The Next Queen of Heaven

But his face had that hollow look, as if there was something gone... you know that look. The inward focus. Distantly attentive to the home you're missing, or the someone you're missing. That look that a bird has when it turns it dry reptilian eye on you. That look that doesn't see you because the mind is filled up with someone it would rather see.

I hate New Year's Eve. One more chance to remember that you haven't yet done what you wanted. And to pretend it doesn't matter.

There was something about words and music together that allowed people to get nearest to honest truth about what was most difficult to say. Paradoxically, only through the essential instantaneity of music could you approach its eternal pertinence.

She was a sour-sass soul with a rubbery face.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love, the common or garden variety: love as a crippling condition. Love as a syndrome.

And that aroma of sex … soft baby asparagus cut with a weak solution of Clorox.