I cried because I knew for certain that I was leaving home, and abruptly, I did not know if it was such a good idea- I realized that I, like my parents, had never believed I'd actually go.
Hannah is missing school because one night, her father exiled her and her mother and Allison from the house. This was, obviously, somewhat insane. But it wasn't more insane or cruel than other things...
For months I heard whispers and though it had seemed that they were carried to me on the wind, they were really coming from inside my own head.
Though as secrets went, this wasn't great. The kind I preferred were about specific people.
People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination.
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...
There are people we treat wrong and later, we're prepared to treat other people right.
The fact that I had no opinion on, for instance, relations between the U.S. And China did nit mean I didn't feel things.
The Wisconsin land, scraped and rearranged by glaciers, accosted by tornadoes, drenched and dried out and drenched again—it didn't care what I had done.
She nodded, jotting something in her notebook.You’re writing that down? Has the interview started?Lee, whenever you’re talking to a reporter, you’re being interviewed.
She is shocked, and also afraid to look at him. As he turns the page, he's describing a dessert whose name he cannot remember but which arrived at the table in flames. She feels utterly bewildered. Th...
Profii de aici le-au vazut pe toate. Noi ne percepem ca individualitati distincte, dar in ochii lor nu suntem decat o masa de nevoi adolescentine. – Gates Medkowski
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...
It was so nice to rest in the moment without pushing it further, to feel its possibilities rather than its limitation.
It was more when things slowed down, during the parts when you were supposed to have fun, that my lack of friends felt obvious- on Saturday nights, when there dances I didn't go to, and during visitat...
It occurred to Liz one day, as she waited on hold for an estimate from a yard service, that her parents’ home was like an extremely obese person who could no longer see, touch, or maintain jurisdictio...
In the end, there was always your regular life, and no one could deal with it but you.
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?
I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.
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...