He said that’s what family is for: the people who love you see you in the best light, as you want to be seen.
Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
But we're lost in a world of appearances now.
I instead was reminded of watching my cousins at Thanksgiving through my own front windows, that strange sense of distance, even where you should belong.
You could control what you did, if you wanted to....Was it efficient? Was it productive? ...So many people didn't bother -- a kind of stupidity...a lack of vision, or purpose. Anyone who said they jus...
How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.I'm a good girl, I'm a nice girl, I'm a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody's b...
There’s a period of accommodation before you are formally and
[S]he was my Muse, my alcoholic's bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.
Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider's web, did not cry.
Maybe, instead, I’ll set the world on fire. I just might.
An inchoate ball of ambition, Julius knew that he had soon, soon, to find something to be ambitious for; otherwise he risked terminal resentment, from which there was no return.
Above all, in my anger, I was sad. Isn't that always the way, that at the heart of the fire is a frozen kernel of sorrow that the fire is trying -- valiantly, fruitlessly -- to eradicate.
That's sort of what happened with Cassie and me. I guess I was Goya, just doing my thing, and she was the French Revolution.
Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely, I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way,...
Just because something is invisible doesn't mean it isn't there. At any given time, there are a host of invisibles floating among us. There are clairvoyants to see ghosts; but who sees the invisible e...
It's the strangest thing about being human: to know so much, to communicate so much, and yet always to fall so drastically short of clarity, to be, in the end, so isolate and inadequate. Even when peo...
When you’re a girl, you never let on that you are proud, or that you know you’re better at history, or biology, or French, than the girl who sits beside you and is eighteen months older. Instead you g...
I’m forty-two years old—which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.
Cassie could be affectionate and scornful at the same time, and I always felt that if I wasn't careful, the scorn might win out.
But this is what I think: you only see what you expect to see. Your brain lets the rest go. Because life’s tumult, with its infinite sounds and smells and signs, rushes around you like a river in floo...