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Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same..

"Is it better to speak or die?"
I'd never even have the courage to ask such a question.

What I didn't realize was that wanting to test desire is nothing more than a ruse to get what we want without admitting that we want it.

..youth has no shame, shame comes with age.

What I may have wanted instead..was what all humans ask of one another, what makes life livable.

..smells and sounds I'd grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the event of that summer.

..the pain, the stoking, the thrill of someone new, the promise of so much bliss hovering a fingertip away, the fumbling..They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer. in every novel I read..

I liked how our minds seemed to travel in parallel, how we instantly inferred what words the other was toying with but at the last moment held back.

What did one do around here?
Nothing. Wait for summer to end.
What did one do in the winter, then?
"Don't tell me: wait for summer to come, right?"

Private, chaste, unfledged, like a blush on an athlete's face or an instance of dawn on a stormy night.

..the color on the palm of his hands was the same as the pale, soft skin of his soles, of his throat, of the bottom of his forearms, which hadn't really been exposed to much sun.

It might have started right there and then: the shirt, the rolled-up sleeves, the rounded balls of his heels slipping in and out of his frayed espadrilles, eager to test the hot gravel path..

…the spiritualization of sensuality is called love.

Sophie's voice was such a summary of her history, such a rich personification of herself.

Of course bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved, and later forgotten when the bereaved one recovers. Was this misery simply bereavement or was it some more final mental ruin from which there was no recovery? I must be a man, he said to his image, and turned from it. The banal phrase struck him. Could it carry to him any sense of possible ordinary living?

Soon he would have a tonsure and would even more resemble what he sometimes felt himself to be. A suspicious Jesuitical face. A cold thinker's face. A clever face. A narcissistic face. The face of a man who had wasted his talents and ruined his marriage and who still thought himself wonderful and exceptional.
A stupid posing false face.

She looked like a poor little rich girl.

***did Murdoch coin this term?? (1974)

Were they silent now, or were they still gabbling away just on the other side of his awareness? Could not the survivor end this wicked servitude and set at liberty the frenzied ghost? How was this to be done? They had loved each other. How little this seemed now to avail. Love was itself the madness.

Alive, their love had been a mutual torment. Death, which might have imposed a merciful silence upon this dialogue, had not done so. He had so often wanted to silence her thoughts.

Can ghosts decide to manifest themselves..?

What was that quotation about love being 'woman's whole existence? It was certainly true in her case, and how terrifying it was.

"Jersey has only really produced two true poets: Springsteen and Danzig. Songs are really poems put to music, and their verses have already stood the test of time. In fact they are probably more poignant than ever in a post-9/11 world."
"Hey, Howards scoffed. what about Bon Jovi? He's a
genius."
"That's party music. You don't listen to it for the words."

"Have you read a lot of books?" I asked her.
"Yes. I have read many books."
"Do you think any of them have changed your life?»
She shrugged.
"I suppose all of them have," Mrs. Angrywall offered with a shrug.
"But some are more important than others, right?"

Maybe if I had let that little girl read me the end of The Corduroy Road, I would have turned out a better person. It made me a little sad. Someday I could look for that book on eBay.

There were dirty strips of red, orange, and yellow in the sky like a box of taco seasoning.

YOU KNOW YOU'RE ADDICTED to coffee when the first cup makes you sleepier. The second cup gets you back to where you were. The third cup gives you the gift of speech.

I wanted to drink something sort of healthy so I made myself a cup of Sprite with ice. It has natural lemon and lime flavors.

🤡🤡🤡

The walls tasted like salt. Imagine how the wall and the women and the girls feel through each winter and each war, standing with their faces up against a wall, playing one love scene they recall over and over again, like a video movie or the memory of something that broke.

"I always thought it was because the ocean is like a one-of-a-kind thing, like there is nothing else similar to it in the entire world and so the ocean feels no love, no mother, no father or husband, like a space alien. I always thought that iust made it an extremely nasty and greedy thing, like an only child."

..I will create Jude inside my head and that way he will be inside of me which is almost as good as fucking or at least pricking our fingers and touching them together.