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.
He was playing on the climbing structure by himself—or by his own, as the children sometimes charmingly put it.
We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.
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.
Better to believe that sane people were sane and crazy people were crazy and you could put the two types of people on opposite sides of a wall and keep them separate, clean and tidy. Without that, whe...
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...
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.
No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say Fuck off to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all.
But just as the world is opening up, it's closing too, and things reveal their previously unimagined shapes.
But our friendship was, at the same time, like a city you hadn’t visited in a long time, where you know the streets by heart but the shops and restaurants have changed, so you can find your way from t...
But the shadow settled on them, obliquely, and was shuffled off only when Danielle rose to put on music, a Spanish soprano singing Cantaloube, her pure, agonized strains floating, their minor harmonie...
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...
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...
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...
Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness?
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.
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.
Death and his zealous minions—dread, despair, disease—can find you anywhere at all, and the armor plate of youth will no longer protect you.
I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.
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...
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