Prettier Removing Quotes

I like to think of us as more like patchwork quilts... Some pieces are prettier than others. Some pieces match and some don't. But if you remove a square, you're just left with an incomplete quilt, and who wants that? All our pieces are equally important if they make us whole. Even the weird ones.

And then I picked up the nearest object-a shoe-and threw it at Jack's head. "What are you doing in here, you little weasle?" He picked up my shoe from where it had clattered to the floor after hitting the door behind him. "How do you walk in these heels?" He sat and removed his own shoe,trying to jam his foot into my purple sling-back. I stalked over and yanked it awway. "What are you, five? Answer my question." He looked up at me, impossibly big blue eyes wide with innocence. "I thought we were friends, after you made me strip and all." "I'm calling Raquel." "Fine,fine. I was just doing some reconnaissance?" "Reconnaissance?" "Oh,sorry,that's a big word,isn't it? It means I was scoping the scene, getting the-" "I know what it means! What,is IPCA investigating me now? Screw them, they can forget about any help from-" "Do you ever let anyone else finish a sentence?" He smiled at my glare, flashing his dimples. "That's more like it. You're much prettier when you aren't talking. True of most people, I've found. Anyhow, I needed to see the address Raquel gave me so that I could find it again.

SIMPLICITY That's what's been missing from my life: simplicity. Slowly but surely I'm beginning to change. For example, these days I never leave my house without taking my bed along. If a woman passes by and catches my eye, I take her to bed immediately. If her ears and nose are ugly or too big, I remove them along with her clothes and put them under the bed, ready for her to take back when she leaves; I keep only what I like. If she could use a change of undergarments, I arrange it. It's my gift. If, however, I see a prettier woman walk by, I voice my regrets to the first and poof! she disappears. Some people who know me claim that I can't do what I've just described, that I haven't got the balls. Well, that may have been true in the past, but that was when I wasn't doing everything exactly the way I like it. Now I always enjoy my afternoons. (Mornings I work.)

I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

All the people who wanted every reference to the bad things we'd done in the past removed were fools. They were just trying to signal that they were better than their ancestors, but in fact, we're no different. We've just got hindsight and their mistakes to learn from. If we forget the atrocities of the past, we'll repeat them in the future, just with prettier names and new justifications.

But I also understand why Steve, who'd sewn his share of panels over the years, would fly into a rage as the end approached: 'And don't put me in that fucking quilt!' Being of a mind to have his body dumped instead on the White House lawn. The guilt had begun to seem too passive, even too nice, letting the war criminals off the hook and providing the media with far too easy a wrap up. Much neater than trying to unravel the Gordian knot of AIDS activism, the Byzantine infighting and turf protection, the in-your-face bad manners of those who wouldn't go quietly. The quilted dead made for prettier sound bites, especially effective at zeroing in on the "innocent" victims, the kids and the hemophiliacs. At the same time there began to appear a certain overview phenomenon under the general rubric of AIDS-and-the-Arts. Typically these were hand-wringing accounts of the impact of so much cultured dying, lamenting for instance the White Way silence left by Michael Bennett, the songs unsung. This litany was something of a mixed bag, bringing under the same umbrella the likes of Way Bandy and Halston, Miss Kitty and Keith Haring. Though it was surely true what Fran Lebowitz so scathingly observed If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with 'Let's Make a Deal.' these roundups of the arts tended to foster in the general populace ever new heights of Not me.

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even the ugly parts of history shouldn’t be forgotten. All the people who wanted every reference to the bad things we’d done in the past removed were fools. They were just trying to signal that they were better than their ancestors, but in fact, we’re no different. We’ve just got hindsight and their mistakes to learn from. If we forget the atrocities of the past, we’ll repeat them in the future, just with prettier names and new justifications.