24 Quotes by Gary Lutz

They weren’t hours, these classes; they weren’t even forty-five minutes – they were “periods,” which sounded to me as if they were each at once a little era and then the end you had to see decisively put to it.

The job required the luxurious useless indoor fortitude it has always been my fortune to enjoy.

A sentence has to sound as if it has always existed, as if cribbed from everyone else’s inner history ever – from everything you were never to be privy to. It should hit you not as news but as a reminder of what you now wish you never knew.

I don’t know which is finally sicker – specifics or engulfing abstractions.

I had to piece together a diet for her, too. I knew which combinations of which foods on which days would rehang everything that was draped so delicately beneath her skin. In a matter of months, the body under the smock was organized anew, redistributed.

Over and over, all I had done was say, ‘There, I’ve said it,’ though it would leave me feeling only exposed, not unmasked.