from Joyce Carol Oates’s them, as spoken by Loretta while sitting in a YMCA after her apartment building was firebombed during the Detroit riots:
“It makes me feel more alone to think I had kids, and they went off,” she said. She spoke with dignity, slowly, choosing her words. All the television broadcasts had made her conscious of words; she might have been speaking on television. “But I think, what the hell, everybody is alone. That’s the secret, everybody is alone and can’t help it, like right here and now, in this place, everybody is alone and they’d all get up and walk out if they could and never see each other again. We’re all like that.”
