Like a Zen master, she reduced to the essences: I do not need to walk around the Museum of Fine Arts; I do not need to be pushed around the MFA in the chair; I do not need the MFA at all, because its...
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...
The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked. Sh...
And of course, you can't ever really know what happens to another person, or what they think happens to them, which amounts to the same thing.
What would it be like to have been locked up in one of those cells for weeks or months or even years, only to discover that you’d never really been a lunatic at all, and could just as easily – if only...
Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness?
When you’re 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 thin...
Brother, a swarthy barrel-maker whose Breton
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...
We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.
He didn't much like reading novels - he preferred history or philosophy - or poetry, although he could read only a little poetry at a time, because when a poem spoke to him it was as if a brilliant, a...
Just because someone tells you in a reasonable way that you aren’t really feeling what you’re feeling, it doesn’t make the feeling go away.
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.
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...
[S]he was my Muse, my alcoholic's bourbon on the rocks: irresistible.
What I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL. Don’t all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with ou...
There are social struggles, and the agonies and embarrassments of puberty...and the weight of the world that falls upon each of us in varying degrees, as we finally relinquish childhood's clouds of gl...
I was suddenly aware, almost in a panic – a joyful panic – of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself. My
Was suddenly aware, almost in a panic—a joyful panic—of the wealth of possibility out in the world, and also within myself.
The Thwaites lived on Central Park West in the upper Eighties, in a building that, while manifestly grand, particularly to someone from Ohio, was by no means the most elegant among its neighbors. Its...
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