Bokelskere.no

A newspaper reporter asked her if she would care to say a few words about her life.
By all means. It was "terrible."
Didn't she enjoy anything?
Certainly. "Flowers, French fried potatoes, and a good cry."

Along with the flat, they acquired a Boston terrier that they christened Woodrow Wilson for patriotic reasons and a canary that Dorothy called Onan because he spilled his seed on the ground.

Although she would not admit it, she had an acute aversion toward homemaking. Granted, she had not been brought up to concern herself with such matters, but most women in 1918, even those raised with servants, were nonetheless able to care for themselves in an emergency. Dorothy was not. So phobic was her reaction to domesticity that she would have starved before boiling an egg. Throughout her life, she would eat bacon raw claiming that she had no idea how to cook it. The mechanics of laundry would be equally mysterious—when she removed her underwear, she threw the soiled lingerie back into the drawer with the clean and let a maid, if there was one, figure it out.

She bent once more and trailed her hair in the water with a swaying motion sideways and then stood and swung it about her in a great hoop of spray and stood with her head back and her eyes closed. The sun rising over the gray ranges to the east lit the upper air. She held one hand up. She moved her body, she swept both hands before her. She bent and caught her falling hair in her arms and held it and she passed one hand over the surface of the water as if to bless it and he watched and as he watched he saw that the world which had always been before him everywhere had been veiled from his sight. She turned and he thought she might sing to the sun. She opened her eyes and saw him there on the bridge and she turned her back and walked slowly up out of the river and was lost to his view among the pale trunks of the cottonwoods and the sun rose and the river ran as before but nothing was the same nor did he think it ever would be.

The cabin when they opened it was dark and musty and had about it a waxy smell like freshkilled meat. Their father stood in the door a moment and then entered. In the front room was an old sofa, a bed, a desk. They went through the kitchen and then on through to the mudroom at the back of the house. There in the dusty light from the one small window on shelves of roughsawed pine stood a collection of fruitjars and bottles with ground glass stoppers and old apothecary jars all bearing antique octagon labels edged in red upon which in Echols' neat script were listed contents and dates. In the jars dark liquids. Dried viscera. Liver, gall, kidneys. The inward parts of the beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from his house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood. The jars stood webbed in dust and the light among them made of the little room with its chemic glass a strange basilica dedicated to a practice soon to be extinct among the trades of men as the beast to whom it owed its being.

Unplug from the humble needs of the body and a person becomes no more than a ghost.

I have just got back from 2 days in NYC. There is one advantage in it because although you see several people you wish you didn't know, you see thousands you're glad you don't know.

These days you caint even have you a good psychosomatic ailment to get yourself a rest.

Please write me a card while I am in the hospital. I won't be able to do anything but dislike the nurses.

Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not. Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting.

If one were to be a person of value that value could not be a condition subject to the hazards of fortune. It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.

I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.

What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?

Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.

Some people ask, “Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem should acknowledge that.