Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible?
Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury. We're all furies, except the ones who are too damned foolish, and my worry now is...
With someone you’ve always known and have loved without thinking, there’s the strangeness of knowing everything and nothing about them at the same time.
When you are the woman upstairs, nobody thinks of you first. Nobody calls you before anyone else, or sends you the first postcard. Once your mother dies, nobody loves you best of all. It’s a small thi...
This was the fall of 2004. The wider world was deeply fucked, and home also. Two American wars raging—bloodbaths each, bloodbath major and bloodbath minor, ugly, squirrelly hateful clandestine wars ma...
It wouldn't have surprised me to learn that nobody we knew had ever really seen the building: it was the sort of thing you wished you'd done, without actually wishing to do it.
It occurred to me, not for the first time, that Lili's world was not so different from my dioramas, or even from Sirena's installations: you took a tiny portion of the earth and made it yours, but rea...
I kept thinking, as I was telling Didi, that somehow what was in my head--in my memory, in my thoughts--was not being translated fully into the world. I felt as though three-dimensional people and eve...
I always thought I’d live in Paris, Rome, Madrid—at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn’t dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl’s fantasy, a...
Her self, then, was represented in her books.
But we don’t really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it’s our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we ack...
And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd cat...
There’s a period of accommodation before you are formally and
It took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark.
Marina, feeling entitled, never really asked herself if she was good enough. Whereas he, Julius, asked himself repeatedly, answered always in the affirmative, and marveled at the wider world's apparen...
Life's funny. You have to find a way to keep going, to keep laughing, even after you realize that none of your dreams will come true. When you realize that, there's still so much of a life to get thro...
I’ve finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked EXIT, the escape to a place where Real Life will be; and you can never find it.
I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.
It shows how long-lived anger is, the desire for vengeance: it has a nuclear half-life, and it teaches people patience in the most sinister way.
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 boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my paren...