It was making me desperate, thinking I was going to have to find a job. A job for Christ’s sake.

The past wasn’t talked about, but you could feel its tentacles wherever you looked.

When the cheering and applause died down, I danced like I always have and always will, not thinking about good or evil but only about my dance, my honest and ever-so-pure dance

“The bee has no time for sorrow”

I’m only able to really get going once I stop trying to seek a way out. 

Extended fart like an angry fly

I leave, for now, that scene that switched on a certain channel in my being.

I’ve always made love and always written as if I were going to die afterward.

The woman in Édouard Vuillard’s Woman Sweeping, painted between 1899 and 1900, is Marie Michaud Vuillard, the painter’s mother. She is tall and stocky, her posture—that slight give of the back to the broom, without bending—marking a nonchalant style of carrying out a chore that routine hasn’t made any less complex. As Madame Vuillard sweeps, her gaze seems to fall on the broom or the floor. We might detect deference or humility in such a pose, but the turn of her head, her face ringed with a whitish glow as if lit by an inner ardor, conveys ease. We cannot see her gaze; we are given only the black slash of her eyelashes, which suggests an almost closed-eye intensity. Madame Vuillard is invested in her work and in herself, though perhaps in this moment she does allow herself to be mildly flattered by her painter son’s attention. The slash also conveys a quiet authority; you know that she need not look up to be heeded.