The world is full of things we’re better off not knowing.
The timing of the electrical failure seemed dramatic and perfectly correct, as if the lights had said, You have no need for sight. Listen.
The sick were a ferocious lot. They’d walk right through you if they thought that health was on the other side.
The root system changes the acidity level in the soil so that nothing much will grow here except for the trees and a little bit of grass. In a sense you could say the tree poisons the area it inhabits...
The journey from the head to the hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost.
That is one thing I've learned, that it is possible to really understand things at certain points, and not be able to retain them, to be in utter confusion just a short while later. I used to think th...
So I’ve come to Chicago to have a drink, he said. I’m living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City? I
She's growing up, Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.
She didn’t even think about the drive. She was from Los Angeles; driving was simply part of it.
She ate from my plates and wore my clothes and slept in my bed like Goldilocks while the benevolent, lumbering bear went south for the holidays.
Perhaps you are right. In another setting it would be ridiculous, too grand. In another setting it would not happen because you are a famous woman and at best I would shake your famous hand for one se...
People die, terrible things happen. I know this now. You can't pick up and leave everything behind because there is too much sadness in the world and not enough places to go. But at seventeen, I didn'...
Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. If I thought too much about how far I’d come or the distance I still had...
No, you don't look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes.
No one should go into debt to study creative writing. It
Most of the time we’re loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It’s not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do. But the other is better, Gen said.Roxane pulled her feet into he...
Minnesota! It smelled like raspberries and sunlight and tender grass. It was summer and everything was more beautiful than any picture she had carried with her....There had never been a place in the w...
Maybe the private life wasn't forever. Maybe everyone got it for a little while and then spent the rest of their lives remembering.
Marina filled her lungs with frozen air and smelled both winter and spring, dirt and leftover snow with the smallest undercurrent of something green.
Marina brushed her hand across the back of her neck and dislodged something with a hard shell.She had learned in time to brush instead of slap as slapping only served to pump the entire contents of th...