The power of having a love affair with A. Proulx is that she leads you to believe that you're the only one, you dismiss whole thoughts of there being countless others who've slept with the same book in their bed too.
"I'm the sort now in the fool's position of having love left over that I'd like to lose; what good is it to me now, candy ungiven after Halloween?"
Remember that time when you couldn't leave the house without Maggie? Yeah, me too.
"L'heure bleue. The gloaming. . . The clothes of course are familiar. I had for a while seen them every day, washed them, hung them to blow in the wind on the clotheslines outside my office window. I wrote two books watching her clothes blow on those lines."
"another more secret and evasive freedom works on him, but only he (and then just barely) is conscious of its movements."
"Sensuality desiccates in words- risks of the portage, risks of the glacier never taken. . . Emptiness thrust like a batch of letters to the furthest dark of a drawer"
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. - A.G.
"If we had been on the island which had been witness to his birth instead of the unspeakable island of Manhattan, he felt, and I also eventually began to feel, that it would not have been so hard for us all to trust and love each other."
"Robert Frost never wrote a nature poem. He said that. Meaning: there's more to me than trees and birds. Meaning: there's more to trees and birds and I know that, so that means there's more to me, too."
what little treasures the junk piles have in store for us on the sides of roads.
"Whereas if you truly become someone on whom nothing is lost, then loss will not be lost upon you, either."
"I pause in the stairwell, hearing / from her shut door a commotion of type-writer keys / like a chain hauled over a gunwale. / Young as she is, the stuff / of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy: / I wish her a lucky passage." - an excerpt from The Writer
pick"My habit when I've been humiliated is to go out and buy a book." Absolutely need to re-read this. This novella doesn't receive nearly as much credit as Johnson's more popular works. So short, such grace, many pulls of heartstrings.
"we know we are in this, up to our waists. But still we're ashamed to want what we cannot name. "
"But you will stop me with my name; and I will come crush you in the fur till winter's end." #springhurrythefuckup
Ode to Tuesday, Ode to Marilyn Hacker who can make fourteen lines read so much like a forkful of decadent chocolate cake, sugar straight to the bloodstream.
"it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience which is not to go wasted on me which is why i'm telling you about it"
If ever you find yourself questioning "how should I load this jar of peanut butter with meaning?", this anthology is for you. It is swiftly becoming my bible for understanding literary technique straight from the masters of its craft.
"Finally I start to get dressed/ and when she's lying on the bed she says/ your capacity for suffering is infinite - / how much fun we could have had if it was not -"
. . . for the little beast in us all. "i couldn't get the boy to kill me, but i wore his jacket for the longest time."
pickfinally earned this read, and holy hell, it was worth the wait.
