They didn’t realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn’t sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.
What you don’t know won’t hurt you. A dubious maxim: sometimes what you don’t know can hurt you very much.
A Paradox, the doughnut hole. Empty space, once, but now they’ve learned to market even that. A minus quantity; nothing, rendered edible. I wondered if they might be used-metaphorically, of course-to demonstrate the existence of God. Does naming a sphere of nothingness transmute it into being?
A home filled with nothing but yourself. It’s heavy, that lightness. It’s crushing, that emptiness.
This is how the girl who couldn’t speak and the man who couldn’t see fell in love.
The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love.
Margaret Atwood
A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you
is that a fact or a weapon?
Margaret Atwood
How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
I’m not senile, I snapped. If I burn the house down it will be on purpose.
How could I be sleeping with this particular man…. Surely only true love could justify my lack of taste.
All you have to do, I tell myself, is keep your mouth shut and look stupid. It shouldn’t be that hard.
The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and date was on them to weight them down.
I planned my death carefully, unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.
One of the gravestones in the cemetery near the earliest church has an anchor on it and an hourglass, and the words In Hope.In Hope. Why did they put that above a dead person? Was it the corpse hoping, or those still alive?
If you really want to stay the same age you are now forever and ever, she’d be thinking, try jumping off the roof: death’s a sure-fire method for stopping time.
Glenn used to say the reason you can’t really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, ‘I’ll be dead,’ you’ve said the word I, and so you’re still alive inside the sentence. And that’s how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul – it was a consequence of grammar.