Everytime I say "sure" when I mean "no," everytime I smile brightly when I'm exploding with rage, every time I imagine my man's ac...hievement is my own, I know the cheerleader never really died. I feel her shaking her ass inside me and I hear her breathless, girlish voice mutter "T-E-A-M, Yea, Team."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The 5307th has collapsed. From a medical viewpoint, they're finished as a fighting unit.... I have never seen human beings in such... condition. They're drained, physically and psychologically drained. I'm not tagging them for specific ailments. I'm simply marking every man in the outfit A.O.E.--accumulation of everything.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She thinks of the 4 a.m. lonelinesses that have folded her up like death, discordant, without logical and... beautiful conclusion. Her teeth break off at the edges. She would speak.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Having children can smooth the relationship, too. Mother and daughter are now equals. That is hard to imagine, even harder to acce...pt, for among other things, it means realizing that your own mother felt this way, too--unsure of herself, weak in the knees, terrified about what in the world to do with you. It means accepting that she was tired, inept, sometimes stupid; that she, too, sat in the dark at 2:00 A.M. with a child shrieking across the hall and no clue to the child's trouble.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I invented the colors of the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green--I made rules for the form and movement of each con...sonant, and, and with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself that I had created a poetic language accessible, some day, to all the senses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
They lock me in this chair at eight a.m. and there are no signs to tell the way,... just the radio beating to itself and the song that remembers more than I.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
. . . the ship struck at ten minutes after four A.M., and all hands, being mostly in their nightclothes, made haste to the forecas...tle, the water coming in at once. There they remained; the passengers in the forecastle, the crew above it, doing what they could. Every wave lifed the forecastle roof and washed over those within. The first man got ashore at nine; many from nine to noon. At flood-tide, about half past three o'clock, when the ship broke up entirely, they came out of the forecastle, and Margaret sat with her back to the foremast, with her hands on her knees, her husband and child already drowned. A great wave came and washed her aft. The steward (?) had just before taken her child and started for shore. Both were drowned.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mother baseball. I enjoy speculating about its bloody beginnings as a fertility rite. Funny that with all the verbiage about the s...port no one mentions the obvious structural relationship between a baseball stadium and a womb: in design, a stadium is both a circle and a "Y," two notorious female symbols. The curved and sloping shape of the stands is like a plush endometrium in which we fans cozy up to watch a lone batter square off against the universe.... I especially like to think about that when announcers describe players' bats as fast, corked, dead, quiet, live, or as loaded barrels--and pitches as high hard ones.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A queen driven from her throne, naked, in winter snows, like Elizabeth of Hungary, suffers more than she who wanders from a snow-b...eleaguered hut every day; the woman who has had the most suffers the most.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The poor are always ragged and dirty, in very picturesque clothes, and on their poor shoes lies the earth of the Lacustrine period.... And yet what a privilege it is to be even a beggar in Rome!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »