That's why you can eat cheesecake,' she said, and sighed. 'Because you don't. That's the way it works.
That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all.
Sometimes love does not have the most honorable beginnings, and the endings, the endings will break you in half. It’s everything in between we live for. (
Society was nothing but a long, dull dinner party conversation in which one was forced to speak to one's partner on both the left and the right.
She isn’t my mother. He meant, of course, by simple mathematical extension, that his mother wasn’t Teddy’s mother either. Which meant that Bernadette, for whom he had lit a thousand candles, was the m...
She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but
She did have friends, she had just made a decision to stay home and experiment with dying.
People like to ask me if writing can be taught, and I say yes. I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can’t teach you how to h...
Neither Doyle nor Sullivan had ever been to visit him at Regina Cleri, and Tip had only come one time and then left after five minutes. To Father Sullivan it was as if this part of his family, these p...
My mother used to say the more lost you are, the later it got, the more you had invested in not being lost. That’s why people who are lost so often keep heading in the same direction.
Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly.
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...
Life, Teresa knew by now, was a series of losses. It was other things too, better things, but the losses were as solid and dependable as the earth itself. Now
It’s not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as the dogless years, but I suspected things could be better. What I never could have imagined was how much better they would be. Whatever holes I ha...
It would be incorrect in every sense to say that so near the end of his life he had lost his faith, when in fact God seemed more abundant to him in the Regina Cleri home than any place he had been bef...
In our friendship I had spent a lot of time telling Lucy to pull herself up, to get over the past and move on. That was my role, the best of my Catholic education in action, and I didn't worry about i...
I will write my way into another life.
I think that what influences us in literature comes less from what we love and more from what we happen to pick up in moments when we are especially open. For
I imagine there are people out there who got a dog when what they wanted was a baby, but I wonder if there aren't other people who had a baby when all they really needed was a dog.
I had no interest in starting over again, but there are some people whom we grant the role of oracle in our lives and when they speak--rarely, gravely--we are well-advised to listen.