I'm old enough to know that sometimes you don't get a second chance.
I wanted my life to start - but in those rare moments when it seemed like something might actually change, panic shot through me.
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.
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 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.
You certainly should
What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
Upon receiving that text from Georgie, she had, of course, wondered, Heard what? But she'd quickly gone from wondering to suspecting that she knew to being certain. Never would she have leapt to a con...
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.
Mr. Bennet stood, dropping his napkin on the table. As interesting as I find this conversation, an urgent matter has come up. I need a hamburger.
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 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 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...
Her prettiness was factual and obvious, the way a flag was patriotic or a puppy was cute—not an interesting prettiness, but also not contingent on taste.
Coordinating the calendars of five men in their forties is like herding cats.
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...
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...
Among the women, a spontaneous cheer went up, which Liz was surprised to find herself joining, and this was when (she was on her fifth drink) she realized both that she was completely drunk--not just...