Quotes from Haven Kimmel

I personally believed that the bathroom door should be kept shut at all times, ever since my hamster Skippy had escaped from his little cage and mysteriously drowned in my potty chair. My sister could do a dreadfully accurate imitation of the look on Skippy's face when we found him, and she preferred to perform it at odd times, just so I would never forget that I was implicated in the death of an innocent rodent.

I'm going to fire her, he thought, and I'm going to hear her voice one more time, and he picked up the telephone, dialing so fast and hard he missed the third number and had to start over.

I moved and felt like a zombie, only without the flesh-eating joy that seems to drive zombies around neighborhoods like Jehovah's Witnesses.

That was the strangest thing about weddings, from Amos's point of view, that they pretended to be sacred occasions but in fact had no meaning. Because a marriage isn't a marriage until it's over, he thought, until the couple looked back, years later, at the moment they wed and said, "Oh, that's what really happened that day.

My dad still sat in his chair and smoked, watching Westerns and drinking whiskey, and my mom still read and talked on the phone and would scratch my back if I asked her. But there was a strange resistance in her, some stubbornness that made her unreachable, and the way Dad kept his jaw set was a fence around him.

never would. In short, he was what it meant to be a father and a man in 1971. Up against his power I could see none of his failings.

If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded.

there are so many ways to go—an infinite number of ways to go as we spiral out from our genesis. Some fight against any measure of grace, and some decide to sit very still at the table and linger. Some stand right inside their impossible weight, tug at the edge of a blouse. Fuchsia. However did people manage?

wanted something so excellent and strange that when I showed it to my friends their bellies would start to ache with covetousness, the way mine ached a whole bunch of the time, almost every time I took a look at the world and saw how little of it belonged to me.

Dee Dee?" Mildred's voice could sharpen pencils. "Where are you?

Um. Mom? That's my new bike? I've hardly ridden it?" But she was already figuring out the pedals. I could see her mind and her body synchronizing in the way that is the ultimate truth about remembering, the way we carry our memories all through us.

It depends. Are you going to be a high school basketball star?" "Probly," I said, scratching at a scab. "I'm pretty good already.

I wish memory were a more steady, more physical artifact. It's just a breeze, or a scent barely detected and fading.

What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of your ruin?

They named you Taos because that's where they went on their honeymoon, and there was something in it, something beyond the sentimental or nostalgic, they were trying to say: once we went so far. And you were how far they went. There is no more distant star, I now believe.

It is an amazing moment, when one goes from being grateful for what one has to longing for what is impossible.

How is it possible, she thought, that a person can drive a thinking, feeling animal to slaughter and not become less than an animal himself?

I think what you'll discover more and more as you get older is that most people aren't thinking about you at all.

Langston, don't you know how Alice died? Where have you been? What goes on with you that you are so completely free of anyone else's story? My God.

His father sat back in his chair, a scarecrow of a man, all angles and laugh lines, his head tilted slightly to the left, as it did when he was either genuinely taken with a notion or wished to appear so.

Amos watched her, struck again by how exquisite the stories were the people around him carried, and mostly silently, the lives they'd lived and endured, the sweetness and loss.

Alice wasn't beautiful, not really, but she was conscious. She took in the whole world at a glance, and in doing so, drew the world to her.

But I loved him, loved him, a little girl is helpless against her love for a brother. I climbed on him, harassed him, begged him to carry me, take me with him wherever he was going. From a distance he seemed both cold and receding, a man whose most familiar feature was his back as he walked away as fast as he could.

the Primordial and Consequent Natures. What might be, what is, what has been. In God's Primordial Nature there exist all the pure possibilities for every moment (every actual occasion, Whitehead would say) of concrescence; in the Consequent Nature is the world as we chose to make it: every actual occasion and every actual entity, every single moment, rendered objectively immortal.