Michelle Latiolais Quotes

• “She has been surprised by grief, its constancy, its immediacy, its unrelenting physical pain.”

  Michelle Latiolais

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• “Wandering is better than place sometimes, than home, than destination. Sometimes she can eke out the idea that wandering is possibility, chance, serendipity--he might be there, that place she didn't think to look, hadn't worked hard enough to find....”

  Michelle Latiolais

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• “...she imagines her body curled in the narrow monk's bed, knees to chin, her own irrefutable geography, but she sees the blood of her futile heart seeping out over her chest and arms and legs, flooding across the rough wooden floor, down the narrow wooden stairs and out into the old soil of the garden. No roses, no, she does not even ask to make roses, just dissolution; most any night she asks just for that.”

  Michelle Latiolais

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• “For all her culture's attention to the physical, it seemingly has little to salve the creatural anguish of losing someone else's body, their touch, their heat, their oceanic heart...she doesn't want another body, she wants the body she loved, the forceps scar across his cheek that she traced with her hand, his penis, its elegant sweep to the side, the preternaturally soft skin. One wants what one has loved, not the idea of love.”

  Michelle Latiolais

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• “She wished it were evening now, wished for the great relief of the calendar inking itself out, of day done and night coming, of ice cubes knocking about in a glass beneath the whisky spilling in, that fine brown affirmation of need.”

  Michelle Latiolais

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• “But then again, that's what the Book of Job was about to her, a cautionary tale about wanting there to be a God, wanting there to be someone who could enact what a God could enact, or who could sanction what the Devil would do. You want this, people? You want these kinds of powers? No, you don't, and here's why, and here's why it's sheer vanity to want them in any other entity. Look what sort of violence would rain down. Poor Job, sure, poor Job with his hives and his financial losses — though who needs three thousand camels? — and too bad about the kids, forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold, sure, too bad, but it's God who's the miserable bastard here. Look what he got himself up to! No good could come of that type of power; that's what the writer of the Book of Job was saying, and she knew the writer was right.”

  Michelle Latiolais

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• “I used to worry that my nephew might be in some dangerous situation with {my husband}, or that {he} would have him eat some plant that might prove fatal to Jamie. Now that two-hundred pound {football players} were hurling themselves at my nephew and my brother seemed willing to pay for this mosh pit called sport, I actively campaigned to have Jamie free for his uncle's uses. So what if he had to have his stomach pumped; he wasn't going to sustain a head injury sorting seeds out of orangutan feces.”

  Michelle Latiolais

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• “The dull bell the hanger made of her closet as she pulled her jumper from the thin wire shoulders which sprang up and off the closet rod and clattered down the back wall to the floor. She left the hanger lying on the boards, its twisted wire neck rounding into a hook which circled a kitten of dust whose white grayness reminded her of a puffball she had once blown that lofted in tact from its stem to the cement of the sidewalk.”

  Michelle Latiolais

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