A man of the mouth, formerly the most oral of surgeons, Henry had the habit of giving his lady patients laughing gas, putting them out, then fiercely fucking them, while tugging on their wisdom teeth. His getting caught was a slip of the tongue, so t...
Tell me about your day, your routine, and what you did at the drugstore when the dumb little girl charged you five cents instead of five dollars. Did you speak up? Are you all so lily-white? The harder it gets to be safe and secure, to trust, to find...
The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it's ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of man's having a life of...
Was this the big one or was this the small tremor, the warning? Does it get better - does the sensation of being in a dream underwater go away?
Can I ask you, what is your relationship to God?” “Limited,” I say. “Limited with the exception of spontaneous prayer in times of distress.
Given the circumstances, I think the rabbi did a very good job. What did you think?” “It's my policy not to review funerals.
A guy rubbed against me,” I say. “But I think he was just trying to get by. He rubbed me, then said sorry. It was the ‘sorry’ that made me uncomfortable. The rub was kind of interesting, but when he apologized I felt like a creep because I ac...
How can I tell anyone that there has always lived within me a rusty sense of disgust-a dull, brackish water that I suspect is my soul?
There is a world out there, so new, so random and disassociated that it puts us all in danger. We talk online, we ‘friend’ each other when we don’t know who we are really talking to – we fuck strangers. We mistake almost anything for a relati...
What does ‘stuck’ mean?” “It means I should make some big decision, I should do some enormous thing. And I can’t do anything. I can’t stand my life, and I can’t change it.” “Maybe it’s not an enormous thing,” he says. “Maybe y...
You are your own beginning. Every day, every hour, every minute, you start again. There is no point wishing you were someone else, you are who you are—start there.
Books tell you more about their owners than the owners do.
For the first time, I understand that, as much as one might desire change, one has to be willing to take a risk, to free-fall, to fail, and that you've got to let go of the past.
There are strangers, people we don't know, who care about is.
She starts to cry. 'It's just so terrible,' she says. 'Which part?,' I ask. 'Being human.
Suddenly, she doesn't want to die. She has no real reason not to, no sudden revelation, except that it's equally pointless to die as not to die. Why doesn't she die? She lives because she's meant to live, because she's already alive and it's comparat...
If you don’t write the book you have to write, everything breaks.
