The collection / 7 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

I later discovered that in order to be a good athlete one must care intensely what is happening with a ball, even if one doesn't have possession of it. This was ultimately my failure: my inability to work up a passion for the location of balls.

Haven Kimmel / quote

02Undated

That cat doesn't have a lick of sense,' I said, sighing.Well, honey, he's not right in the head,' Dad said, flipping his cigarette into the front yard.I glared at him. 'And just what do you mean by that?'Dad counted on his fingers. 'He's cross-eyed; he jumps out of trees after birds and then doesn't land on his feet; he sleeps with his head smashed up against the wall, and the tip of his tail is crooked.'Oh yeah? Well, how about this: he once got locked in a basement by evil Petey Scroggs in the middle of January and survived on snow and little frozen mice. When I'm cold at night he sleeps right on my face. Of that whole litter of kittens he came out of he's the only one left. One of his brothers didn't even have a butthole.'I stand corrected. PeeDink is a survivor.

Haven Kimmel / quote

03Undated

What kind of good deeds? Like Girl Scouts? Because I got kicked out of Brownies and they won't give me another chance to keep my clothes on at camp.

Haven Kimmel / quote

04Undated

Decoupage hit Mooreland pretty hard...

Haven Kimmel / quote

05Undated

Ordinarily my mom just sunk deeper into her corner of the couch and ignored it. She had succesfully ignored a quarter of a century of entropy and decay, had sat peacefully crunching popcorn and drinking soda while the house fell down around us. If I had to guess the number of books she read during that time, I would place the number at somewhere in the neighborhood of forty thousand.

Haven Kimmel / quote

06Undated

And then there were men who were violently afraid of losing to a woman, the scariest men in the world. They become dictators, heads of state, bureaucrats, men with deadly weapons, they were everywhere. Sometimes she could pick one out with a look, but they were often charming, they had to have the power to attract in order to dominate.

Haven Kimmel / quote

07Undated

One chance--that's what she had seen she had--one flying leap that was really composed of eight thousand separate possibilities for falling, and she had taken that chance and come this far and been found out.

Haven Kimmel / quote