Quantity, at
When I think of Henry and Oliver and Mike, I feel as if they are three different models - templates, almost - and I wonder if they are the only three in the world: the man who is with you completely,...
What greater happiness is there than the privilege of being bored together?
Well-- My mother paused, and her tone was reflective in that way that is inevitably sad, because the past is sad. What I remember, she said, is that you were always such a dear little girl.
There then occurred the first and only paranormal incident of my marriage. Charlie shifted in his sleep, opened his eyes, looked at me and, without preamble, said, You have to forgive yourself for kil...
She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant and contrad...
Plus, it made me nervous, because was this the time in my own life before I found someone to love and had a family and looked back longingly on my youthful freedom? Or was it the beginning of what my...
Perhaps fiction has, for me, served a similar purpose--what is a narrative arc if not the imposition of order on disparate events?--and perhaps it is my avid reading that has been my faith all along.
Maybe I have always been, as Vi would subsequently accuse me, someone who creates obstacles for myself than looks around in surprise, wondering where they came from.
It's hard to imagine him angry without them. It must be like watching a game show by yourself, how calling out the answers feels silly and pointless. What is fury without witnesses? Where's the tensio...
It was one thing for a person who didn't really know me to act distant, but it was quite another for someone to get to know me and then to back away.
I think adults forget just how much faith teenagers can have in them, just how willing to believe that adults, by virtue of being adults, know absolute truths, or that absolute truths are even knowabl...
I often messed up with people, it was true, but it rarely happened because I was reading them wrong; it was because I got nervous, or because I could see too clearly that I was not what they wanted. A...
I heard Gillian say, with a laugh, At this point, does anyone expect the liberals not to be total hypocrites? She was oblivious to the possibility that perhaps not everyone present shared her views, a...
I have 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 cerem...
I have always found the times when another person recognizes you to be strangely sad; I suspect the pathos of these moments is their rareness, the way they contrast with most daily encounters. That re...
I felt an old, visceral insecurity that manifested itself in an impulse to cover up our cribbage game, to literally shield the board with my hands.
I enjoyed making them, and if it's great reverence you're looking for, or earnest expressions of gratitude - well, then you don't work with kids.
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.
Yet surely she was as culpable as he was; recalling her casual speculation about when Jasper's wife's grandmother might die and thereby free Jasper and Susan to divorce, Liz wondered if a stronger sig...