This was a factory, a sorting house. We were no different from dogs and pigs and cows: all of us were allowed to play when we were small, but then, just before reaching maturity, we were sorted and classified. Being a high school student was the firs...
If everyone could feel as I felt at that moment, dressed in my preppy sweater and McGregor coat and about to set out on a little journey with my Bambi-eyed girlfriend on Christmas Eve, all conflicts in the world would vanish. Mellow smiles would rule...
When I went on anyway, my body began to grow cold, and I thought I was dead. Face pale, my dead self sat down on a bench and began to turn toward my real self, who was watching this hallucination on the screen of the night. My dead self came nearer, ...
Yeah, he'd said, maybe it's just my idea, but really it always hurts, the times it don't hurt is when we just forget, we just forget it hurts, you know, it's not just because my belly's all rotten, everybody always hurts. So when it really starts sta...
Do I dare ask him for what I want, As if I knew it, Could find it on some page In some chapter In some book?
I feel his arm Lightly Over me. He takes one of my outstretched hands. Draws it beneath my stomach. "One more time..." This is not sex, Not friendship. Something Strange Special In the stillness of his breath, The waterlike way he moves. He is making...
It is strange to hear my words Read back to me. I don't think I wrote them To have them ever leave the page. I think I only write What happens across my brain When my feet are too weary To dance anymore.
It was the face of a human being who’d been constructed exclusively of wounds. Not time or history or ambition, nothing but wounds. The face of a person who could probably kill someone without feeling anything whatsoever.
To distort our faces with joy, or wail and weep with sorrow, or collapse in agony, or wallow in sentimentality – wasn’t an inviolable human trait but something we can lose simply by leading dull and dreary lives. ‘A rich emotional life,’ she�...
That’s what violence was: emotion leaking out from consciousness into the physical world, linking up with the muscles of the arms and shoulders and diaphragm and, inevitably, the face. Stifle emotion during an act of violence and the face becomes a...
But sometimes things happen that no one hopes for. Events that cause everything you've worked towards, the life you've carefully constructed piece by piece, to come tumbling down all around you. No one is to blame, but you're left with a wound you ca...
Four laughs vibrate in harmony, Warm Delicious Real.
People were infected with the concept that happiness was something outside themselves, and a new and powerful form of loneliness was born. Mix loneliness with stress and enervation, and all sorts of madness can occur. Anxiety increases, and in order ...
Dare I tell them that since I came here to dance I have been giving pieces of my body away To ridiculous diets, To repeated injuries, To Remington? And that maybe I think With each bit of my body I lose a little piece of my soul
Nice person, bad person -- that's not the level this girl is at. I can see you're crazy about her and probably won't be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you'd be better off staying away from someone like her. I can't read her exactly, but I ca...
You have to watch your step with women these days, Pops. She could be involved with Yakuza or something. Even some of the girls in my class -- you should hear the stuff they talk about. Fifteen years old, and there's nothing they don't know. We're no...
Does it matter that people and things Have words, Have names? If not, Why read any book? A litany of useless letters Detached from bone, muscle. Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement, Person Real?
You don't know what cold is until you've experienced the cold you feel when the blood is draining out of your body.
But why is it that if you imagine a baby who smells of milk, for example, you can't help smiling? Why is there such an agreement around the world about what is or isn't a foul smell? Who decided what smells bad? Is it impossible that somewhere in thi...
What makes somebody nice or unpleasant to be around is the way they communicate. When people are fucked up, their communication is fucked up.