“Black coffee's a lot like whiskey, you know? All devil and no trimmin's. Always liked my sins pure and take it as it comes.”
― Jack Ketchum, quote from Off Season
“Fighting for your life is a fucking ball. As long as you didn’t get slaughtered.”
― Jack Ketchum, quote from Off Season
“Friendship and sex were really all she wanted from men these days.”
― Jack Ketchum, quote from Off Season
“She had always given too much of her life over to relationships, and they’d never quite worked out. Now she was simplifying her life in favor of her career. It gave her a sense of control to watch herself succeeding, and a great deal of satisfaction.”
― Jack Ketchum, quote from Off Season
“To her eyes, used to diversity, there was a troubling uniformity about them all, something that spoke of isolation, and a dull and thoughtless cruelty.”
― Jack Ketchum, quote from Off Season
“It was strange how, when there was nothing else in your life, sex was everything.”
― Jack Ketchum, quote from Off Season
Jack Ketchum
Born place: in The United States
Born date November 10, 1946
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“Marginalia
Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.
And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.
We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.
Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page
A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.”
― Billy Collins, quote from Picnic, Lightning
“All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness.”
― Erica Jong, quote from Fear of Flying
“Yer skirt invites a man’s attention. I’ve seen handkerchiefs that were bigger.”
She swung her handbag over her shoulder. “At least I wear underwear under my skirt.”
“I hope they’re nice since everyone is sure to see them.”
― Kerrelyn Sparks, quote from All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire
“Mutta voi, miten ihanaa on hiljaisena hetkenä juuri ennen auringon nousua mennä kotiin nukkumaan kun syömiset on syöty, juomiset juotu, puhumiset puhuttu ja tanssittu jalat väsyksiin.”
― Tove Jansson, quote from Finn Family Moomintroll
“Surely it is better that the immoral learn morality through adversity than that the moral forget morality in prosperity.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Robots and Empire
Mirror Dance
Hourglass
The Seat of the Soul
To Win Her Heart
A Shadow in Summer
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