novembre

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D-E-F-Y

These are not quotes about the spooky-beautiful: they are just spookily beautiful quotes.

"I think you would like Warren. He drinks Courvoisier in a Coke can, and has a laugh like you'd find in a cartoon bubble."

"Just once in my life--oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?"

"I meet a person, and in my mind I'm saying three minutes; I give you three minutes to show me the spark."

"The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?"

"I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true � nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be."

"Since his mother died I have seen him steam a cucumber thinking it was zucchini. That's the kind of thing that turns my heart right over."

"He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good."

"Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare."

"She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend.

'I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend we were in Canada.'

'That's how dumb we were,' I say.

'You could be sisters,' the nurse says.

So how come, I'll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glorious place? But do they ask?

They do not ask.

Two months, and how long is the drive?

The best I can explain it is this - I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it's the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the bone - and when he looked at it - it scared him to death.
I mean, he died.

So I hadn't dared to look any closer. But now I'm doing it - and hoping that I will live through it."

"Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women's cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought stay."

� Amy Hempel
The Collected Short Stories

7:52 am - 02.13.09

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