, the brothels and wrecking yards, the big puffing power plant and its cat’s cradle of coils and springs and fencing, an occasional freight train and the meander...
The Sunset was transformed. The grocery store on Irving was gourmet. A girl I was friends with in high school worked the meat counter. People who looked like frat boys crowded the streets, wearing col...
Ski racing was drawing in time, I said to Sandro. I finally had someone listening who wanted to understand: the two things I loved were drawing and speed, and in skiing I had combined them. It was dra...
It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt.
I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.
I thought of the girl in the photo in Ronnie's studio, the one on layaway. She was probably waiting for him this very moment, somewhere downtown. Checking the clock, applying lipstick, concentrating h...
I come from reckless, unsentimental people.
Enchantment means to want something and also to know somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren't going to get it p.71
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...
When the revolution comes it won’t make any difference, Gloria said. They’ll have a special guillotine for girls like that. With an even rustier blade for the artists who ogle her.
There were hours built in where you had to hear someone express feelings about something that didn’t seem important, and you nodded and pretended that it was. You had to mask your own ambivalence and...
P 271 There's a little songbird eaten whole, bones and everything, by French aristocrats. Illegal, and, by custom, enjoyed with a cloth over the face and head, like an executioners's hood. Maybe what...
I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.