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He is golden skinned, a poor listener.
The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do.
“Angry sea,” people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.
they are perched on the brink of not giving a shit.
a city born of the terror of the vastness of space,
They are the products of desire: sexual, yes, but more importantly (in the age of contraception, at least) they come from the desire to recur. Give me the chance to repeat myself.
on children
Over the course of human evolution, did men learn to be attracted to skinny women because they were not visibly pregnant? Did voluptuousness signal that a body was already ensuring the survival of another man’s genetic material?
Some supermarket breads are made with human hair dissolved in acid, part of a dough conditioner that accelerates industrial processing. The mender does not eat bread from the supermarket, and she has her own supply of hair, which instead of dissolving in acid she grinds into her mixtures. She keeps head hair in a separate box from pubic, as they’re good for different things—pubic has more iron, head more magnesium and selenium. The mender’s supply came from one person and is dwindling.
Which (the disbelief) was stupid. She knew—it was her job as a teacher of history to know—how many horrors are legitimated in public daylight, against the will of most of the people.
Shut up, she tells her monkey mind. Please shut up, you picker of nits, presser of bruises, counter of losses, fearer of failures, collector of grievances future and past.
People used to believe that new roses were born from the cinders of burnt roses, new frogs from rotting dead ones.
And these kids are going to teach themselves. She’s only here to give them some nudges and clues. She is here to tell them they don’t have to get married or buy a house or read the list of shipwrecks at the pub every Saturday night.
“What do you call a time-traveling flower shop?” Ro/Miss raises one eyebrow. “Back to the Fuchsia,” says the daughter.
How much of her ferocious longing is cellular instinct, and how much is socially installed? Whose urges is she listening to? Her life, like anyone’s, could go a way she never wanted, never planned, and turn out marvelous.
