Nicole > Recent Status Updates

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we a still able to recognize one.

"Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in their windows there was most demand for, keeping their private opinions for the back-shop, where through lack of use, they gradually lost substance and color.... As old John Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they regarded heroism as a form of gambling." -The Old Maid

"Lewis was his very own, and Lewis represented what was most dear to him; and for both these reasons Mr. Raycie set an inordinate value on the boy (a quite different thing, Lewis thought from loving him)." -False Dawn

a low startle-threshold is like a pretty face: a girl either has one or she doesn't. Count yourself lucky that your girl does, that her childhood was the kind that gets etched all over the twitch-muscles. Applaud yourself for the choice you've made. Other girls may be faster head-bob studies, but you can bet they don't wince like yours.

You're a compulsive fucking uptoucher, man. The tip of your nose should not be white and the tip of your nose is always white cause you look so closely for dings in the wall you just finished priming, your nose pushed up against the wall and removes a patch of primer so that now you've gotta re-prime, and after you re-prime, you do another ding check and the cycle, it whats? The cycle repeats.

Most people, when you tell them you're not into their vice, they either assume you're afraid or don't like them. If you're selling them the vice, they know you're not afraid. Those few who do take what you say at face value see you're different from them, which undermines trust. And my bags were light--I made ten 'eighths' out of every ounce. If someone ever pulled out a scale, I'd be fucked.

'How do I know I'm a Democrat?'
'Here's the test: do you think our new mayor Richard M. Daley is a funny guy who makes a lot of clever plays on words when he talks, or do you think he's more like an illiterate, nonsense-speaking midget with a really red face?'
...
'I don't know,' I said.
'There! You're a Democrat. You got an open mind on you. You don't know, so you withhold judgment.'

There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off. The wicked regard time as discontinuous, the wicked dull heir sense of natural causality. The good feel being as a total dense mesh of tiny interconnections. My lightest whim can affect the whole future.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow traveller, the possibility of children.

They wait for me to speak, and of course it all vanishes then. They know I'm a foreigner. It makes me a little uneasy. I'd like to be able to talk without the slightest accent--I have the ear for it, I'm told. I'd like, impossible, to understand everything that's said on the radio, the words of the songs. I would like to pass unseen.

Easterners hear 'coffee culture' and think of Vienna, not longshoremen idling their pickups at a drive-through. ...They hear 'beach' and think of sand, not prefab boathouses selling onion roses and buckets of beer.

Gernot had succeeded in weaving a fuzzy web of universal moral precepts that made even small-time vandalism stretch to the ends of time and space and beyond. I suppose that's what theologians learn in school.

They had goals, partners, approaches, and a campaign--all the things you can have without actually having done anything...

The only smart leap I had ever made, in their opinions, was marrying Stephen. It was what set me apart from my sister, since secretary and bikini barista are not really such different professions when you get right down to it.

Rabelais was gloriously learned because learning amused him, and so far as I am concerned that is learning's best justification. Not the only one, but the best.

I am just not liking anything I read these days. Is it the books? Is it me? Is it still being on fucking arrêt maladie and just being straight up bored with the inside of my own head?

Had Solomon ever met with Al Capone? Yes. Longy Zwillman? Yes. Moe Dalitz? Yes again. 'But,' Solomon said, 'I have also met with Joan Miro and George Bernard Shaw, but I am neither a painter nor a writer. I have talked with your brother in Ottawa more than once and I am not a bigot.'

...his faith provided for all contingencies save that of the Arctic adherent. In the years to come, followers of Ephraim's who wandered too far north in search of seal in October soon discovered that they were in bad trouble. Once the sun went down they were obliged to remain celibate and fast until it rose once more several months later, not sinking below the horizon again for many more months.

Do you think Paris would have abducted Helen if she hobbled or, if he had been so blind, that Menelaus wouldn't have said good riddance, leaving Troy intact? Consider Calypso. If she had suffered from an infirmity such as mine, surely Odysseus, far from being detained, would have put his shoulders to the oars. Or imagine what the two families would have been spared if Romeo and Juliet had seen Juliet lurching onto

Jesus was not a hero, Mr. Gursky. He is Our Savior.

God damn right he is. I meant no disrespect.

Those who do not accept Him can never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Or the Manitoba Club, you little rat, Mr. Bernard thought, but never mind.

As interprovincial liquor trade was still allowed, Bernard acquired a mail-order house in in a small town in Ontario, and Morrie became a distributor of something called Rock-a-Bye Cough Cure, which enjoyed an understandably huge sale.

...she played her scenes like an overwrought Shirley Temple with a disconcertingly gay Peter Van Daan. When that didn't work, she switched to Elizabeth Taylor of National Velvet.

"There are so many lies being told about Bernard Gursky already, somebody should be hired to listen to the truth from me and write my biography."
"I was thinking the same thing, Mr. Bernard."
"For this job I don't want a Canadian. I want the best. The hell with the expense."
"I could consult Becky and draw up a list of names."
"What about Churchill, who wrote his stuff?"
"He did, Mr. Bernard."

Their antidote for ungrateful children--unwanted polyps--was plaques, plaques, and more plaques, which they awarded one another at testimonial dinners once, sometimes twice a month in t his very ballroom. At ease in the Ritz-Carleton, they took turns declaring each other governors of universities in Haifa or Jerusalem or Man of the Year for State of Israel Bonds.

If the retention of these old letters in this country is truly in the national interest, this young man appeared to be saying, with his vulpine smile and slight snarl, then Market Forces will ensure that the papers are kept in this country without any artificial aid from the state. He added...that he had had to do Randolph Henry Ash for his A-Level, and hadn't been able to make head or tail of him.

I do not believe all these explanations. They diminish. The idea of Woman is less than the brilliant Vivien, and the idea of Merlin will not allegorise into male wisdom. He is Merlin.

He peeled off the little white glove, and pushed his ring over her fine one with its green stone, so that the two lay together. It fitted, though loosely. He would have liked to say something--with this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship--but these good and true words were doubly treacherous to two women. Their unspoken presence hung in the air.

Reading Leonora Stern's excerpt with Roland, I experienced a visceral flashback to one of my first ever graduate seminars--and the outrage I felt in reading about "female" things: who are you, Irigiray, Cixous, teacher of that seminar, fellow students, just who the hell do you think you are to tell me what I am like? Or, worse, to suggest that I am somehow not a real woman should these descriptions not apply to me?

I proposed a game of chess--because I thought it might distract him from a too vehement expression of his doubts and certainties, and because I enjoy these miniature campaigns. He was pleased to tell me that I played very well for a lady--I was content to accept this, since I won handsomely.