Katie K

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one who poverty bothers.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poem. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection. Or if he'd collected editions of Festus, the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey--that would be an achievement. But collecting your own poems? What's so great about that? And mixing and mingling them in with some new? New and and Collected Poems? Oh, well! Good job. Nice going.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“One French guy at a bar wanted several of us to "faire le parachutisme." He said it was easy, you just jumped out of a plane. It sounded very exciting but no, thank you. He said "I'm not a homo." I said it's not a question of whether or not you're a homo, I just don't want to jump out of a plane.”
― Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

“Cowgirl Interlude (Bonanza Jellybean)

She is lying on the family sofa in flannel pajamas. There is Kansas City mud on the tips and heels of her boots, boots that have yet to savor real manure. Fourteen, she knows she ought to remove her boots, yet she refuses. A Maverick rerun is on TV; she is eating beef jerky, occasionally slurping. On her upper stomach, where her pajama top has ridden up, is a small deep scar. She tells everyone, including her school nurse, that it was made by a silver bullet.

Whatever the origin of the extra hole in her belly, there are unmistakable signs of gunfire int he woodwork by the closet door. It was there that she once shot up one half of an old pair of sneakers. "Self-defense," she pleaded, when her parents complained. "It was a [sic] out-law tennis shoe.

Billy the Ked.”
― Tom Robbins, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues