I Am No One You Know: Stories

Joyce Carol Oates

Цитаты

CastleAtingle30 июля 2017 г.
What you call your personality, you know?—it’s not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It’s more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there’s no sign of it, like it had never been.
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CastleAtingle30 июля 2017 г.
I was trying not to think of those strangers who must’ve seen me, sure they saw me, and turned away, uncertain what they’d seen but knowing it was trouble, not wanting to know more. Just a girl with a blackened eye, you figure she maybe deserved it.
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CastleAtingle30 июля 2017 г.
I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.
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CastleAtingle30 июля 2017 г.
Some illusions are too much strain to uphold, in the first place.
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robot11 марта 2014 г.
As in adolescence we torment and comfort ourselves with thoughts of suicide. A punishment to expiate all sins: our own, and those that have been perpetrated upon us.
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robot11 марта 2014 г.
As a child of six she’d become an adult, and she had liked it. To be an adult—even as a child—is to exercise judgment, control. It’s to successfully resist self-pity and to forestall pity, the most despicable of human responses, in others.
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robot11 марта 2014 г.
We’re too old for love. We make ourselves ridiculous.
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robot11 марта 2014 г.
Among those closest to him Kyle had cultivated his good nature like a paper mask. Not a rubber mask that clung to his face and might have interfered with his breathing, not a gargoyle-mask that called attention to itself. Kyle Cassity’s mask was smiling, affable, kindly, patient. He’d been a charismatic lecturer at the college, and he maintained some of that spotlit affability around the house. Through the mask’s mouth he could even kiss, sometimes. Brushing his lips against the lips of the woman who was his wife. Brushing his lips against the cheeks of the adults who were his grown children, and now the young children, scarcely known to him, who were his grandchildren. Through the mask’s smiling eye-holes he regarded the world, that region of infinite chaos, sorrow, and cruelty, with a sunny equanimity.
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