“I don't think there is any feeling I like more than the one that someone is glad to see me.
—Connor Kane”
“Talk was like the vitamins of our friendship: Large daily doses kept it healthy.”
“Silence does for thinking what a suspension bridge does for space -- it makes connections.”
“I'm not sure that love and like aren't like cats and dogs: One can't grow up to be the other, but they can be taught to live under the same roof.”
“Because way down deep they know that civilized people have to preserve rare birds.”
“Branwell told a cruel lie in silence.”
“She thanked me again and then said, ''Some people say 'God is in the details.' Others say it's the Devil.'' Margaret replied, 'Maybe it depends on who's reporting the details.”
“A good lawyer never asks a witness a question she doesn't know the answer to.' 'But, Margaret, I'm not trying to be a good lawyer. I'm trying to be a good friend.”
“But no one was prouder of me or happier for me than Branwell, and I think he would not have been prouder or happier if he had won himself. And I don't know anyone anywhere who has a friend like that.”
“I am truly anxious to get on with my life.”
“Friendship depends on interlocking time, place, and state of mind.”
“To my surprise, the toilet began to play music. It was probably supposed to be comforting, some sort of melody to soothe you while you pooped, but the whole idea of a musical toilet just weirded me out.”
“If I stay within the tree line at the edge of the field, my buddies across the way won’t notice, as they’re now chasing a bird. The bird lands to peck at the grass and, when they get close again, it flaps another ten feet and lands. I think it’s fucking with them.”
“Being in the present moment, one can step outside the mechanical train of life, and this is where the inner revolution begins.”
“I was having nightmares because I’d discovered monsters that were real. Disease and the prospect of death were far scarier than any boogeyman.”
“I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.
That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.
You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judges you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.
That blue suit.
A mad, execution uniform,
Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,
Unable to fathom what stilled you
As I looked at you, as I am stilled
Permanently now, permanently
Bending so briefly at your open coffin.”
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