Cori

“There were only two questions at three in the morning, and they were Am I dying and Does anybody really love me.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“I think I am an impostor. Twenty-seven years ago I was a baby. Before that I was a clump of cells. Before that I didn’t exist. How could I be a bookstore clerk, or a Catholic, or a woman, or a person at all? I’m a life force contained in the deformed body of a baby. Of course I’m a fraud. The fact that I’m able to carry myself through life without being crushed beneath the psychological weight of being alive proves that I’m a con artist. Aren’t we all con artists?”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“While the churches, bringing the sweet smell of piety for the soul, came in prancing and farting like brewery horses in bock-beer time, the sister evangelism, with release and joy for the body, crept in silently and gravely, with its head bowed and its face covered.

You may have seen the spangled palaces of sin and fancy dancing in the false West of the movies, and maybe some of them existed—but not in the Salinas Valley. The brothels were quiet, orderly, and circumspect. Indeed, if after hearing the ecstatic shrieks of climactic conversion against the thumping beat of the melodeon you had stood under the window of a whorehouse and listened to the low decorous voices, you would have been likely to confuse the identities of the two ministries. The brothel was accepted while it was not admitted.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The pain was creeping in her hands again, and there was a new place. Her right hip ached angrily when she moved. She thought: So the pain will move in towards the center, and sooner or later all the pains will meet … and join, like rats in a clot.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden