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Halve me like a walnut Pry the part of me that is hollow From the part that yields fruit. —OMOTARA JAMES Let’s be hungry a little while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can. —MAYA C. POPA
“Your voice sounds like how biting into a Granny Smith apple feels.”
Like most people, he noticed her hair first. It hung over her shoulder in two golden curtains, sweeping open to reveal that much-anticipated first act: her face. And it was a performance, her face. He felt instinctively that he could watch it for hours.
she felt as if she had taken a knife to the surface of the sky, skimmed a little off the bottom, and worn the peel.
What is a wedding, Cleo wondered, if not a private dream made public, a fantasy suspended between two worlds like a cat’s cradle?
She worried that she was one of those artists who care more about being an artist than they do about making art.
“Eighty percent of relationship,” she said, “is tolerating difference.” “What’s the other twenty percent?” asked Frank. The woman shrugged. “Fucking.
people who had found the intersection between creativity and economy, who made beautiful things but did not suffer for it.
‘Love looks through spectacles that make copper look like gold, poverty like riches, and tears like pearls.”
To delight in another, to be delighted in turn by them,
Listening to her was like trying to test the temperature of bathwater with biohazard gloves on.
her hair falling forward in a golden curtain that left Frank offstage.
Fun was fine when you were young, but as you got older it was kindness that counted, kindness that showed up.
Why did she feel the need to make everyone, even this waiter, like her? What a thing it must be to be indifferent to indifference.
Cleo understood why bikes were so often described as freedom; not for their ability to take you elsewhere, but for the way they transformed the place you already were.
“Well, what’s mine is yours, baby doll.” “No, Ma. What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is yours. That’s the appropriate boundary between an adult woman and her mother.”
Okay, so I am not beautiful or blond or British. But I can make jokes, be nice to your mother, and give a decent blow job. That’s what I got.
“Sometimes I hate the thing I love to do,” I say.
I tell Frank that in my experience, the better the headshot, the crazier the actor.
Finally, I stand in front of the mirror, and I see … soft belly, coarse hair, thin lips, thick waist. I am a Jewish man in drag. *
This is a place of exquisite beauty and extreme danger.
It was the time of year when winter had ceased to be festive and become a test of endurance lasting until spring.
He wished he loved her a little more or hated her a little less, something to tip the scale. Instead, he lived in the fraught balance between the two, each increasing the intensity of the other: the more he longed for her, the more disappointed he felt by her; the more disappointed he felt, the more he longed.
Her laugh was the sound of a slot-machine jackpot, a soda can cracking open, fairground music in the distance, a Corvette engine coming to life, a thousand hands applauding all at once. It was one of those truly beautiful sounds.
“Do the things you’ve never done to get the thing you’ve never had.
“Running is for children and thieves,”
Nothing changes if nothing changes.
“She is warm like the sun.”
was a theater kid, after all, and treated secrets as a vital source of sustenance—
the taste of loneliness is a glass of chardonnay and a turkey club sandwich at an airport bar.
“No expectations. No preferences. If you prefer one outcome over another in life, you will likely be disappointed. I prefer nothing and am always surprised.”
well, when you’re an actor you can kind of be both seen and not seen at the same time. You’re speaking, but not your own words. You express feelings, but not your own feelings, or at least not usually. You can play a character without being judged by your own character. It’s freeing, you know? Freedom from being yourself.”
Talented people were often unhappy, but unhappy people were not often talented.
‘Wherever you are going, it is waiting for you.’ ”
