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.
I discovered I could hate her a bit, and because I didn’t tell her so, because our friendship went along on this reduced, part-time scale that didn’t allow for arguments, there was no noticeable chang...
Geniuses have the shortest biographies.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that the imaginary is equivalent to the real: your skin, your vast breathing skin, will insist otherwise.
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 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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren’t alone.
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.
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...
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...
We wouldn’t be proper children if we didn’t disregard our parents’ most vital instruction.