Michael > Recent Status Updates

“‘I don’t believe in heaven or paradise, but I do want to believe in memories of love for those who have passed.’”

“Since first catching sight of the rainbow on the far shore of the lake, she had felt as though it were calling out to her. She was filled with a strange yearning to go to that country beyond the rainbow while still alive; or more realistically, to visit its shores.”

“‘The thing about zomes is,’ Riggs with a desperate grin, ‘is they can act as doorways to other dimensions. The F-105s, the coyotes, the scorpions and snakes, the desert heat, none of that bothers me. I can leave whenever I want.’ He motioned with his head. ‘All I have to do is step through that door over there, and I’m safe.’”

“On certain days, driving into Santa Monica was like having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, for sure, ‘any’ drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica.”

“The sign on his door read LSD Investigations, LSD, as he explained when people asked, which was not often, standing for ‘Location, Surveillance, Detection.’”

“At the Trianon Palace, a visitor disrobed and climbed into the imperial bed. It is disputed whether he is, as he claims, Napoleon IV.”

“I have been telling it all like a moron… First I’ve got to organize myself… give you something of an idea, something of a picture of what it was like… the place, the setting… It’s the excitement that throws me off, flusters me, spoils the effect. I’ve got to react!… Got to describe the whole set-up to you…”

“Having just sniffed a pinch of snuff, A. Chevrel sneezed and, falling from the hay wagon he was bringing back from Pervencheres, Orne, died.”

“Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.”

“But even more than at the diary, Shimamura was surprised at her statement that she had carefully catalogued every novel and short story she had read since she was fifteen or sixteen. The record already filled ten notebooks.”

“Evenings in the park, from spring into autumn, tens and hundreds of couples walked hand in hand. It was a park with few lamps and many shadowy trees.”

‘I don’t know how birds sleep and die.
Whether their breaths are snuffed out when what remaining light vanishes.
Or whether their lives go on flowing, like electricity, into the early hours of dawn.’

“There are people who actively change the course of their own life. They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So that in time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.”

“James Joyce says that future events cast a shadow on the present. A past that might have happened throws a similar shadow on what came after. That is where the ghosts live, in that bit of conjectural space-time, their blurred faces peering from behind a curtain, moving incognito through the places where they might have lived.”

“The fleeting nature of a mirage does not degrade its beauty. But the most precious spell is one that grows and is sustained by both physical attraction and impassioned talk, weaving together instinct and reason. The moment when you fall in love shines with complete clarity, as does the mystery of a lasting desire. When you saw her the first time, you instantly felt you had known her forever.”

“Literary wanderers make a living as best they can by writing for the newspapers. They have no other job. They have no private means, or they lost them if they ever had them. No patron to protect and support them. They give up the rights to their work as soon as they accept whatever amount some editor is willing to pay. They earn so little that they must write as fast as possible.”

“Let me repeat. Most of our history and literature students care nothing for the past and are indifferent to the accretions of poetry and fiction that are our beautiful inheritance. They sign up to the humanities because they lack mathematical or technical talent. We are the poor cousins and we don’t get the smartest bunch.”

“—I am a daughter of the earthquake. In the middle of the earthquake, I was reborn. It’s like I told you at the Aquarium. I’m going to become a man. I’m never going to be a woman. When hundreds of people sleep, lying together on concrete, legs touching, without anything to cover up their bodies—then a girl starts to hate becoming a woman.”

“But there is one young girl selling her balls better because of her beauty. A red ribbon droops from her bobbed head, and beneath her short open skirt, her legs (stockings rolled) dance the Charleston—cha cha, cha cha—while through her dark encarmined lips she whistles jazzily along. She keeps time, bouncing that ball like a tambourine or like castanets.”

“‘Oh, husbands, on days of afternoon rain, especially on evenings of late-autumn rain, hurry back to the stations where your wives are waiting. I cannot promise that a woman’s heart, like a woman’s umbrella, will not be handed to another man.’”

“I wish to tell a story. A simple story. You may ultimately call it a sickening one, but that does not change its simpleness. I wish therefore to tell a simple and sickening story.”

“My reportage is buttressed by credible hearsay and insider tattle. Massive paper trails provide verification. This book derives from stolen public files and usurped private journals. It is the sum of personal adventure and forty years of scholarship. I am a literary executor and an agent provocateur. I did what I did and saw what I saw and learned my way through to the rest of the story.”