Home > Work > Faithless: Tales of Transgression
1 " A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope? "
― Joyce Carol Oates , Faithless: Tales of Transgression
2 " He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life. "
3 " Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased. "
4 " Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat. "
5 " I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul. "
6 " Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there. "
7 " Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident. "
8 " Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live. "
9 " There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it. "
10 " Which is why we say I can't live without you meaning your life gives life to me, who am otherwise an empty vessel, nameless. "
