“Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.”
“No matter what, expect the unexpected. And whenever possible BE the unexpected.”
“It is true that I am a person with black pockets of evil and hatred in my heart. There are underground places inside of me”
“But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?”
“A man who has been dead for a week in a hot trailer looks more like a man than you would first expect.”
“I am hell with a knife and there is nothing I can really do about it but try and keep my mouth shut and try not to let it show.”
“What if she stepped on a needle and it went right into her foot and Roberta would not feel it and the needle would rise and rise and rise through the veins leading up to the heart and then the needle would STAB HER IN THE HEART and Roberta would DIE and it would be VERY PAINFUL this according to nurse mother a medical expert on Freaky Ways to Croak... The mother shouted that she knew several people who died from the Rising Stab of the Unfelt Needle or RSUN she has seen cases of it many times and not ONE PERSON HAS SURVIVED IT.”
“Ask a burning question, get a burning answer”
“Twinkle twinkle little star. You are nothing. You've been dead for a thousand years...”
“Mr. Harmong is the cheapest chintziest most pig-lipped tightwad skanked-out lardo king landlord of all time.”
“Some nights looking at him scares me so bad I can hardly move and I start doing a prayer for protection. But when the thing that is scaring you is already Jesus, who are you supposed to pray to?”
“After tidying up, Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower, the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water–and the heat of the day began to breathe on the blinds as they stirred slightly in their daydreams.”
“Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works.”
“The tribes of the new pastures are engaged in bitter, often bloody conflict, even though they are all, in their different ways, moral peoples. They fight not because they are fundamentally selfish but because they have incompatible visions of what a moral society should be. These are not merely scholarly disagreements, although their scholars have those, too. Rather, each tribe’s philosophy is woven into its daily life. Each tribe has its own version of moral common sense. The tribes of the new pastures fight not because they are immoral but because they view life on the new pastures from very different moral perspectives. I call this the Tragedy of Commonsense Morality. The”
“Students who were harder on themselves for procrastinating on their first exam were more likely to procrastinate on later exams than students who forgave themselves. The harder they were on themselves about procrastinating the first time, the longer they procrastinated for the next exam! Forgiveness—not guilt—helped them get back on track.”
“I remembered during puberty, through the anorexic mists of intermittent menstrual cycles, that man, my father, lifting Shirley's nightdress over her head and asking her in his mocking way to choose what colour condom she wanted. 'Red or yellow?' Which did she choose? I can't remember. Perhaps she alternated. Perhaps there were other colours. It didn't happen once. It happened again and again. I had no power to stop it. That man, my father, had some control over me. I was drugged by the black silence in that big house, the vile whiff of aftershave, the crushing torment of inevitability. My father fucked Shirley using red or yellow condoms and it was those condoms that brought it all to an end. It was my last realization of the day; any more would have been too much to contemplate.
That time when my mother had found used condoms in bedroom, he had admitted, after a pointless burst my father's of denial, that he had been going to prostitutes. That was no doubt true but I can't imagine clients take used condoms away with them; prostitutes would surely get rid of the things. No. My father kept those used condoms as a prize. He was fucking his fourteen-year-old-daughter. He was proud of it.
Rebecca welled up with tears. Poor thing, she kept saying. Poor thing.”
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