The sound he was making was the sound Cal had made right before he died, that same high-pitched whistling that was, if not the opposite of breathing, at least the very end of breathing. It’s
The room was dark except for the light of her phone. She picked it up, even though nothing good ever came from answering the phone in the middle of the night. Hello? Franny said.
The part when they are together for a while, the two of them, before things go wrong. The way things ended always obliterated the genuine happiness that had come before and that shouldn't be the case.
The ability to have a friend, and to be a friend, is not unlike the ability to learn. Both are rooted in being accepting and open-minded with a talent for hard-work. If you are willing to stretch your...
Only now, as I'm typing this, have I realized the only thing I wasn't thinking of was how lonely I was. I guess I was my old self for awhile there, my better self. Lately I've been completely obsessed...
No one tells the truth to people they don't actually know, and if they do it is a horrible trait. Everyone wants something smaller, something neater than the truth.
Maybe he was concerned, or bored, or inappropriately friendly, or midwestern friendly.
I’ll tell you the truth, Dr. Singh, what I have discovered about these trees is not what I expected. It will not be what your pharmaceutical company expects. It is something much greater, much more am...
It was her plan to outrun all of that, and somewhere in that running she had started to fly. She no longer felt like touching all the dirt and the muck she had so patiently submitted herself to so tha...
Instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fode had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having the Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment,...
In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month sp...
I was free to quit my day job, and that was, of course, the point at which I realized how much I liked my day job.
I understood how we long to believe in goodness, especially in the person we promised to love and honor. It isn't just about them, it is how we want to see ourselves. It says that we are good people,...
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.
I still don’t understand this, Albie said, pointing at Franny and then at Leo. How did he wind up with my life? It isn’t your life, Leo said. That’s what I’m trying to explain. It’s my imagination.
I loved her even as she was swimming away from me, even as I was hating her. That’s the way it is, when you’ve loved somebody your whole life. It’s like a direction you go in, even when you don’t want...
I like the Catholic Church, she says to me sometimes. Good thing, I say, which always makes her laugh. I think that she is everything I have ever loved about our religion distilled down to fit into on...
I have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn’t give herself because she was marr...
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.
I decided I was going to make up a novel, and that the novel was going to get me out of the restaurant. The novel was going to be my getaway car.