- “People like me, I guess we aren’t safe anywhere. Not in this world. But you and I don’t live in this world. Do we."
- We were always escaping, you see – escaping, or standing ready to escape.
- I was struck like a match. I had no option but to burn.
- She had a look that says: beware, I kill – the look that men will die for gladly.
- Giving birth is a secret between two people only: the one being born – and the one who. . .what? The one who was giving up life of the other. Birth is a parting, a separation forever.
- She had wanted to take him so deep inside that he would never leave her.
- It did not occur to her that, in loving one, you gain a multitude of strangers who were intended to be kin.
- She hated – and always had – those moments in the service of Christian burial when the clergy held out there collective hands and reached for the souls of the living, using death of loved ones as a trick – as a trap – to gather more converts. It was despicable.
- “I wish – I only wish we had never met so we might never have to be parted.”
- Loving the excessively at first, she grew to dislike them excessively. To despise them. Which brought her to scorn them – even to ridicule them.
- She is always standing apart, stubbornly refusing to join the human race – perhaps afraid of the negative comparison between herself and its taller, thinner members.
- Clearly, Willa’s violent relationship with her dolls was nothing more tan a reflection of her violent relationship with food. And her violent refusal to be loved.
- [“ I kept thinking, someone will come and I will be able to rust them. Someone – a stranger – will come and I will be able to trust them and I will be able to tell. But that person never came. Until you. And then. . .”] [“Then you didn’t trust me.”]
- “Life is a flame, but if we flame, we die.”
- “All who did not fall down, were to be cast into the midst of a fiery furnace.”
- It was then that she knew what she wanted to hear – knew it because she wanted so desperately to hear it herself. “You are not alone,” she said. “You are not alone.”
- Charming. He could be so damned charming, she thought, sitting there beside him on the train._ Charming. But still arrogant._
- She loved him, sometimes, with desperation.
- I am me – none other. I am this – nothing more. I am here – nowhere else – and here I’ll bide. Forever
- Come on, he said, it’s time you learned to fly. . .
- “That you’re going to leave. . .and that we’ll never fly again. . .”
- _Older women – lonely women only want one thing: a man they won’t have to bury, but who will bury them. . .
- The time is always now, yet now holds everything that ever was.
- In January of 1936, King George V died and all hell broke loose with Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson. There were wars in Spain and Ethiopia. Hitler marched on Rhineland and the Great Depression entered in its seventh year. This was the time of our love affair and, on April 26th, 1937, we were married. That very same day the bombs fell on Guernica.
- It was the land’s departure – not the ship’s.
- If my father suddenly announced himself and said: I’m here! No matter who he was, he would still be a stranger coming for me out of the dark.
- “Don’t grow up, my darling. Be a child forever.”
- It wasn’t as if we didn’t know each other – all of us, one way or another. It wasn’t as if we weren’t emancipated.
- Why are we so afraid of one another in our skins? We are only men and women – we are only human beings – creatures, only – nothing more. And beautiful. . .
- boys dressed up in their god-damn youth and waiting for the god-damn bugle call.
- she had even developed a dainty cough, and would hold a handkerchief to her lips as though expecting blood to stain it. When the blood did not appear, the handkerchief would be crumpled and fisted in the hopes that its mere presence in her hand would tell the visiting world that she was dying.
- run until the demons could not find us.
- [“You’d have to give up dying. I suspect what I’m proposing is rather strenuous.”] [“Give up dying?”] [“Yes. Surely you must be bored with it by now.”]
- “The trouble with dying is how tiring it is.”
- The movies became her drug – her good, safe place – her world within the world, where no one could reach her – no one could harm her.
- “He seemed quite nice,” I said. And meant it. “He is,” said Lily. “Very nice. For a dead man.”
- “We are not alone here, Charlie,” Lily said to me. “It’s there world, too. But we have taken – we are taking it from them – breaking it over their heads. . .”
- I am not disabled, she would say. I am merely hampered.
- They would be part of our lives until our their own were over.
- It was dreadful-tasting – but after a moment, when it began to work its magic on my nerves, I thought: yes – that was good – and drank some more.
- Their injuries were mostly to the spirit and thus invisible.
- . . .the haunted presence of those men, who often – as I witnessed – stood frozen on the grass and wept.
- That she favoured dark colours gave the impression of a genteel tragedy hovering in her background.
- There are burns where his finger held me.
- I swear their shadows were dancing.
- Cigarettes had ruined her breathing. . .
- When smiling, the boy fell dead. . .
- She was notorious for smoking openly in public – a thing that women never did.
- I thought perhaps she might have spoken to me as she passed; called me to join here before she went inside. But she was already on her way to the rest of her life.
- There had been no forgiveness. None was needed.
jun 13 2012 ∞
jun 13 2012 +