We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.
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 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.
I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.
I was aware of doing only a so-so job on the grown-up career front, but I didn't really care, because there were two big exam questions I wanted to be sure I answered fully: the question of art, and t...
I wanted him to reassure me, and when I saw he wasn’t going to, I thought, This is when the shit hits the fan.
How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good?
Each of us shapes our stories so they make sense of who we think we are.
Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?),
But 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.
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...
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...
You get to middle school, and you think about these things. The world opens up; history stretches behind you, and the future stretches before you, and you're suddenly aware of the wild, unknowable int...
Without it being said, I was treated as a kid with a bright future and Cassie, well, she wasn’t necessarily not going to have one, but her path would be different from mine. Without anybody saying so...