For so long I had eaten my greens and here - at last! - was my ice-cream sundae.
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.
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...
A strangely prolonged lunch involving lobster, that infernally overrated food....
Would not, could not, make a significant overture. My pride depended on this. She would have needed to make the effort, enough to be openly vulnerable; she would have had to risk my revenge. I like to...
Who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that. Almost none. It’s the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding. Maybe I’ve learned it’s a mistake to reveal her at all.
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...
It rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow,
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.
You start to grow up and you learn from all the stories around you what the world is like, and yous tart to lose freedoms. Not because anybody actually tells you that you've lost them, but because you...
Who is he who walks always beside you? No-fucking-body, thank you very much. I walk alone.
The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would,...
The novel is describing a time in which she felt hope, beauty, elation, joy ,wonder, anticipation-these are things these friends gave to her and this is why they mattered so much. Her rage corresponds...
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...
Never let the sun go down on an argument, she said. Because one of us might die in the night, I said, as I’d replied since I was small. But this time, she laughed, a dry, sad laugh. One of us just mig...
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...
MY MOTHER assures me that it happens to everyone, sooner or later, for reasons more or less identifiable; everyone loses a best friend at some point. Not in the she moved to Tucson sense, but in the s...
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.'...
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.
It was one of those moments when life's disguises are stripped away, when you see clearly what is real, and all you can say to yourself is useful to get that learned.