Erasure

by Percival Everett

“She sounds okay on the phone,” I said, knowing full well it was a stupid thing to say, but still my bit in all this was to allow segue from minor complaint to reports of coming doom.

The center of the tree is the heartwood. It does little to feed the tree, but it is the structural support. The sapwood, which feeds everything, is weak and prone to fungi and insect damage. The two look the same. But you want the heartwood. You always want the heartwood.

A reiteration of the obvious is never wasted on the oblivious.

I wasn’t worried about the acting out of any such threats, as the clowns who had taken me as their enemy were as unlikely to actually do something as they were to actually write something.

It’s incredible that a sentence is ever understood.

A metaphor cannot be paraphrased.

I walked in the morning, all the way to McPherson Square where I took the Metro to the mall. I walked around the National Gallery for a couple of hours, ate lunch alone in the cafeteria and imagined that I had a life.

Then I wondered which was more confidence-killing: believing that you should not have felt inadequate when in fact you were, or discovering that, all along, you were actually smart enough to see things clearly, that you were correct in your fears.

damn

I wouldn’t use the cliché that I was the captain of a sinking ship, that implying some kind of authority, but rather I was a diesel mechanic on a steamship, an obstetrician in a monastery.

Had I not known, I would not have cared, but now all I could do was care.

Nothing’s easy. Least of all being confronted with one’s own questionable agenda, however unworked out or articulated.

I have often stared into the mirror and considered the difference between the following statements: (1) He looks guilty. (2) He seems guilty. (3) He appears guilty. (4) He is guilty.

Host of a literary talk show aired on PBS in St. Paul called With All This Snow, Why Not Read?

I was familiar with novels the way a surgeon is familiar with blood.

“My daddy used to say, There isn’t anything so bad that seeing something worse won’t make better.”

“We promise ourselves all sorts of things during our lives,” I said. “What have you promised yourself?”