P.16 The birth of an idea is preceded by a long gestation, by a process
unconscious in the person conceiving it. That’s how I explain my lack of
appetite during tat magnificent dinner, my agitated insomnia in a bed with
fresh sheets, after a busy day. At tow in the morning, at last, it was
born, the idea.
P.34 Alone in the world, without father or mother, she ran, panting, mute,
focused. At times, mid-escape, she’d flutter breathlessly on the eave of a
roof and while the boy went stumbling across other roofs she’d have time
to father herself for a moment. And then she seemed so free.
⠀Stupid, timid and free. Not victorious as an escaping rooster would
have been. What was it in her guts that made her a being?
P.79 One possible way they might still have saved themselves would eb the
thing they never would have called poetry. In fact, what was poetry
anyway, that embarrassing word? Could it be seeing when, by coincidence, a
sudden rain fell over the city? Or perhaps, while having sodas together,
they both looked simultaneously at a passing woman’s face? Or even running
into each other on that old night of moon and wind? But they’d both
already been born by the time the word poetry was being published with the
greatest shamelessness in the Sunday paper. Poetry was the word older
people used. An their wariness was enormous, like that of animals. Whom
instinct alerts: that one day they will be hunted.
P.84 I am the thing itself you were seeking at last, the big house said.
⠀And the funniest thing is that I don’t have any secrets at all, the
big house also said.