A Gate at the Stairs

The minister made only the vaguest mention of God, in terms that made God seem a design and a force but a little indifferent to our fates and therefore unworshippable. Like a railway system. It could get you where you were going, wherever that was. A transit authority! But it wouldn't counter your own devotion with love.

Quoted on August 11, 2011

If he had loved me, or even if he'd just have said so, I would have died of happiness. But it didn't happen. So I didn't die of happiness. Words for a tombstone: SHE DIDN"T DIE OF HAPPINESS.

Quoted on August 11, 2011

"When I was little Dannon made this delicious prune yogurt that came in a waxy brown eight-ounce container. Well, now they don't make those things. Completely gone. Although I was in Paris last year and found some there."

I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy, in its tuneless spark, it bypassed poetry and entered science.

Quoted on August 11, 2011

I tried to live cautiously - or eventually learned to try to live - in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret - operatic, oceanic, fathomless - seemed to stretch before her in every direction. No matter which path she took, regret would stain her feet and scratch her arms and rain down on her, sightlessly and lifelong. It had already begun.

Quoted on August 11, 2011

And they used tenses like, 'I'd been gonna.' As in, "I'd been gonna to do that but then I never got around toot." It was the hypothetical conditional past, time and intention carved so obliquely and fine that I could only almost comprehend it, until, like Einstein's theory of relativity, which also sometimes flashed cometlike into my view, it whooshed away again, beyond my grasp. "I'd been gonna to do that" seemed to live in some isolated corner of the grammatical time-space continuum where the language spoken was a kind of Navajo or old, old French. It was a part of a language with tenses so countrified and bizarrely conceived, I'm sure there was one that meant 'Hell yes, if I had a time machine!' People here would narrate an ordinary event entirely in the past perfect: 'I'd been driving to the store, and I'd gotten out, and she'd come up to me and I had said …' It never reached any other tense. All was backstory. All was preamble. The past was severed prologue and was never to be anything but.

Quoted on August 11, 2011

Blot [the dog] hated the garbage truck, feeling, I thnk, that the men were taking away things that rightfully belonged to him, if not to all dogs in general. He barked wildly as if here were saying, 'You bastards, we're going to find out where you live and come take all your garbage and see how you like that!'

Quoted on August 11, 2011

Subconsciously, my deepest brain still a cupboard of fairy tales, I suppose I believed that if a pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something bad to deserve it. I had a young girl's belief that this kind of negative aging would never come to me. Death would come to me - I knew this much from reading British poetry.

Quoted on August 11, 2011