Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories

by Cookie Mueller

He was very sick, quite contagious, and looked ill, but sexy, like pictures of Proust on his deathbed.

We waited and waited, and hoped, but the world didn't fall apart. It was a big letdown.

I've known a few chickens in my time and they're all really stupid, even though they lay perfectly good eggs.

I didn't want to be in the same room with murderers or birdbrains or desperate people anymore.

When I got home I hung up my pink sequined G-string, and there it hangs to this day, gathering dust. It still sparkles just a little when the sun hits it.

If a vacation didn't work to relax me, I'd use the credit cards to have a lobotomy. Then I would be stupid and blissful instead of stupid and stressed-out.

My son loves his mother on Mother's Day. My son loves his mother every day.

Many years and brain cells ago, I had this belief that everyone would be happy someday.

Happiness is a fictitious feeling. It was created by imaginative storytellers for the purpose of plot building or story resolution. Fortunately most people don't know this. They think the lives they are living are actual screenplays or theater pieces.

People want money because they want to be loved.

whenever she walked out onto the little patch of land behind her parents’ house, she would pretend she was Charlotte Brontë on the moors in the heather.

“You're in the soup, Molly,” she told herself. Molly was indeed.

stationary and grand as a girl tree,

Everything seemed a bit more friendly once she knew it was her everywhere she looked.

Not only as beautiful but much more. No, truthfully, a very dear friend and gifted artist drew this picture of me and he likes to think that every woman should look like this. What is my true identity. This is my true identity.

Firstly you're right about my mind being open, in fact it's so open that at times I hear the wind whistling through it.

Real art will never make anyone famous really fast: there's too much hard work involved.

I was elated to realize that I am truly an unsparing critic of certain visual and intellectual atrocities. All I do is bitch, bitch, bitch.

Work, work, work “and you'll win, win, win. It's true, but who wants to work that hard just for a dumb bank account?