Wasn’t that the story of her life? Currying favor that was never forthcoming? Jess at 13 buying lunch for the whole tableful of popular girls so they would let her sit with them for that day only. The same Jess who had refrained from seeing a divorce attorney; letting Bart—her adversary—draw up the settlement agreement and sell the house out from under her, splitting the equity she was legally entitled to.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve loved the word “striking.”  You see that word used about a lot of people now.  Red-carpet-baggers.  Grandstanding politicos.  Wheaties athletes.  Isn’t it weird, though, how it’s mostly only women and girls that get called striking?  Almost never men.  When its men that do most of the actual striking. 

Church bells rang out the noon Angelus. The ringing is automated now, someone told me. That’s not change. They still clang at their appointed hours. Two ropes used to hang down a long open chute behind a closed door in the sacristy. You could look all the way up the chute and see the clappers dangling in the bowls.
“Don’t let him get you in there,” one of the older boys told me the first time I served Mass with Byrnes.
I don’t pray anymore. That’s changed.

Learn to get just drunk enough in the morning that you have a headache by lunch time and cannot possibly eat a thing when the other wives invite you over for mediocre sandwiches and pilfered bottles of sweating cola.

He undressed for bed that night feeling reluctant to examine himself in the mirror. He couldn’t even muster the courage to look down at his own torso and thighs. Who knew what he might find? Some new bulge or wrinkle to prove how quickly he was closing in on his own death? Switching off the light he began to pull on his pajamas in the dark wondering how much Noreen’s intrusion into his life had caused these morbid, almost shameful thoughts.

In contrast to Kandinsky’s intricate articulation (in both theory and practice) of the spiritual purpose of form, de Kooning’s work is an interesting anomaly.  It is curious that de Kooning, in this period of artistic uninhibitedness, is regarded by more than one critic as evoking a sort of vacancy in his work, a deliberate descent into visual paradox, an emptiness and a void. 

There is a Zen story in which a student’s teacher has taught the student, “When drinking tea, just drink tea,” yet the student comes across the teacher in the act of reading a newspaper while drinking tea. The teacher says, “When drinking tea and reading the newspaper, just drink tea and read the newspaper.”