Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.
In Kevin's book, unwitnessed disobedience is wasteful.
The secret is that there is no secret.
For Celia, her whole surround was animate, and each tapioca lump had a dense, nauseating little soul.
In truth we are bigger, greedier versions of the same eating, shitting, rutting ruck, hell-bent on disguising from somebody, if only from a three-year-old, that pretty much all we do is eat and shit and rut. The secret is there is no secret. that is what we really wish to keep fom our kids, and it's suppression is the true collusion of adulthood...
The very insurmountability of the task, its very unattractiveness, was in the end what attracted me to it.
Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
It isn't very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps, but real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness.
Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.
It's an apathy so absolute that it's like a hole you might fall in.
Time hangs off me like molting skin.
He didn't like to be seen needing it - as if hunger were a sign of weakness.
It's far less important to me to be liked these days than to be understood.
Time itself made all things rare.
He looks uncomfortable, and in this respect the garb is apt. Kevin is uncomfortable; the tiny clothing replicates the same constriction that he feels in his own skin.
Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
Wasn't there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?
Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches.
He prizes ambiguity; he loves to keep you guessing.
Later you referenced that anecdote to illustrate that my expectations were always preposterously outsized; that my very ravenousness for the exotic was self-destructive, because as soon as I seized upon the otherworldly, it joined this world and didn't count.
We shared a sympathetic look, mutually marveling that kids who commit grown-up crimes still have their little-boy sweet tooth.
Bur Armenians have a talent for sorrow.
He was already intuiting that attachment - if only to a squirt gun - made him vulnerable.
My own apathy is bone chilling.
What is cool changes; that there is such a thing as cool is immutable.
But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.
How lucky we are, when we're spared what we think we want!
No eleven-year-old has any real grasp of death. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist. And his own adult future isn't real to him, either. Makes it that much easier to throw away.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.
I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.
Now that children don't till your fields or take you in when you're incontinent, there is no sensible reason to have them, and it's amazing that with the advent of effective contraception anyone chooses to reproduce at all.
Yet in my experience, when left to their own devices people will get up to one of two things: nothing much, and no good.
But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules; nothing.
I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.
Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.
You can blame your mother, and she can blame hers. Leastways sooner or later it's the fault of somebody who's dead.
Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman's cunt.
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
People seem to get used to anything, and it is a short step from adaptation to attachment.
You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
I so mixed and matched the planet that you sometimes worried I had no commitments to anything or anywhere, though you were wrong; my commitments were simply far-flung and extremely specific.
Teachers were both blamed for everything that went wrong with kids and turned to for their every salvation. This dual role of scapegoat and savior was downright messianic but even Jesus was probably paid better.
You restored me to the concept of home.
Discomfort begets discomfort in others.
I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.
That boy hardly needed a mask when his naked face was already impenetrable.
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories