quotation is life

We walked along a stretch of empty road towards the lights we’d seen from the highway and came to a strip of small tired storefronts and a donut shop. Her eyes lit up. Frosting in the morning made her happy all day.

Once, when still heavy and tethered; and intimate and yet hard, like some tool of a doctor’s, against which, with a sense of transgression, we could squash a hot cheek; when transmitting the sound of the other with that erstwhile fidelity that allowed us to feel they were with us in bed; the telephone, that old bludgeon-shape thing with the corkscrew-curl cord, was intensely romantic.

A day later the first stranger walked in. They’d taken to posting guards with whistles, so that they might be warned of a stranger’s approach. They’d all seen the post-apocalyptic movies with the dangerous stragglers fighting it out for the last few scraps. Although actually when she thought about it, Annette said, the post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen had all involved zombies. “I’m just saying,” she said, “it could be so much worse.”

Origami Club was held in Clayton’s apartment, and the first unusual thing was that Clayton’s apartment was on a street Graham had never heard of and he thought he knew every street in Manhattan. Walter Street? Where the hell was that? On the Lower East Side, as it turned out. And although the building looked like all the other low red-brick buildings around it, it had a bright green door, which made Graham think of enchanted forests. There was no doorman and the hallway had black-and-white hexagonal tile and smelled deeply of cabbage and rent control.

Blackberry like the eye of a fly. Cut the liver out of the clock, wrap in wax paper and write a number in grease pencil. Do what they say and survive. Cut flowers for the table. Tell no one what day it is. Sleepwalk instead of dream. Run don’t walk. Go to town on Thursday—buy gingham and salt. Forget the dead. Keep singing if you forget the words. Love the ferns.

Alone water is similar to lemon water, but with a sharp, clawing bleakness squeezed into the water instead of half a lemon.

If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast as you can. Don’t stop. Don’t try to talk. Nothing good can come of it.

He said, “You dont have to make no Bad Luck go a way syn I aint no Bad Luck Im whats lef after the Bad Luck ben. Im pas the tern and on the way to Good Luck.”

Amelia got out and closed the door. She exhaled deeply. Leaning against the funeral bow, she then breathed in slowly, just as deep, again. She felt dizzy with the way feelings went. How did anybody ever survive feelings? Did anybody ever survive them? No wonder, she thought, so many didn’t bother having them to try.

Now, if Zola, or anyone else, but if Zola at the restaurant had asked what was it like when you were growing up? what was the reservation like? could he say that the days, the short days of winter and the long days of summer, when the sun stayed so long that just when the afternoon began it felt like a whole new day had been added on to the one you had just enjoyed and the night would never come, and that in those hours life was very full, and there was so much to do you never wondered who you were and what the answer might mean, and that the people of your childhood, your parents who, neither one no matter what, ever said or did a cruel thing, and your uncle often got very drunk but was always kind, and Adolphe who lived behind the village had such a funny way of swinging his arms when he walked and he walked with a limp because he had dropped a crate of ammunition on his foot during the First World War but played the fiddle at all the jigs, or the girl who owned a pack of dogs and could climb trees like no one else ever could and who climbed those trees and kept those dogs and sicced them every so often on her own father when he met her in the woods when she was alone because he wanted things she did not want to give, or the land itself; the ever-stretching swamps into which it felt that no one had ever gone before you and the pinestands, those that were left, anonymous and communal, and the hardwoods so full of secrets but so quiet and good to hunt in if there was snow. He could not.

But the threat of the Pechenegs was not to be taken lightly. They painted other people’s blood on their faces; they used the dry skulls of their victims for drinking cups; they sharpened both sides of wooden spears and thrust a human head onto one end and plunged the other end into the earth; they kicked bunny rabbits in the face. (Not in the side—in the face!)

. . . his books on the Zohar, his seven-volume set of the Talmud which had stretched across an entire shelf, his miniature reproduction of the Chagall Windows which had stood on a little stand next to the telephone, and, most hated of all, the music box in the shape of the Ten Commandments that played Hatikvah, the Jewish National Anthem.

Before he’d quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, but the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not be in relation to it.

Cocooned in a leather armchair Jonathan understands for the first time the English word cosy, the need their climate instills in them to pad their blue-veined bodies with layers of horsehair and mahogany, aspidistras and antimacassars, history, tradition, and share certificates. Being British, he decides, is primarily a matter of insulation.

De Souza thinks that if Firoz is going to behave like this he will have to order a prairie oyster. That might help. Would it really be too much to ask? In reply Firoz launches a well-aimed highball glass. Brief curtain of Tom Collins.

Once inside, she kept her long johns on and wore a stocking hat in place of her hair. She couldn’t remember a chill that had lasted so long and defied so many means of throwing it off. She made herself wear a shawl—and she despised shawls. The urge to wear a shawl is the body’s advice that you had better get your paperwork in order and unhide the petty cash so your heirs won’t miss it.

It’s because they are not walking, I realize. They are not in their actual bodies.