“Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, A Fair Maiden
Joyce Carol Oates is such a genius – it is scary. Her stories never turn out how you think they will and… most importantly… she is not afraid to go there.
“Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?”
― A Game of Thrones
The Cedars, Dallas, Texas
“When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd’s mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy’s face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he’d ridden by the day’s end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd – a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy’s whips and the twitching of the cattle’s tails also emitted sparkling “snakes of fire.”
― The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest
Richardson, Texas
Inside the bowl, the two goldfish are making a Pisces sign, head-to-tail
and very still. Penelope sits and peers into their world. There is a little
sunken galleon, a china diver in a diving suit, pretty stones and shells she
and her sisters have brought back from the sea.—-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Bishop Arts District, Dallas, Texas
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat’s Cradle
Waxahachie, Texas
“Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up the stair, why had the simple task of shutting the windows of an old house seem fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind have for him the unmistakable sound of good news, cheer, glad tidings?”
― John Cheever, The Swimmer
detail of mural by Amber Campagna, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
