I always thought I’d live in Paris, Rome, Madrid—at least for a while. It strikes me now that I didn’t dream of Zanzibar or Papeete or Tashkent: even my fantasy was cautious, a good girl’s fantasy, a...
Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
For so long I had eaten my greens and here - at last! - was my ice-cream sundae.
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.
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...
But I did wonder what she did, on those afternoons—not just Fridays either, because on the days I had speech team, somebody else’s mother or father dropped her at her door. It seemed like a lot of tim...
And then, into the fantasy, as into a dream, would come the thought: it's not like this anymore; the world has changed. Just the way, even at that time fully two years after my mother's death, I'd cat...
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.
There’s a period of accommodation before you are formally and
It took me a long time to realize that she, too, was cautious and bourgeois, frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark.
It rained as if the gods were disconsolate, as if spring were a sorrow,
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.
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...
We’re the quiet woman at the end of the third-floor hallway, whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting, and who, from behind closed doors, never makes a...
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...
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...
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.
I’m a dog and she was a cat: I, slobbery and keen; she, self-contained and ultimately private.