The narrators get into trouble and make fools of themselves with their perversely impulsive fondlings of the language. These people have retreated from the world, in which they keep falling short, and into language, where they fall even shorter. The narrators aggrandize their every plaint and lurid insight into verbal formations that betray their fatuity as speakers and even as hosts of their own bodies and souls.

I was a great many far cries from myself.

What could be worse than having to be seen resorting to your own life.

I've been within an inch of my life.

I have never felt at ease in language. I did not grow up among books or among people who read them. I heard words emerge from mouths but didn't get the hang of how people hung the things out as if on lines to get their gripes and recreational distempers yowlingly known.

If I believe in anything when it comes to writing, and I can't stress enough that I detest writing, it's something that sticks with me not from any English class but from some awfully recondite driver's ed. seminars I had the privilege to audit during my mid-teens, and to this day I probably misunderstand it anyway. It's the term "right of way."

If I have a problem, it is this: there is a store where everything costs a dollar.