then he stopped thinking and even saying Yes, it was like nothing he had ever dreamed, let alone heard in mere man-talking until after a no-time he returned and lay spent on the insatiate immemorial beach and again with a movement one time more older than man she turned and freed herself and on their wedding night she had cried and he thought she was crying now at first, into the tossed and wadded pillow, the voice coming from somewhere between the pillow and cachinnation: “And that’s all. That’s all from me. If this don’t get you that son you talk about, it wont be mine:” lying on her side, her back to the empty rented room, laughing and laughing
William Faulkner, “The Bear,” in Go Down Moses (1942)
In the end only the girls know the whole truth.
The Hold Steady, “The Weekenders,” Heaven is Whenever (2010)
American girls, they want the whole world,
They want every last night in New York City.
The Gaslight Anthem, “The Queen of Lower Chelsea,” American Slang (2010)
the sex so new that each time they were dazed,
grinning like kids holding sparklers in the dark—
Juliana Baggott, “How It Begins,” This Country of Mothers (2001)
(h/t Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has the rest.)
The whole poem is fine (and concerned with something quite different), but I liked this bit a lot.
