In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Perhaps living in fear can drive all devils out of a person.
Depressing thought: my friends were the girls I ate lunch with, all buddies from kindergarten who knew one another so well we weren’t sure if we even liked one another anymore.
she’d played mother and wives. Women in narratives were always defined by their relations.
Also the fact that he’s a guy. A girl screws around like Lotto and she’s like diseased. Untouchable. But a guy can stick it to a million places and everyone just thinks he’s doing what boys do.
a feminist is just someone who recognizes power structures that keep people from having the fullest life they can.
It was mathematical, marriage. Not, as one might expect, additional. It was exponential.
Mathilde and Lotto held hands in the taxi going to brunch, communicating, not speaking.
…then he blushed and seemed to fade where he stood….When the musical star moved on, Lotto turned to her and silently docked his head on her shoulder for two moments, recharged he turned to face the others.
What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did.
When your family dismisses you, like Lotto’s did, you create your own family
And she had pushed, or she hadn’t. The result was all the same. There had been no forgiveness for her. But she’d been so very young. And how was it possible, how could parents do this? How could she not have been forgiven?
He got drunk as usual, but instead of drifting to sleep, he stayed up, and at a white heat, wrote what had been sitting on his heart for decades.
All she had ahead of her was the cold water, the slow ballet.
What was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy.
Ever since the other boy had arrived half way through the semester, he’d been so blue, he was practically iridescent.
Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.
He thinks of the rotten parachute they played with as kids in Arcadia: they hurtle through life aging unimaginably fast, but each grasps a silken edge of memory that billows between them and softens the long fall.
On the nights I stuffed myself full of myths, I dreamed of college, of being pumped full of all the old knowledge until I knew everything there was to know, all the past cultures picked clean like delicious roasted chicken.
Struggle forms character. No struggle, no character.
We have all had stupid youths,’ said Mathilde. ‘I find them delicious.
Up rose the ghosts of parties, of themselves when they were younger, too dumb to understand they were ecstatic.
Childhood is such a delicate tissue; what they had done this morning could snag somewhere in the little ones, make a dull, small pain that will circle back again and again, and hurt them in small ways for the rest of their lives.
Only when she smiled at him was he finally able to relax.
Sleep sparks a series of pulses across the webs of neurons, pulses like waves; it washes out what is unnecessary and leaves only what’s important behind.
There is little that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time.
We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.
His heart…responds to those once-upon-a-time people, anonymous in the shadows, the faith it took them to come together and rest and listen through the gruesomeness, their patience for the ever after, happy or not.
He wanted terribly, to say, Stop, to say Bern’s name, to stroke her soft cheek where it was bitten by the light. But, in the end, he didn’t do anything at all.
The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.
There aren’t very many good models of feminine rage – and the ones that we remember are ones where women take that anger internally and implode themselves in a real way, like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary.