Me: Did you get your tree yet?Ken: I'm a Jew, I don't decorate Christmas trees.Me: So you're going to go with a wreath instead?Ken: I just told you, I'm a Jew.Me: Oh, I get it. You're looking for a ch...
Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower....
I’ve been around for nearly half a century, yet still I’m afraid of everything and everyone. A child sits beside me on a plane and I make conversation, thinking how stupid I must sound. The downstairs...
I’m going to have you fired! and I wanted to lean over and say, I’m going to have you killed.
It's always so satisfying when you can twist someone's hatred into guilt--make her realize that she was wrong, too quick to judge, too unwilling to look beyond her own petty concerns.
It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless yo...
It is what it is, which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see. Isn’t that the state motto of South Dakota? I said the second or third time I heard it.
It bothered me that the bag bothered me more than head did, but what are you going to do? A person doesn't conciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it...
Isn’t that sweet of my only son to travel all this way so he can whine about his pathetic little friend? Maybe if I weren’t strapped to my deathbed I could muster up the strength to give a damn.
In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: Shut up. That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhe...
If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.
I would clear the table and Hugh would do the dishes, neither of us speaking and both of us wondering if this just might be the one to do it. 'I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand,' people wou...
I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his spo...
I had to wrestle daily with both my inadequacy and my uncontrollable jealousy. I didn't want to kill her, but hoped someone else might do the job for me.
I don't know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then reread them if the child so orders....
I didn’t see my sessions as the sort of thing that one would want to advertise, but as my teacher liked to say, I guess it takes all kinds. Whereas my goal was to keep it a secret, hers was to inform...
I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn't either. We'd never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I though, like strok...
Honestly, though, does choice even come into it? Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright?
Here was a person for whom the word pen had two syllables. Her people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready—so who was she to advise me on anything?
Here I am, just turned fifty, and I forgot that my father isn’t dead yet!