The little girls in Room 4 were playing breakup. The ballerina doll was breaking up with the sailor doll. I’m sorry, John, she said in a brisk, businesslike voice—Jilly’s voice, actually—but I’m in lo...
She passed her on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.
He wanted to say, Muriel, forgive me, but since my son died, sex has... turned. (As milk turns; that was how he thought of it. As milk will alter its basic nature and turn sour.) I really don't think...
Everything,' his father said, 'comes down to time in the end--to the passing of time, to changing. Ever thought of that? Anything that makes you happy or sad, isn't it all based on minutes going by? I...
But his study was so dim and close, and it gave off the salty inky smell of mental fidgeting.
The Amateur Marriage grew out of the reflection that of all the opportunities to show differences in character, surely an unhappy marriage must be the richest.
She was good at talking with young people. She seemed to view them as interesting foreigners.
She walked to work every day feeling starkly, conspicuously alone. It seemed that everyone else on the street had someone to keep them company, someone to laugh with and confide in and nudge in the ri...
It struck her all at once that dealing with other human beings was an awful lot of work.
It makes you wonder why we bother accumulating, accumulating, when we know from earliest childhood how it’s all going to end.
But it was easier, somehow, to reflect on them all from a distance than to be struggling for room in their midst.
Abby had a little trick that she used any time Red acted like a cranky old codger. She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afterno...
This was an attractive room, spacious and well designed, but it had the comfortably shabby air of a place whose inhabitants had long ago stopped seeing it.
No couple buying wedding rings wants to be reminded that someday one of them will have to accept the other one's ring from a nurse or an undertaker.
It’s hard being a man. Have you ever thought about that? Anything that’s bothering them, men think they have to hide it. They think they should seem in charge, in control; they don’t dare show their t...
I liked to dwell on these shortcomings now. It wasn’t only that I was wondering why they had ever annoyed me. I was hoping they would annoy me still, so that I could stop missing her.
Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!
Cody cut into a huge wedge of pie and gave some thought to food--to its inexplicable, loaded meaning in other people's lives. Couldn't you classify a person, he wondered, purely by examining his attit...
But it has occurred to me, on occasion, that our memories of our loved ones might not be the point. Maybe the point is their memories—all that they take away with them. What if heaven is just a vast c...
Dying, you don't get to see how it all turns out. Questions you have asked will go unanswered forever. Will this one of my children settle down? Will that one learn to be happier? Will I ever discover...