On the seals’ tank a plaque warns: COINS CAN KILL–IF SWALLOWED, COINS CAN LODGE IN AN ANIMAL’S STOMACH AND CAUSE ULCERS, INFECTIONS AND DEATH. DO NOT THROW COINS IN THE POOL.
But this road doesn’t go anywhere,” I told him. “That doesn’t matter.” “What does?” I asked, after a little while. “Just that we’re on it, dude,” he said.
Hip,” I murmur, remembering last night, how I lost it completely in a stall at Nell’s—my mouth foaming, all I could think about were insects, lots of insects, and running at pigeons, foaming at the mouth and running at pigeons.
Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn’t a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don’t know. I think it’s a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility.
You don’t market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It’s a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you’re confronted by criticism. You just don’t listen to it.
I don’t really need to pretend, because it’s who I am, an emotional vampire. I’ve just come to expect it. Vampires are real. That I was born this way. That I feed off of other people’s real emotions. Search for this night’s prey. Who will it be?
It’s as if her mind is having a hard time communicating with her mouth, as if she is searching for a rational analysis of who I am, which is, of course, an impossibility: there… is… no… key.
I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you’ve always lived.)
