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...
I needed them, sure, and we can all argue about the moment when the balance tipped and I needed them so much that I would hurt. But you can't pretend they didn't need me too, each in his or her way. T...
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...
As my wise friend Didi has more than once observed about life's passages, every departure entails an arrival elsewhere, every arrival implies a departure from afar.
All those years we'd been friends, since forever, we'd used the same words and perhaps meant different things--sometimes slightly different, but other times radically dissimilar; and we'd never known...
Service is one of life's great joys. It's a privilege to be in service. It's a great relief, a gift, to be faced with a job that you know absolutely you must do for the benefit of someone else. As lon...
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.
It continued to amaze me how the touch of skin on skin had altered things: curled in the crook of his arm, my head upon his breast, I'd sensed his heart beating and for a moment hadn't been sure wheth...
I was funny—ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless.
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 don't want to sleep,' my mother said. 'I want -- for God's sake, I want to wake up.
Have you ever asked yourself whether you’d rather fly or be invisible?
For real?' Cassie's eyes glittered, and it occurred to me that all along she'd expected me to stop us. She'd goaded and teased me, made out like I was a wimp; but she also relied on me to keep us safe...
Don't ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast breathing skin, will insist otherwise.
But do you know this idea of the imaginary homeland? Once you set out from shore on your little boat, once you embark, you'll never truly be at home again. What you've left behind exists only in your...
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...
And then, suddenly, there's something else. When you least expect it. Suddenly there's an opportunity, an opening, a person or people you couldn't have imagined, and - elation!-it feels as though you'...
An inchoate mass 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.
A strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food....
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...