Monica Drake Quotes

He was hurt. He was a man who needed a country. I was a woman who needed a man. I'd be his country. He'd be my dictator. I saw our future unfold like a history book.

Everything was out in our crowded lawn, really - love, anger and jealousy. History and intimacy. You could breath it in, thick as fog. I wanted to yell, Get out of our yard!

Space is never empty. Emotions have vectors and velocity. You can crush a person from a distance. Sometimes the first weapon is the act or art of pulling away.

The Buddhists say if you meet somebody and your heart pounds, your hands shake, your knees go weak, that's not the one. When you meet your 'soul mate' you'll feel calm. No anxiety, no agitation.

And she thought, Who the hell are you, Mister? But his eyes were blue and his hair was thick, and his arms were strong and sinewy. He had a Nevada tan, desert tan, wherever he'd been living, wherever he sometimes went. He was gorgeous, that hothead. She put an orange segment in her mouth, held it out toward his mouth, leaned in, rolled on top of him, her body over his, and he bit into the orange, gulped it even, made his mouth ready for more, for her, like he'd been starving.

You will be my favorite ex," I whispered in his ear. "I'll be your fifth former wife. We'll mutter crazy dreams together then apart, but you will always be with me." His breath was warm and so very human, not demonic at all. He said, "Don't break my nose." I said, "I won't even break your heart.

When I stand around all day, into the afternoon, I start to feel like a good bike pulled to the curb. I'm every car that's ever idled, a motorcycle gulping its own exhaust, lurching toward open road. I'm paid to stand, and I get this feeling my body is waiting for my mind to figure out what I'm supposed to do with being alive.

What I feel in that kitchen is the way humans are so flawed and so perfect, and I want to share bodies. You know your old dog? That's how I feel - I want to climb on people, breathe their breath, lick the inside of stranger's mouths. I don't know these two, but who do we ever know, really, past the skin? How do we get there?

Which on am I?" I drew my left eyebrow in a high, puzzled arch.
"Which what?" Crack reached for her makeup kit. "Bottom or fool?" She pulled out a tiny mirror and put another layer of mascara on her giant fake lashes. She used a special oversized mascara brush for her oversized lashes, carried in a big tube.
"No. Trixie, Twinkie, or Bubbles?" I asked. "Who, in the show?"
She shrugged. "What ever you want, Sugar. Makes no diff to me. A name's just another kind of package. Marketing. Starts the day you're born" p.136

He said, "Only you." I was alone and he was alone and we had nothing in common short of being human at night.

Come with me, Mack," I said. "Back to my place." I tried to pull my hand back. Our fingers were intertwined like those bloody hospital robes. I didn't mind, even when he scared me a little. The blood that kept us alive was trapped just under our skin, racing through veins. All those cells inside and out were fighting for a way to move closer together, beyond the trap of skin, dependent on breath.

I felt stiff, the way I moved when I took that first bite, like I was eating something in church. He'd made that sausage so carefully. Food was his thing. I took another bite. I did. I ate it. I ate the dead man's hot and meaty sandwich. It was good. […] When you see women who don't eat? Or women who cleanse, detox and purge? I think they've done something like this. They've eaten in a way that's left a memory, a creepy ghost, a body inside their own body.

Despair. I'd been told I suffered from it too. The thing was, I never sensed myself in despair, but rather, in love with something I felt closest to only when walking or riding my bike in the city. I felt it when I kept my windows open all night, or sitting on the rickety wood of the porch my landlord called a fire escape, peeled paint flaking under my hands and feet, looking over the empty lot. It had to do with a texture, with the moon and a stray white cat I'd been feeding, a cat that saw me as home now.

The Arboretum's overgrown grass rustled. The branches of an apple tree shook as though an animal had jumped from one to the next. A wind slid up my thighs, in the night, under my short nightgown. Crickets and cicadas made a sound like distant laughing children, the laugh track to a sitcom that didn't end. It was like the grass was full of tiny giggling babies. So beautiful, and creepy.

I kneeled in front of the E M T chair, in front of the mirror on the medicine cabinet, and wiped the rest of the makeup away. My skin was raw, pink and new. The ambulance had a single round light in the middle of the ceiling. The light cast long shadows under my nose, ears, eyes, and chin, and in the shadows I was young and I was a crone, in the exact same moment. That's it, I thought: life is short. The only value of wated time is knowledge. p.295

The moon was now paper-thin and fading. That moon was sky-tinged, the way you could see right through it to the blue of the evening light, and it was hung like a damp tissue as though pressed against glass.

I watched the moon through the window. It was a beautiful, floating illusion of a still point in the universe. Dark shadows passed over the plains, mountains and water.

My head was so light. Wind sang through the field grass. The same wind brushed hair off my face, soft as my mother's hand, and when the falling snow started to clump into flakes, each thick flake came down with the love of a frozen kiss, like somebody was saving up, freezing their warm love for later.

When life sucks, throw yourself into art.

Outside the window, one lone car passed and threw a violent blast of rainwater over the sidewalk. It was a storm, by now. Looking at that rain, I was falling deeply in love with our warm bar. What could you do, with a world like that? I was in love with every minute of being alive even as I floundered.

Ooo la la! That kiss was fine, and it was full of all the words I didn't need to say.

There is no such thing as a truly single person, only a lonely one. Humans are porous in the borders of our skins, these walking micro cities.

In the middle of a wrist's suicide slash-line, below the layered skin and above the pulse, there's an acupuncture point that says, Get back to who you were meant to be. This is the heart spot, the center. Your whole life the skin on that place will stay closest to being a baby's skin, as close as you can get anymore to the way you started, the way you once thought you'd always be.