Does being forty feel fabulous and foxy? Liz asked.
By the time we met up again, she'd be able to hand her reaction to me as a tidy package: a single square of lasagna in a sealed Tupperware container as opposed to a squalid kitchen with tomato sauce s...
Reason to do anything other than bypass and ignore. And
When you are a high school girl, there is nothing more miraculous than a high school boy.
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?
The tarps Ken Weinrich's crew used has yellow and royal blue stripes, not unlike those for a circus, and this had lent a festive yet undignified mood to the proceedings.
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...
Since Liz’s adolescence, when viewing television commercials that celebrated the ostensibly unconditional love of mothers for their children, or on spotting merchandise in stores that honored this uni...
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...
It was generally less shocking to Liz that twenty years after high school she was still her essential self, the self she’d grown up as, unencumbered by spouse or child, than that nearly everyone else...
In my expectation that good fortune will lead inextricably to its reversal, I should note that I don't think I'm less deserving of happiness than anyone else; it is that in an unequal world, nobody de...
I've never tried to assert my views unless they are self-evident, not reliant on an argument from me to prove or disprove them: Breast-cancer awareness and AIDS prevention are good. Illiteracy is bad....
I wanted to hold happiness in reserve, like a bottle of champagne. I postponed it because I was afraid, because I overvalued it, and then I didn't want to use it up, because what do you wish for then?
I think my mother found her mother-in-law entertaining, and in a person who entertains us, there is much we forgive.
I had no idea, of course, that of all the feelings of my youth that would pass, it was this one, of an abundance of time so great as to routinely be unfillable, that would vanish with the least ceremo...
I decided that I wanted to say to Sin-Jun, I like your skirt. But sometimes speaking is so hard! It's like standing still, then sprinting. I kept rehearsing the sentence in my head, examining it for f...
He seemed simultaneously like a stranger and someone she knew extremely well; there was either an enormous amount to say or nothing at all.
But I should note, for all my resistance to organized religion, that I don't believe Charlie could have quit drinking without it. It provided him with a way to structure his behavior, and a way to exp...
At that time in my life, no conclusion was a bad conclusion. Something ended, and you stopped wishing and worrying. You could consider your mistakes, and you might be embarrassed by them, but the box...
Approaching each other, him from the gym, me from the library- this was when I walked down the aisle and he was waiting, this was when we made love, it was every anniversary, every reunion in an airpo...