Jeffrey Ford

An honor it was, too, as he told me, “You know that because you don’t get paid anything for it.”

“You two don’t know yet,” he said. “When you get old, you think more about the past than about what you did five minutes ago. Time changes.”

Time became a sermon, preaching itself.

Dreams are dreams and the future is like a hall of mirrors reflecting the past and offering up wavering illusions until everything shatters and you were cut to ribbons by shards of reality.

“My specialty is napping.”

“A noble pursuit,” he said.

You are no more nor less than any man—a hungry heart and a wavering will.

The lion is fur, muscle, tendon, claw, and speed, five important ingredients of the unfathomable.

“Do you remember what you wished for?” asked Stan.

“Only the one of them. I must have been ten or eleven.”

“Did it come true?” asked Groot.

“Hell no, I wished I’d never get old,” said Venner.

After my mother finally quit drinking, she entered a brief epoch of peace in her life. Gone were the paranoia, the accusations, the belittlements, the bitter rage of judgment, the look of fear. For years, nearly every day a lost weekend, she had been possessed by the dark amber ghast of gag-sweet Taylor Cream Sherry. Living with her back then had been like living with a vampire whose bite drained but never conferred immortality.

They’ve told so many lies in their lives that they’ve run out and can now tell only the truth.

I had, at the time, an irrational, Luddite inclination that there was something morally bankrupt about making art with a computer.

There is no certainty but that there is no certainty.