Sally Grace’s Reviews > The Chronology of Water > Status Update

“He treated this thing I'd done - this DUI - the dead baby - the failed marriages - the rehab - the little scars at my collar bone-my vodka - my scarred as shit past and body- as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.”

“With Virginia Woolf there will perhaps be a long walk in a garden or along a shore, perhaps a walk that will last all day. She will put her arm in yours and gaze out. At your backs will be history. In front of you, just the ordinary day, which is of course your entire life. Like language. The small backs of words.
Stretching out horizonless.”

“Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.
If I could go back, I'd coach myself. I'd be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I'd be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.”

“I was not alone…some of them would become rich and famous and some of them would go to jail and some of them would become accountants and some would join the Peace Corps or move to France and some of them would fall in love and some of them would kill themselves and everyone who'd wronged us and everyone we'd been and everyone we would be all meeting in books. All touching the skin of words. What is a family.”

“Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk & fucked up. Again. Here are the scars.”

“you said you would love me until I died you said we would die together in love you said when I was 75 we'd laugh our saggy skinned laughs and drink to our old ass love you said it to me you did every year until you stopped saying it where are you where is the man who would love a woman like me there are no men if not you there never were any men for me not even a father”

“That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head.
Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.”

“For three days and three nights I prayed to the thing called god so hard I choked on the spit in my mouth. I clenched my hands until they went red. I dug my fingernails into flesh so hard little scarlet moons appeared. I shut my eyes so tight I thought my forehead would bleed. My head, my heart, everything on the inside was burning.”

“I think that everyone that knew Kesey knew him differ-ently. Maybe that's true about all larger than life people, or it may be that no one really ever knows them at all - we just have experiences near them and claim them as our own. We say their names and wish that something intimate is coming out of our mouths. But intimacy isn't like in books or movies.”

“Before my father was my father he was a boy.
Just a boy.
Before I hated him I loved him.”