The truth is always an insult or a joke, lies are generally tastier. We love them. The nature of lies is to please. Truth has no concern for anyone’s comfort
When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,” Papa would say, “she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.
[Pride and power] are the same except that pride leaves the lights on and power can do it in the dark.
It goes in streaks. But some things never go out of fashion.’ Hunger artists, fat folks, giants, and dog acts come and go but real freaks never lose their appeal.
I have been a believer in the magic of language since, at a very early age, I discovered that some words got me into trouble and others got me out.
I knew what he felt. The huge buoyant air sack of love that filled his body had just exploded and the collapse was devastating.
I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.
It is coincidence, I decide, and I am getting old and batty, thinking the universe revolves around me.
American culture is torn between our long romance with violence and our terror of the devastation wrought by war and crime and environmental havoc.
‘The Iliad’ includes some snappy sports reporting, and writers ever since have been probing athletes for signifiers, for metaphor amped by grit under pressure.
Prior to penicillin and medical research, death was an everyday occurrence. It was intimate.
I’m like every waitress in every diner I’m like every mom driving her kids to school. I’m nothing special at all.