It would in retrospect appear to be a stop on a narrative path that was inevitable, but this is only because most events, most paths, feel inevitable in retrospect.
He’s a lawyer in Atlanta, and he’s very active in his church, Mrs. Bennet said. If that’s not the description of a man looking for a wife, I don’t know what is.
Children are nothing but a problem people create and then congratulate themselves on solving.
But I was living my life sideway. I did not act on what I wanted, I did not say the things I thought, and being so stifled and clamped all the time left me exhausted; no matter what I was doing, I was...
A reality show isn’t unlike the Nobel Peace Prize, then, Mr. Bennet said. In that they both require nominations.
Then I thought of how my life at Ault was a series of interactions and avoidance of interactions in which I pretended not to mind that I was almost always by myself. I could not last for long this way...
I bet things would be easier for you if you either realized you're not that weird or decided that being weird isn't bad.
I am filled with gratitude at the astonishing fact of being married to someone I enjoy talking to, someone with whom I can’t imagine ever running out of things to say.
Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in public places.
Far in the future, Hannah will have a boyfriend named Mike with whom she'll talk about her father. She'll say she isn't sorry about her upbringing before the divorce, that she thinks in a lot of ways...
And now I knew myself to be generous with encouragement only when I either did not want the thing the other person sought of did not believe the person would really get it.
…it never comes down to a single thing you did or didn’t do or say. You might convince yourself it did, but it didn’t.
To be a person who sees a political ad on television and takes the statements in it as fact, how can you exist in this world? How is it you're not robbed daily by charlatans who knock at your door?
There are, I have learned, so many gifts of motherhood, and so many sadnesses, and one of the sadnesses is the asymmetry of the family experience: that in spite of all the daily nuisances, and in spit...
The big occurrences in life, the serious ones, have for me always been nearly impossible to recognize because they never feel big or serious. In the moment, you have to pee, your arm itches, or what p...
People recognized you or they didn’t, and it was unrelated to knowing you. Knowing you could just be your name or the street you lived on, your father’s job. Recognizing you was understanding you had...
Nin— Jasper said, and his pained tone was a reminder that, however he had transgressed, he hadn’t done so entirely callously. His affection for her was not fake; it just was partial. Or perhaps it was...
I'm not a Democrat because I haven't thought about the issues. I'm a Democrat because I have.
I want to open myself up, I want to experience other dimensions, I don’t want to be bound by the rules of this world. Does that make me a freak?
Even our challenges here have made our lives richer and deepened our ability to feel. Our family has been very lucky to live somewhere beautiful.