Date: December 13, 2010

"Like butterflies with frayed wings, thoughts fly at me in random and rapid succession."

— Oates, Joyce Carol (b. 1938)

Date: 2010

"With the rap of the gavel, the Judge Judy tribunal in my brain, permanently empowered, was at once in session and I found myself under harsh cross-examination."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"The idea of sex with a woman, of 'having a lesbian lover,' was simply unthinkable, like living alone at the North Pole or deciding to become a lycanthrope. If the thought existed at all, it was a mote, a sweet nothing--a little 'feather on the breath of God,' barely sensed now and then, but most...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"Brain on fire, I then leadfooted it at once back to my mother's house."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"The Professor was my very own bespoke monstre sacrée for so long--so long the resident she-Minotaur in my private psychic labyrinth--that I developed, fairly early in the game, what might be called a Professorial shtick: a narrative, often comic, in which the more Grand Guignol asp...

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"Yet seared into my brain forever is one of her parting utterances: a cool assessment--delivered with ghoulish panache as she and my friend were about to leave--of the Professor in the sack."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"One bore the Professorial stigmata, if only brainular, for years."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"I still have my old paperback copy of Spenser's poem and just looking at it--the pages and pages of bewildering verse in tiny print, the demented little crib notes I've scribbled in the margins--can induce in me a sort of mental seasickness."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"After enough angst and pot and lack of sleep the poet's romance-world--so dense with weird archaisms and arcane symbols, bizarre characters, confusing plots and subplots--seemed more and more to allegorize the scary mental maze in which I found myself."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)

Date: 2010

"But the squalor of it sank into my soul, adding not a little to the septic murk within."

— Castle, Terry (b. 1953)