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Famous Barry Graham Quotes

“Lotte wanted Francoise to stay the night, but she wouldn’t. Francoise thought of movies, usually thrillers, in which the hero gets out of bed during the night, dresses and slips out, leaving a beautiful woman asleep and unaware. Francoise wished she could leave like that, but her film was a realistic one. As she walked back to her apartment she thought that getting out of the relationship had been as awkward and messy as Lotte’s pulling her finger out of Francoise’s ass.”

“Maybe it wasn’t that job particularly; maybe it was just working for someone else. It’s so brutal and tiring, the way it can push you down and knock the heart out of you. It’s not getting up at a certain time and arriving at a certain place at a certain time and leaving at a certain time and coming back again at a certain time — it’s knowing that you have to. What’s worse is that, through age or job-experience or academic qualification or sheer good luck, one adult is in a position to order and insult and abuse and shout at another adult who isn’t in a position to reply in kind. It makes everyone a tin god. Everyone likes having slaves to beat, as they’re beaten themselves. And working on the grind wears you out. After a week of it you’re so tired that you use the weekend just to catch up on your rest before going back to another week of it.”

“He was shot in the chest while sitting in a friend’s car in Scottsdale. The killing was somehow related to drugs, no one knows exactly how. Or maybe Sophia knows, but she’s not admitting to it. She talks about him in glowing terms, describes their relationship as “perfect”, and yet says he used to hit her. Things weren’t easy when he was alive, and they haven’t gotten easier since his death. She works in her family’s restaurant and doesn’t have much money, which is why she still lives in the barrio. She tells me about a time when she woke in the middle of the night and found a man in her bedroom. He’d broken in through a window. She screamed at him to get out, and he said, “It’s okay. It’s okay,” and left. She now keeps a gun under her bed.”

“Soon it will be different. Soon there will be a night when we’re in my car and she’s screaming, raging, stabbing herself in the arm with a knife she’s pulled from her purse. Blood all over her, me and the dashboard. Me tearing up my shirt to bind her arm with. Her crying and saying she’s sorry. Everything being different, and then there being nothing between us.”