George Bishop Quotes

For better or worse, I was my father's son, and I intuited, however unclearly, that my life was inextricably bound up with his. I was who I was because of him. His blood was in my blood, his history was my history. Even my future, the person I might one day become, depended on him, because everything he'd ever seen or done or thought or felt flowed up through him and into me.

Freshman year, kissing and deep French kissing. Then sophomore year, I'd want to be making out with her. By sixteen we should be having oral sex, and by seventeen or eighteen, full frontal sex. Of course, it could go faster than that, but basically, he said, that was the standard progression. Before I finished high school, I should be having full frontal sex with her.

Drifting off to sleep, I imagined a spark from the comet floating down, down like a mote of stardust, to land inside my father, where, settling in his belly, it rekindled the long-forgotten dreams and ambitions of his youth. I saw his white shirt glowing yellow in the moonlight, flames shooting from his fingertips, like he was a man set on fire.

She was so pretty, so elegant, it made me lonely just to look at her.

And why, oh why, I wondered, had he named me after himself? What kind of a father would do that to his son? What could he have been thinking? Was it an excess of pride? Or was it, as my sister had once theorized, just the opposite, a deep-seated sense of inferiority that made our father want to double himself?

The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.