The Girl Who Was Saturday Night

On of the reasons that I wanted to study literature was because it exposed everything. Writers looked for secrets that had never been mined. Every writer has to invent their own magical language, in order to describe the indescribable. They might seem to be writing in French, English, or Spanish, but really they were writing in the language of butterflies, crows, and hanged men.

Love is like this small room where a child brings you to show you all their treasures. First the child shows you all the new toys that are bright and shiny and top of the line. But then she shows you all the stuff that has ended up at the bottom of the trunk. There are dolls with eyes that wobble, hair that is falling out of their heads, and dirt behind their ears. Their fingertips have been chewed off by dogs and they have been drawn on with ballpoint pen. It has been so long since they have been held or anyone has told them that they are lovely. They lie at the bottom of the toy chest, hidden and ashamed. You are either going to be disgusted by them, or you are going to be so filled with love for them that your heart almost breaks. I took his hand in mine.

When you are born and put into your crib, the whole world sticks their heads over the tops of the bars. They give you a name and they have all sorts of different ideas about you. … But your task is to become something much more unique and surprising than anyone your parents could ever imagine you to be. You have to know that the life you have is completely yours.

Oh, we had a lot of sex back then in Montreal; it wasn’t just me. Blame it on the cold. The roses in everyone’s cheeks made them seem way more appealing than they actually were. We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection.

A cat peeped in the window. It had one white paw. One night it had decided to dip it into the reflection of the moon in a fountain to see what would happen.

You should beware of motherless children. They will eat you alive. You will never be loved by anyone the way that you will be loved by a motherless child.

You feel as if everybody has been given an instruction manual on how to be likable, but you didn’t get it. And they are all sold out now. And if you are what you eat, then you must have surely spent the last few years of your life eating dog food and cat shit. Because when you look in the mirror, it is all that you see.

You have to know that the life you have is completely yours

Adam was charming and spoke perfect French. Like many anglophones in Montréal, he actually spoke French better than we did. They knew exactly which verbs to use in the same way that people knew which utensils to use while eating at a fancy dinner. It was very proper because they learned it from books. They didn’t know slang or how to curse. They didn’t know how to do anything other than be proper and reserved. It was state-sponsored, dry-clean-only French.

A cat's tail waved above the arm of the couch like an elegant hand in a black glove waving goodbye.

I was trying my best to straighten out my life, but I always ended up in the middle of some festive waste of time.

There was a scent called Five Minutes Before It Rains. If you put it on your neck, whoever kissed you would cry.

In Moscow there were a hundred different words for sadness, and one of them was joy.

A beige cat came down the stairs like caramel seeping out of a Caramilk bar.

There are things that are permissible in sex that aren’t permissible elsewhere. You can smack each other and tie one another up and pee on them and strangle them. That’s when love shows its face. When love takes off its clothes and has a drink. It sometimes takes the most appalling forms. It made the night seem like it was going to last forever.

We confused the indoors with intimacy and electric heating with connection. Every night seemed like the last night because we would all freeze to death shortly.

Mothers took your problems from you and fretted about them for you, even if there was no reason on earth why they should, even if you had done everything to create your own mess.

It might seem like the easier way to get rid of a poet would be just to take him out to the backyard, have him kneel between the cans with tomato plants in them and put a bullet in his brain. But they knew from history that it doesn't work to kill a writer. Every time you shoot a poet,a dozen new ones are born. It's like plucking a grey hair.

The cat looked at its paws and frantically back at its body, as if it had just been transformed into a cat and couldn't accept it.

There is nothing as frustrating as being consumed with rage over someone and knowing that you aren’t even on their mind. You want your enemy to be engaged in a struggle until the death with you. Otherwise you are fighting yourself. I mean we are all essentially only in wars against ourselves, but we don’t like it to be so painfully obvious.

Scientists could make a human, but they could not make an artist.

We had started thinking of ourselves not in terms of things that we had done, but in terms of what we were going to do.

It was terrifying to have the responsibility of living in a world that was filled with so much wonder.

I had to admit that I had a strong tendency to date jokers. I couldn’t say no to them. I would sit across from someone I was dating and try to imagine who in the entire world would date this nimrod other than me. But I always had to have a boyfriend. They distracted me from being sad. They baffled me with their stupidity. I refused to believe that finding love was difficult.

But your task is to become something much more unique and surprising than anyone your parents could ever imagine you to be. You have to know that the life you have is completely yours.

We just thought of old age as some sort of clown routine.

She was as secure as a sixty-year-old woman whose husband has never cheated on her.

You came out of prison incredibly buff or with an addiction to paperback novels.