Sue’s Reviews > Later Novels and Stories: The Château / So Long, See You Tomorrow / Stories and Improvisations 1957–1999 > Status Update

from "The Holy Terror": The Germanic voice coming from a few feet beyond the crown of my head suggested that my brother's accident had been a great misfortune not only for him but for me also; because I saw what happens to little boys who are incorrigible, I became a more tractable, more even-tempered, milder person than it was my true nature to be.

from Front and Back Parts of the House: D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is showing at the movie theater downtown and there are scenes in it that have made all the colored people in Lincoln angry. I am told to stay out of the kitchen.

again MFF: Pre-adolescent boys, at a certain point, become limp, pale, undemanding, unable to think of anything to do, so saturated with protective coloration that they are hardly distinguishable from the furniture, and not much more aware of what is going on around them.

from "My Father's Friends": Though it would be accurate to say that Aaron McIvor was not like anybody else in Lincoln, it would also, in a way, be meaningless, since small-town people of that period were so differentiated that the same thing could have been said of nearly everybody.

from "With Reference to an Incident at a Bridge (for Eudora Welty): But I have remembered it. I have remembered it because it was the moment I learned that I was not to be trusted.

from The Man in the Moon: The view after seventy is breathtaking. What is lacking is someone, anyone, of the older generation to whom you can turn when you want to satisfy your curiosity about some detail of the landscape of the past. There is no longer any older generation. You have become it, while your mind was mostly on other matters.

from Billie Dyer: For things that are not known--at least not anymore--and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood.

currently reading "Love", in Billie Dyer and Other Stories:
She managed a flicker of recognition but I was struck dumb by the fact that she didn't seem glad to see us. She didn't belong to us anymore. She belonged to her illness.