Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

hear people monitoring their larynx to purvey warmth and cold, probity, confidence, censure, approbation—we are phony voices if only by a little. After all, one’s speech is the first instrument of one’s will.

She spent twenty years thinking her husband was an ordinary suicide, which is onerous for a family to believe since there are no ordinary suicides.

we both made a point of laughing, first in harmony, then in counterpoint. Why is phony laughter musically more structured than the real stuff?

Every few weeks she would leave me to visit her father, Rodman Knowles Gardiner, now approaching the magical age of ninety, magical I say because such common events of the day as slumber, evacuation, and alimentation could be accomplished only by charms, spells, and the endlessly repetitive rituals of the old.

never did I feel more devoted to my wife than after biting into the wild garlic of treachery. No wonder I never sniffed it on her. Not if I was eating of it myself!

The sink was cracked, the soap was gritty, the bath towel was small and coarse. So was the toilet paper. This was one of the ten best hotels in Moscow. I was furious suddenly at I knew not what. How did these people presume to be our greatest enemy on earth? They did not even have the wherewithal to be evil.

Happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror.

The paradox of sex is that it always negotiates some kind of contract with love—no matter what, love and sex will never be entirely without relations.

Do you read Borges?” “No.” “You must never read him. In five pages, in any of his five pages, he will summarize for you the meaninglessness of the next ten years of your life.

They love to hear what they want to hear—I am beginning to think that politics is built exclusively on the comforts of such cant.

I did not sleep after all—merely lay in the poetic detritus that blows about the marketplace of the mind as one returns from the deep,