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He imagined living in her warmth forever.
[Grief is for the strong, who use it as fuel for burning.]
If one might die at any moment, one must live!
Mathilde and Lotto had been born to nestle into each other like spoons in a drawer.
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s pickled his brains with booze,”
“I’m struggling,” Lotto said. “Maybe. But come on, I was born wealthy, white, and male. I’d have nothing to work with if I don’t have a little struggle. I’m doing what I love. That’s not nothing.”
“I want to buy a sex doll just to wake up next to someone in the morning.”
Kills you slowly, failure.
I never lie, Mrs. Dutton. I’m a pathological truth-teller.
His happiness stretched out its wings and gave a few flaps.
Also, the pain that had just surfaced, a nuclear submarine out of the deep.
He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered.
Dogs, being wordless, can only be mirrors of their humans. It’s not their fault that their people are fatally flawed.
His wife carried their picnic basket to the edge of the lake under a willow so old it no longer wept, just sort of bore its fate with thickened equanimity.
“I have a million ideas. I’m boiling over with them. I had to go for a walk to get away from them, but the problem with ideas is that the more you walk, the more you get. They breed in the brainpan.”
Her face was so terribly closed. She looked older. Sad. Skinny. Her hair greasy. She was browned, as if she’d been pickled in her own loneliness.
Mice are nice but lions roar.
[The noble feel the same strong feelings as the rest of us; the difference is in how they choose to act.]
A woman growing like a goldfish to the size of her bowl, the only escape the final leap.
Her loneliness an island he’d shipwrecked on.
Marriage is made of lies. Kind ones, mostly. Omissions. If you give voice to the things you think every day about your spouse, you’d crush them to paste. She never lied. Just never said.”
It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.
Where are the people? said Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. It’s a little lonely in the desert . . . It’s lonely when you’re among people, too, said the snake.
MATHILDE WAS NOT UNFAMILIAR with grief. That old wolf had come sniffing around her house before.
Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage.
She’d survived on wine and sugar for months because, fuck it, she never really got a childhood, and what was grief but an extended tantrum to be salved by sex and candy?
She’d always hated pregnant ladies. The original Trojan horses, they.
The man swallowed praise the way runners swallow electrolytes.
