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G L said:
"
This collection of short stories is like having a hug from your best friend when you're crying then suddenly it's a slap and she's telling you to 'stop being a whiny little shit'. In the best possible way. It's like Lorrie Moore has lived a thousand
...more
"
“I write letters to lovers I have never seen, or heard, to lovers who do not exist, to lovers I invent on a lonely morning. Open a file, write a paragraph or a page, erase before lunch. The sheer pleasure of being able to write something that my husband can never access. The revenge in writing the word lover, again and again and again. The knowledge that I can do it, that I can get away with doing it. The defiance, the spite. The eagerness to rub salt on his wounded pride, to reclaim my space, my right to write.”
― When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
― When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
“Sand
And she frequently forgot,
That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand.
That it had shattered and is shattering still.
Slipping stubbornly through fingers.”
― The White Book
And she frequently forgot,
That her body (all our bodies) is a house of sand.
That it had shattered and is shattering still.
Slipping stubbornly through fingers.”
― The White Book
“Hope - as the cliché goes - is the last thing to disappear. I sometimes wish it had abandoned me first, with no farewell note or goodbye hug, and forced me to act.”
― When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
― When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
“John’s adolescence was marked by loss. When he was thirteen his father died, swiftly followed by his two sisters. Shortly after he turned seventeen his eldest brother, James, whose progress through his chosen medics, career had taken him to London, became unable to work due to ill health and returned to the farm, lying for days on one of the beds that pulled out from the walls of the two-roomed cottage like drawers, coughing himself to death at least while John watched or was nearby; and I find it hard to imagine, now, when death is largely hedged about with treatment plans, when it does not often come senseless out of nowhere, but can be postposted, or if not, then at least explained, what grief must have been like when that boundary was a curtain you could put your hand through. It is easy to think that when death could be so quickly turned to, a matter of mistral and all families counted lost children in their numbers, that loss must have been a blunter thing- that having so much practice, they must have been better at it, or inoculated, that it cannot have been for them such devastation, this laying waste- as the birth of a tenth child might be of less account in a busy week than the loss of a pair of, so that the date of it was not looked for until later, when it was found to have been forgotten. It is easy to think that in an age without anaesthetics, when legs might be hacked off on kitchen tables, teeth pulled sigh pliers taking gobbets of jaw and gun away with the , that pain must have been somehow a less precise, less devastating thing, the alternative being unthinkable- that it was just the same but persisting, could only be endured, to universal to allow concession; and so John Hunter watched the bodies of those he loved carried out of the tiny farmhouse one by one, making their last journey to the church, and afterwards he went about the business of his day, he went to school or to the fields, and then at last, summoned by William, the sole surviving brother he barely remembered, he went to London and, did not return.”
― Sight
― Sight
“Lying by Johannes in the darkness, envying him the unquestioned habit of sleep, the way he could remove himself, I wished that I might pause, take stock; that is a thought that comes back to me now: that I would like to pause pregnancy like a film, to walk away, do something else, returning later when I have had time to rest or think. I had always, before my pregnancy, regarded my body as a kind of tool, a necessary mechanism, largely self-sustaining, which, unless malfunctioning, did what I instructed of it, and so to have my agency so abruptly curtailed, revealed as little more than conceit, felt like betrayal. I no longer listened to my own command. Inside me, while I wished that I might be able to be elsewhere, that I might leave my body in the frowsty sheets and go downstairs to sit in the dark kitchen, unswollen and cool, cells split to cells, thoughtless and ascending, forming heart and lungs, eyes, ears- a hand grew nails- this child already going about its business, its still uncomprehending mind unreachable, apart.”
― Sight
― Sight
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