Maureen Johnson

It was as if the news itself wanted to reassure me. Even Jack the Ripper himself had reappeared as part of the greeting committee.

I decided to deflect her attitude by giving a long, Southern answer. I come from people who know how to draw things out. Annoy a Southerner, and we will drain away the moments of your life with our slow, detailed replies until you are nothing but a husk of your former self and that much closer to death.

I__ love to be a tabletop in Paris, where food is art and life combined in one, where people gather and talk for hours. I want lovers to meet over me. I__ want to be covered in drops of candle wax and breadcrumbs and rings from the bottom of wineglasses. I would never be lonely, and I would always serve a good purpose.

I felt so alone on that train... a weird, unnatural kind of alone that bore into me. It was feeling just beyond fear and somewhere to the left of sadness.

People were freaked out, but they showed it in weird ways. Back home, people would have been weeping and doing a lot of very public group hugs. At Wexford people just aggressively pretended nothing had happened.

You can't curl up on the sofa and deny life forever. Life is always going to be a series of ouch-making moments, and the question was, was I going to go all fetal-position or was I going to woman up?

People can't really sympathize with you properly when you've woken them up

Money is for doing things, my love. Don't sit on it like a hen sits on an egg. It doesn't hatch. I should know. I've made enough of it.

Maybe this was what Aunt Peg meant all along - returning was a weird thing. You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it's a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe our what came before.

Hey! Jack the Wanker! Over here! I want your autograph!

Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this.

My final word: don't follow your dreams . . . chase them. With a stick, or a shovel, or whatever you have handy. Get that [bleep]ing dream!

Fear can't hurt you. When it washes over you, give it no power. it's a snake with no venom.

I'm done. I'm going to go to bed and read important books about theater.""It would would be easier if you just said porn," Scarlett said."No idea what you're talking about. But knock first if you need me.

Every time you try to flirt with her, a puppy dies.

When she emerged, Keith was watching the tiny round window of the under-the-counter washing machine. "Put your clothes in for a wash," he said. "They were disgusting."Ginny always thought that the only way of getting clothes clean was by drowning them in scalding water and then whipping them around in a violent centrifugal motion that caused the entire washing machine to vibrate and the floor to shake. You beat them clean. You made them suffer. This machine used about half a cup of water and was about as violent as a toaster, plus it stopped every few minutes, as if it were exhausted from the effort of turning itself.Sluff, sluff, sluff sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest.Click.Sluff, sluff, sluff, sluff. Rest. Rest. Rest."Who thought to put a window on a washing machine?" Keith asked. "Does anyone just sit and watch their wash?"You mean, besides us?""Well," he said, "yeah. Is there any coffee?

She had always thought applying to college would be exciting. Living away from home, meeting so many new people, Learning new things, making a few poor life desicisons....

Of course, he showed me this one afternoon when he was skipping class. When trolls cut classes, you think they are losers. When the beautiful and/or reasonably erudite do the same thing to sit on the library steps and read poetry, you think they are on to something deep. You see only deep brown wavy hair and strong legs, well honed by years of Ultimate Frisbee. You see that book of T. S. Eliot poems held by the hand with the long, graceful fingers, and you never stop to think that it shouldn't take half a semester to read one book of poems... that maybe he is not so much reading as getting really high every morning and sleeping it off on the library steps, forcing the people who actually go to class to step or trip over him.