This Is Awful. I Don't

I Think A Little Menace Is Fine To Have In A Story. For One Thing, It's Good For The Circulation.

I Loved You So Much Once. I Did. More Than Anything In The Whole Wide World. Imagine That. What A Laugh That Is Now. Can You Believe It? We Were So Intimate Once Upon A Time I Can't Believe It Now. The Memory Of Being That Intimate With Somebody. We Were So Intimate I Could Puke. I Can't Imagine Ever Being That Intimate With Somebody Else. I Haven't Been.

Nights Without Beginning That Had No End. Talking About A Past As If It'd Really Happened. Telling Themselves That This Time Next Year, This Time Next Year, Things Were Going To Be Different.

A Man Can Go Along Obeying All The Rules And Then It Don't Matter A Damn Anymore.

It's Possible, In A Poem Or Short Story, To Write About Commonplace Things And Objects Using Commonplace But Precise Language, And To Endow Those Things—a Chair, A Window Curtain, A Fork, A Stone, A Woman's Earring—with Immense, Even Startling Power.