garden

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dullness she had fled from?

You wrote a letter to god, "just in case," you said, "I'm nothing if not a pragmatist."
"You needn't worry about us, we can look after ourselves, we have learned not to rely on you or anyone else."

Our addiction to social media is, at its core, a compulsion to write. Through our comments, updates, DMs, and searches, we are volunteers in a great "collective writing experiment." Those of us who don't peck out status updates on our keyboards are not exempt. We participate too, "behind our backs as it were" creating hidden (written) records of where we clicked, where we hovered, how far we scrolled, so that even reading, within the framework of the Twittering Machine, becomes a kind of writing.

In the years of watching everything I love dying, I told myself that after a while you stop loving men and learn to love your own loneliness. I have told myself this so long that it has become its own kind of unquestioned truth.

But life is too long to not ask questions.

Although history should not become a straitjacket, which overwhelms and binds, neither should it be forgotten. One must critique it, test it, confront it, and understand it in order to achieve a freedom that is more than license, to achieve true, adult agency.

Love stories influence our lives, the way we see the world, and putting emancipation, rather than possession or living together forever or a tragic end, at the center of a philosophy of love I think offers a positive dynamic. I’m very interested in depicting other representations of love.

There is no other food! If Wile E. will satisfy his desperate hunger, he must eat; to eat, he must catch the Road Runner; and he cannot catch the Road Runner. Just as the very armature of the world—biology, ecology, physics, logic, his own goddamn personality, everything—will warp and bend to ensure the failure of his next scheme, that same armature was bent from the very beginning to ensure that there will always, always be a next one.

The game was rigged from the start. Quitting it is just as impossible as winning. The stark, absolute order of Wile E. Coyote’s universe doesn’t have to do with preserving the Road Runner’s safety or punishing Wile E.’s effort, but actively and forcibly producing his humiliation. Not Wile E. Coyote cannot succeed, but Wile E. Coyote must fail.

You may have won a Pulitzer, but it sure as fuck wasn’t for scrambled eggs.

As time went on, I realized that the guiding principle I used in most of the interviews was the same: It was my conviction then, as it is now, that we all keep most of the same secrets.

The green future has to be a welcoming one, even a thrilling one. If people cannot see themselves in it, they will fight to stop it. If the cost of caring about climate is to forgo having a family, that cost will be too high. A climate movement that embraces sacrifice as its answer or even as its temperament might do more harm than good.

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The trouble is that, despite decades of field trials, the machines just aren’t that good. States, of all varieties, keep feeding in people, but the results remain inconsistent at best. Sometimes it works, and model citizens are manufactured. Other times, the people who emerge are just traumatized versions of those who entered. In the very worst cases, the machines spew out embittered individuals who keep suspiciously glancing at critical national infrastructure.

I maintain that redemption is a lonely, internal process of “getting right with God,” of wrestling in the dark with the worst parts of oneself. It is suspect if performed, and the intimacy of the struggle makes it among the most fertile and timeless subjects for literature.

Happiness is stupid, and so is love. But here we are in it again anyway, at the end of the month that sucks the most, in the heart of Fool’s Spring, in the miracle that makes himbos of us all, when everything blooms green.

In this best of all possible worlds, everything is in a hell of a mess. Everything is topsy-turvy, upside-down. The hedonists are the most joyless people, the haters are full of life.

you are really as you are I become as I
really am alive and knowing vaguely what is
and what is important to me above the intrusions
of incident and accidental relationships
which have nothing to do with my life

The most effective way to remove a broadhead arrow embedded in a human body is to push it through. Attempting to pull it out will only further devastate the surrounding tissue. To begin healing, then, the violent act must be completed. This is the function of sacrifice. When the ritual victim is killed, the spread of violence stops because there is no one left to visit vengeance upon. You cannot spite a god, after all. The arrow, once removed, is stripped of its power. But we do not often shoot each other with arrows anymore, do we?

Isaiah had loved God and now his love was turned to pain.
Isaiah wanted a name for the pain, he called it sin.

When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time, or that it's
Been decided that if you lay down no one will die.

I would
attract every bullet
like a goddamned
black hole right now
if I knew they’d
be okay forever but
that’s not how it
works, not everyone
gets to be Jesus
even if you
want to.

Little her, who was her patron saint? Anger and hurt and gravy on toast notwithstanding. She wasn’t doing a good enough job. She thinks you’re selling out for fifteen an hour. She thinks you’re cursing your mother, and your mother’s mother, and your whole life before twenty-two. She’s ashamed you aren’t battle bled and chainmailed, no knightly deeds, only an unpaid lunch half hour.

This is something I have often thought about: the fact of knowing and not knowing, the sense of the body as self and as something altogether different; as you but also as something liable to attack you, to harbour things that mean you harm. It is frightening, to be in one sense wholly inextricable from your body and yet not know what’s happening inside it.

It’ll heal ugly, but most things do.
You can have it all, just not all at once.

This is just who I am now, a person who looks exactly like her late mother, despite far more exercise and a far healthier diet. Besides, I loved my mother, and I love seeing her again in every store window I pass.