More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When her strength failed, the Skinless Horse would be there, sitting on one of the lower branches, baring its square teeth, stroking its enormous bloodred penis.
The woman had passed through the fire without being consumed, but she had, my grandfather understood, been damaged. So he had decided that he was going to save her. Getting into her panties was a necessary first step.
His lust itself felt like a form of belief.
“Apologies.” Entschuldigung, to my grandfather’s ear always the most beautiful of German words.
After that night she had seemed distinctly sane and unburdened. She lost herself in mothering. She returned to my grandfather’s bed and opened her legs to him with her accustomed readiness.
“Oh, you get it? What do you get?” “I get that you’re a big ol’ fuckin’ nihilist.”
You try to take advantage of the time you have. That’s what they tell you to do. But when you’re old, you look back and you see all you did, with all that time, is waste it.
After I’m gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours.
silence was darkness, and that naming shone a light.
the ordinary course of life, it was probably best to say what was in your heart, to share what was on your mind, to tell the people you loved that you loved them, to ask those you had harmed to forgive you and to confront those who had hurt you with the truth about the damage they had done. When it came to things that needed to be said, speech was always preferable to silence,
My mother’s lack of attachment to the past and its material embodiments went deeper than principle, training, or metaphor. It was an unbreakable habit of loss.
“She was beautiful.” “She was.” Her tone shifted. She sounded almost disappointed in me. “But I think she let it define her a little too much. It was the only thing she really liked about herself.”
On the outside she was beautiful, but on the inside she felt ugly. She felt ruined. And she was so afraid of having that come out.”
Her face, all the angles of beauty and torment he had fallen for then, in spite of combat fatigue and a blanket disdain for sentimental conventions, at first sight.
If there were times when the weight of the secret she carried, whatever it had been, made it impossible for her to love herself and thus to return his love, the fierceness with which she had clung to him even at those moments was recompense enough.
