Quotes from Monica Drake

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

Space is never empty. Emotions have vectors and velocity. You can crush a person from a distance. Sometimes the first weapon is the act or art of pulling away.

When I stand around all day, into the afternoon, I start to feel like a good bike pulled to the curb. I'm every car that's ever idled, a motorcycle gulping its own exhaust, lurching toward open road. I'm paid to stand, and I get this feeling my body is waiting for my mind to figure out what I'm supposed to do with being alive.

There is no such thing as a truly single person, only a lonely one. Humans are porous in the borders of our skins, these walking micro cities.

Love is a demon. It would take over, and it would kill us, but first it would keep us all alive.

He was hurt. He was a man who needed a country. I was a woman who needed a man. I'd be his country. He'd be my dictator. I saw our future unfold like a history book.

I, American in body and spirit, healthy, debauched and dedicated to travel, had no date. I felt a simmering discontent. What good was freedom when I wasn't free to hand it over, what use was the currency of my body if I couldn't spend it?

The moon was now paper-thin and fading. That moon was sky-tinged, the way you could see right through it to the blue of the evening light, and it was hung like a damp tissue as though pressed against glass.

You'll freeze out here," he said. What did he know? I was already a sheet of ice, a frozen branch, a twig. I could freeze in my own house, if I wanted to. The man's eyes darted down the road. I was an icy slip of nothing. I was invincible.

Come with me, Mack," I said. "Back to my place." I tried to pull my hand back. Our fingers were intertwined like those bloody hospital robes. I didn't mind, even when he scared me a little. The blood that kept us alive was trapped just under our skin, racing through veins. All those cells inside and out were fighting for a way to move closer together, beyond the trap of skin, dependent on breath.

He said, "Only you." I was alone and he was alone and we had nothing in common short of being human at night.

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that's not the one. When you meet your 'soul mate' you'll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

The only value of wasted time is knowledge.

In the middle of a wrist's suicide slash-line, below the layered skin and above the pulse, there's an acupuncture point that says, Get back to who you were meant to be. This is the heart spot, the center. Your whole life the skin on that place will stay closest to being a baby's skin, as close as you can get anymore to the way you started, the way you once thought you'd always be.

I thought I was old, back then. I thought I was grown up. I didn't know all my big mistakes were up ahead of me, still to come. Always

Outside the window, one lone car passed and threw a violent blast of rainwater over the sidewalk. It was a storm, by now. Looking at that rain, I was falling deeply in love with our warm bar. What could you do, with a world like that? I was in love with every minute of being alive even as I floundered.

I kneeled in front of the E M T chair, in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and wiped the rest of the makeup away. My skin was raw, pink and new. The ambulance had a single round light in the middle of the ceiling. The light cast long shadows under my nose, ears, eyes, and chin, and in the shadows I was young and I was a crone, in the exact same moment. That's it, I thought: life is short. The only value of wated time is knowledge. p.295

The Arboretum's overgrown grass rustled. The branches of an apple tree shook as though an animal had jumped from one to the next. A wind slid up my thighs, in the night, under my short nightgown. Crickets and cicadas made a sound like distant laughing children, the laugh track to a sitcom that didn't end. It was like the grass was full of tiny giggling babies. So beautiful, and creepy.

Everything was out in our crowded lawn, really—love, anger and jealousy. History and intimacy. You could breath it in, thick as fog. I wanted to yell, Get out of our yard!

I asked the cardiologist why an electrocardiogram was called an EKG, instead of an ECG. He said, "Nazis. Nazis invented the machine." After he left, I found a napkin on my breakfast tray and wrote that down: EKG = Nazis.

Ooo la la! That kiss was fine, and it was full of all the words I didn't need to say.

She didn't call. That was good. If she called, she'd have a chance to cancel.

Maybe da Vinci didn't serve lamb in his painting of the Last Supper, but there was room for interpretation. Jesus himself was the lamb led to the slaughter.