Jealousy

The voice trembled with glorious details.

It is difficult to tell any story about jealousy without the endings falling apart. Even the simplest tales--where one day you can't remember what it was, exactly, that made you go to all that trouble over a skunk like that--don't have the right ending.

The thing about jealousy that makes it ( Read more... )

Nothing hurt Reva more than effortless beauty like mine. (10)

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It's impossible to believe me, maybe, especially just from the quote selection below (which isn't quite the magic of this read), but I loved--and I do mean LOVED--reading this book. It hit me at a great time personally. I laughed, I cried, I RELATED. I MISSED her when it was done ( Read more... )

In the guest bathroom, the walls were covered in pictures of her travels: in a sari on an elephant, in blackface and leopard pelts, in leather chaps and nothing else (alongside a certificate stating that the "bearer bared her knuckers at Mardi Gras 1998"). My grandmother was beautiful long after she was beautiful. She carried and dressed herself in ( Read more... )

Love that had begun so powerfully in the body had spread luxuriantly into everything. (39)

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On my nighttime walks, the neighbors' lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums. (3)

( ... )

"Imperfect definition," and, further down: "Description: "Imperfect definition," and, further down: "Descriptions are usually used to present singular people or individuals. A description is thus the gathering of accidents by which something may be easily distinguished from some other thing." Perhaps I only needed to confine myself to the imperfect ( Read more... )

In the occult, good manners matter, as they do in life, and perhaps even more so. (25)

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Beware! If you play at ghosts, you become one. --anon, The Kabbalah

In a way, I was living in a perpetual state of communion with the dead. But not in a sordid sense. In contrast, the people around me were sordid. Moby was. Dakota too, sometimes. The dead and I, no. (10 ( Read more... )

"I don't think you love yourself. You need to learn to love yourself."
Veronica was silent for a long moment. Then she said, "I think love is overrated. My parents loved me. And it didn't do any good." (9)

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