Tenth of December: Stories

I was a terrible guy who was knowingly doing this rotten thing over and over, or (B) it wasn’t so rotten, really, just normal, and the way to confirm it was normal was to keep doing it, over and over.

our protestations of love poured forth simultaneously, linguistically complex and metaphorically rich: I daresay we had become poets. We were allowed to lie there, limbs intermingled, for nearly an hour. It was bliss. It was perfection. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

The writer gets no points just because what’s inside the box bears some linear resemblance to ‘real life’—he can put whatever he wants in there. What’s important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit . . . In fact, Slaughterhouse-Five seemed to be saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual.

heightened bureaucratese, or a passively received vernacular

trope of all tropes

follies and foibles

leaning in and encouraging.