Sometimes what I wouldn’t give to have us sitting in a bar again at 9:00 a.m. telling lies to one another, far from God.
The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.
She wanted to eat my heart and be lost in the desert with what she’d done, she wanted to fall on her knees and give birth from it, she wanted to hurt me as only a child can be hurt by its mother.
English words are like prisms. Empty, nothing inside, and still they make rainbows.
With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I’d been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen.
He didn’t like having to start the fire again, that was the source of this small sadness. You get tired of these endless beginnings.
. . . things whose perishing had been arrested by their power to make her love them.
When I reached the street I didn’t know whether to go right or left. Soon I’d have to start acting like a person who cared about what happened to him.
The Americans won’t win. They’re not fighting for their homeland. They just want to be good. In order to be good, they just have to fight awhile and then leave.
The first kiss plummeted him down a hole and popped him out into a world he thought he could get along in—as if he’d been pulling hard the wrong way and was now turned around headed downstream.
[G]ive him this much: death didn’t just walk up and inhale him. He wasn’t exactly whisked away. He left claw marks on his life.
He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.