For many years I have regarded the Pentateuch simply as a record of a barbarous people, in which are found a great number of the ceremonies of savagery, many absurd and unjust laws, and thousands of ideas inconsistent with known and demonstrated fact...
I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interw...
Yes, and our sister's sons are candid now about a creepy business which used to worry them a lot: They cannot find their mother or their father in their memories anywhere - not anywhere. The goat farmer, whose name is James Carmalt Adams, Jr., said t...
Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with child-like seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before. I stole closer to her, and then I said, "Boo!" She jerked h...
Sam Littleton was a beautiful woman who would try to play women's games. That meant that if he asked her if she was upset with him about something, she would do what women all do at such times: She would deny that anything was wrong, then continue ac...
Someone once asked me why people sing. I answered that they sing for many of the same reasons the birds sing. They sing for a mate, to claim their territory, or simply to give voice to the delight of being alive in the midst of a beautiful day. Perha...
You know, if you ain't poor, you might think it's the folks in them big ole fine brick churches that's doin all the carin and the prayin. I wish you coulda seen all them little circles a'homeless folks with their heads bowed and their eyes closed, wh...
- Siempre pienso en la nieve como en uno de esos tiempos entre tiempos. En esas ocasiones hay algo mágico, según nos cuentan las leyendas. La niebla, el amanecer, el crepúsculo...Cuando el mundo no es ni una cosa ni la otra. Eso mismo me parecen a...
Less than twenty-four hours ago, I had a family and a home and a dreamworld I thought was as close to heaven as you could get without dying. I have none of that now. My brother is dead. My parents threw me out of the house—again—with barely enoug...
No matter how hard you try looking for love, Orafoura once told me, the last place you’ll find it is in another man’s ass. But that may not be true, because the last time I lost my boxing gloves, that’s exactly where I found them.
I have alchemised my love for Agatha, and turned it into gold, which is the embodiment of Orafoura. I am the Elixir of Love--hot, cold, dry, and moist, I am the quintessential element: Jell-O. Agatha makes me yummy like John Wayne rides horse radish.
Do you remember our first kiss? I do. Not a day goes by I don’t think of the feel of that bicuspid against my tongue. It had such a distinctive feel, neither cuspid nor molar…but I’m not sure it knew that – that was what endeared it to me so....
We made up, and I knew just how to do that. I told her, “I feel like dancing. Let me grab my dancing shoes and stick-on mustache (better to tickle your vagina with).” And she replied, “My vagina already has its own mustache.
I am Oscar Wilde’s reversible underwear. I am John Wayne’s rusty six-shooter. I am William Shakespeare’s identity crisis. I am a kiss delivered Priority Mail, to a girl named Agatha, by me dressed as a mailman.
You know, if a waitress asks me if I want ketchup with my fries, I’ll reply, “No thanks, I’ll just drink water.” And that’s not just a statement about table etiquette; it’s a personal quote that accurately reflects my moral and philosophi...
The big difference between my mom and me-- besides the fact that she is dead normal and I'm a magic-handling freak-- is that she's the real thing. She may have a slight problem seeing other people's points of view, but she's about it. She's a brass-b...
We're the Septembers now. The real ones. We are everything to one another. We don't need to say so; it's just true. Sometimes it seems like we're so close we form one single complete person rather than four separate ones. We settle into types- Bridge...
I shook my head, folding my arms around my waist. He was wrong; he was the one offering fairy dust, Peter Pan offering to carry me off to the Neverland of soulfinders and happily ever after. But he was too late. Last night i had to grew up and I now ...
Each word, as someone once wrote, contains the universe. The visible carries all the invisible on its back. Tonight, in the unconditional, what moves in the long-limbed grasses, what touches me As though I didn’t exist? What is it that keeps on mov...
Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I...
Know your load. That’s rule numero uno in this business, which is why I make them count the penguins out in front of me one at a time. I’m not going to be the schmuck who shows up in Orlando two birds short of a dinner party....I know I’m pulli...