The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.
That's why you can eat cheesecake,' she said, and sighed. 'Because you don't. That's the way it works.
Somebody's going to have to make the money to buy you all those books.They're free, Franny said. I check them out of the library.Well, thank God for libraries, Caroline said.
Simon Thibault would never die in a foolish gesture for Edith. On the contrary, he would take every cowardly recourse available to him to ensure that their lives were spent together.
She's growing up, Sister Evangeline said.And I wanted to tell her no, I'm not. Everything is exactly the same.
She would not attend the dinner (she did not eat before she sang) but would arrive at the end of the meal and perform six arias with her accompanist.
She put no stock in dreams. To her they were just a television left on in another room.
She did have friends, she had just made a decision to stay home and experiment with dying.
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'...
Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society...
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 could see her objectively anyway. Even those who saw her for the first time, before she had opened her mouth to sing. Found her radiant, as if her talent could not be contained in her voice and...
Must Thibault imagine the animal (who was long since dead but when and how? He couldn't remember) skinned and braised? Milou as dinner. Once something is named it can never be eaten. Once you have cal...
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.
Like her mother and all her mother's people before her, those inexhaustible blondes who staked their claims in verdant prairies, Marina was cut from Minnesota, the soil and the starry night. Instead o...