Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“I want no weeping. We must look death in the face. Silence! Be quiet, I said! Tears, when you’re alone. We will all drown ourselves in a sea of mourning. The youngest daughter of Bernarda Alba has died a virgin. Did you hear me? Silence! Silence, I said! Silence!”

“The road to Manderley lay ahead. There was no moon. The sky above our heads was inky black. But the sky on the horizon was not dark at all. It was shot with crimson, like a splash of blood. And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.”

“Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places.”

“Evelyn Nesbit’s life, in the end, was little different from the lives of millions of others, a story of perseverance and determination, of achievement and independence, that nothing could finally diminish.”

“It is said that Negronis are like breasts: ‘One is not enough, two is perfect, and three is just too many.’ Today I am tempted to see what happens if I drink four.”

“I’m getting closer to the coast and realize how much I hate arriving at a destination. Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.”

“In Shubert Alley that night, I had unwittingly reached the threshold of an entire landscape of alleys that would lead to a world of theaters, each a house packed with strangers both generous and mean, shabby and grand. It was to be a life full of the transitory moments, double-edged with ecstasy and loss, that I had already come to think of as the theater.”

“If I heard that song I wouldn’t get married for anything in the whole world.”

“In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”

“If you keep a place clean, people will respect it; if you let it get dirty, they’ll make it worse…Just make the park beautiful and you’ll appeal to the best side of people. They all have it; all you have to do is bring it out.”