From Priestdaddy, by Patricia Lockwood (really could excerpt the whole book. One gem of a sentence after another).
"Later, I would sit in empty churches and keep the Eucharist company. This was pleasant; it was communing with an idea. It was much like a girl spending a long afternoon brushing her hair and polishing her nails and looking at herself in the mirror-marveling at herself, except I was marveling at my mind, at my ability to swoon or be astonished, at my capacity to understand metaphor better than I understood anything else. I was combing my brain down to my feet."
"Religion trains you like roses--it installs automation int he arms and legs, even in the mouth."
Summer at the pool.
"Beach bodies had a stillness, a turning, a restless luxuriation--an introduction of every part of the body to the sun. They stretched on their white plastic chairs. They stretched and stretched. Legs and arms, columns of backbones, necks. Even their long tan lineage stretched, back to some previous life as a basking animal. Their hair grew half an inch; their fingernails; the future."
"Time slowed down, and stretched, and exposed every part of itself to the sun. The high dive meant leaping off the edge of a moment and trusting the next one would catch you."
"If a cathedral is a spiraling, infinite library of human prayers, it is also a palace of free association."
"A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth."
"I feel the jolt you feel when alternate universes, which usually run parallel and unseen alongside you, leap out of black water and crisscross like dolphins over your trajectory."
"I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn't work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome. Sometimes, when the ceiling seems especially low and the past especially close, I think to myself, I did not make it out. I am still there in the place of diminishment, where that voice an octave deeper than mine is telling me what I am... I did not make it out, but this does. Art goes outside, even if we don't; it fills the whole air, though we cannot raise our voices....On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength. On the page I am everything that I am not, because that is where I put myself."
And then just the perfect Dorothy Parker-like minimalist wit.
"He was wearing his most formal boxer shorts, the ones you could almost not see through."
"'Is it ADD?' she [her mother] asks me. 'Your father gave you all ADD, you know.' Sensing that this is not entirely fair, she adds graciously, 'And then I gave you ADD as well.'"
Upon finding semen on the bedspread in a hotel. "'Mom, no. We're not calling the police.' 'Can¡t we call the police...just a little bit?'"
Going hunting with her dad and brother: "He was participating in an age-old ritual, where a boy becomes a man and a man becomes a psycho."
"Don Pablo's was a fake Mexican restaurant that prided itself on the sizzlingness of its food." and "The Don Pablo's in Cincinnati was a large converted factory, so it looked vaguely like a nightclub where people went to have wrong ideas about Mexico."
