She thought back to what he had said. /I could make you very happy./ It was something men said then, when they were trying to persuade you, and that was what they meant. It seemed rash and sweeping to...
Roly Grain, his name was, and he does not have any further part in what I’m writing now, in spite of his troll’s name, because this is not a story, only life.
It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing, what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there wou...
Children Katy’s age had no problem with monotony. In fact they embraced it, diving into it and wrapping the familiar words round their tongues as if they were a candy that could last forever.
When you died, of course, these wrong opinions were all there was left
They were all in their early thirties. An age at which it is sometimes hard to admit that what you are living is your life.
They had something close in front of them, a picture in front of their eyes that came between them and the world, which was the thing most adults seemed to have.
The conversation of kisses. Subtle, engrossing, fearless, transforming.
She hoped he wouldn’t ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical.
It is all about a girl who is more interested in politics than in love... the Russian censors will not let it be published and the world outside will not want it because it is so Russian.
It had a sort of a head on it, like a mushroom, and its color was reddish purple. It looked blunt and stupid, compared, say, to fingers and toes with their intelligent expressiveness, or even to an el...
How am I supposed to know? She just wants to do it. You wait. You’ll see. She’ll get you over there bawling and whining about what a bastard I am. One of these days.
Every year, when you're a child, you become a different person.
Doing this was likewading and then throwing yourself into the lake for the first icy swim, in June. A sickening shock at first, then amazement thatyou were still moving, lifted up on a stream of steel...
But now he pays attention, he notices something about the bush that he thinks he has missed those other times. How tangled up in itself it is, how dense and secret. It’s not a matter of one tree after...
But I hope you will -- use your brains. Use your brains. Don't be distracted. Once you make that mistake, of being -- distracted, over a man, your life will never be your own. You will get the burden,...
When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified—no, frightened—by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in...
What good is it if you read Plato and never clean your toilet? asked my mother, reverting to the values of Jubilee.
They were a pair of people with no middle ground, nothing between polite formalities and an engulfing intimacy
There would never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of what she had done.