I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.
I’m forty-two years old—which is a lot more like middle age than forty or even forty-one.
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.
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.
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...
We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.
Was this what it meant to grow up, this vast loneliness?
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...
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...
Live, my dear Nora. Satisfy your hunger. There's food all around you, you know.' 'What kind of food, I'd like to know?' 'Ah'-he smiled- 'you must taste all things, actually to know if you like them.'...
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.
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...
Maybe I made her feel trapped, like she'd outgrown me. But from my side, it was like I knew her too well, I saw her too clearly, when she no longer wanted to be known: she wanted to try out a new role...
Maybe, instead, I’ll set the world on fire. I just might.
My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadm...
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...
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...
Reza, in spite of the tears caught in his lashes like raindrops on a spider's web, did not cry.
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.
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,...
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