Hope: A Tragedy

He was emaciated, pale shrunken skin pulled tight over weary twisted bones, holding a cloth of some kind over himself in some final instinct of modesty and self-respect.

It seemed such an inadequate device, the heart—so finicky, so easily stopped, so Japanese when it should be so German. One moment it’s pumping, the next it’s not. And they lived. The end.

when someone rises up and promises that things are going to be better, run. Hide. Pessimists don’t build gas chambers.

a furry, flattened body with a red/gray ejaculation of blood and brains having burst from his little exploded head. To Kugel, chipmunks looked as if they’d died of a good idea;

how could she think that dying was always more tragic than living?

he still couldn’t bring himself to throw them away, like old medicine bottles full of remedies that never worked but that you didn’t dare throw away on the off chance they would someday do what they promised, that you’d be stricken by chance with the one disease only they could cure, two weeks after they’d been pulled off the market.

Maybe he was hoping he would come back as candy.

You never see a lion crucifying another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don’t form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children.

We think of the obvious signs of love—tenderness, concern, care—and yet somehow, nothing said more about the health of a couple’s relationship than whether or not they went to bed at the same time.