Carolyn Parkhurst - The Dogs of Babel (2003)

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I can't take one breath, not one single breath, without knowing that I love you.

Carolyn Parkhurst
It's not the content of our dreams that gives our second heart its dark color; it's the thoughts that go through our heads in those wakeful moments when sleep won't come. And those are the things we never tell anyone at all.

Carolyn Parkhurst
Had I known but yesterday what I know today, I'd have taken out your two grey eyes and put in eyes of clay. And had I known but yesterday you'd be no more my own, I'd have taken out your heart of flesh and put in one of stone.

Carolyn Parkhurst
The conclusion I have reached is that, above all, dogs are witnesses. They are allowed access to our most private moments. They are there when we think we are alone. Think of what they could tell us. They sit on the laps of presidents. They see acts of love and violence, quarrels and feuds, and the secret play of children. If they could tell us everything they have seen, all of the gaps of our lives would stitch themselves together.

Carolyn Parkhurst
Perhaps she saw before her a lifetime of walking on the ruined earth and chose instead a single moment in the air.

Carolyn Parkhurst
How can it be, I wondered, that we can be lying in bed next to a person we love wholly and helplessly, a person we love more than our own breath, and still ache to think of the one who caused us pain all those years ago? It's the betrayal of this second heart of ours, its flesh tied off like a fingertip twined tightly round with a single hair, blue-tinged from lack of blood. The shameful squeeze of it.

Carolyn Parkhurst
I sing of a woman with ink on her hands and pictures hidden beneath her hair. I sing of a dog with skin like velvet pushed the wrong way.I sing of the shape a fallen body makes in the dirt beneath a tree, and I sing of an ordinary man who is wanted to know things no human being could tell him.This is the true beginning.

Carolyn Parkhurst
There would be hard times, but what did I care if we had hard times? The branches of my love were wide, and they caught the rain and the snow. We would be okay, the two of us together. We would be okay.

Carolyn Parkhurst
I'm not going to feel guilty for wanting the things that everyone wants.

Carolyn Parkhurst
It's true, isn't it, that each of us has two hearts? The secret heart, curled behind like a fist, living gnarled and shrunken beneath the plain, open one we use every day.

Carolyn Parkhurst
I remember my wife in white.' It just made people weep to hear it...Everybody just thought it was the saddest sentence that was ever written. And it didn't matter if I never wrote another word. This one sentence had put an end to the need for any future sentences. I had said it all.

Carolyn Parkhurst
It's gratifying to know that you've appeared in someone else's dreams. It's proof that you exist, in a way, proof that you have substance and value outside the walls of your own mind.

Carolyn Parkhurst
Because for most of us, suicide is a moment we'll never choose. It's only for people like Lexy, who know they might choose eventually, who believe they have a choice to make.

Carolyn Parkhurst