For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing lat...
For the most part wisdom comes in chips rather than blocks. You have to be willing to gather them constantly , and from sources you never imagined to be probable.
For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.
DAs were the guys who smoked your cigarettes because they were trying to quit. The
Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable.
Certain things existed out of time. It was ten years ago, it was this morning. In that way the accident was like his mother's death. It did not recede so much as hover, waxing and waning at different...
Cancer really was the devil's handshake.
Cal!' Beverly called out over the crowd... But Cal looked back at her as if it were some weird coincidence that his name was Cal and this complete stranger had said something to someone who was also n...
But it is never about who has given what. That is not the way of gifts. This is not a business we are conducting.
Because while Leo Posen appeared to be perfectly sober, she would be that he seemed that way regardless of how much he had drunk. Some men were like that. They went from sober to more or less dead wit...
All I had ever wanted was a dog who would sleep in my lap while I read and lick my neck and bring me the ball to throw eighty-seven times in a row. I thought a dog would be the key to perfect happines...
After her death, at the age of thirty-nine, I wrote a book about us. I wrote it as a way to memorialize her and mourn her, and as a way of keeping her own important memoir, Autobiography of a Face, al...
And there it went, the burden of her lifetime, taken.
Interested in being a better writer? Go buy yourself a copy of The Collected Stories by Grace Paley.) The
While every insect in the Amazon lifted its head from the leaf it was masticating and turned a slender antenna in her direction. She was a snack plate, a buffet line, a woman dressed for springtime in...
To never have to look at someone who was remembering when you have made such a concerted effort to forget.
Novel excerpts rarely benefit from group critique. It’s one thing to get all those opinions when you’ve finished, but when you’re still in the middle of a project, it’s like having fifteen people give...
Lunchtime. She waited for a minute for Mr. Fox to say what he had come to say. She didn’t think he had come all the way from his office in the snow, a good ten buildings away, to give her a weather re...
It wasn’t the girls you saw at all, only a gathering of distended abdomens, overinflated balloons from which small wisps of girls were attached.
And washing it off in the sink. Finish up your lunch. We’re starting now? Good a