Today the teacher called me a sadist. I tried to say that was like the pot calling the kettle black but came out with something closer to That is like a pan saying to a dark pan, ‘You are a pan.
The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing.... I hate computers. My hatred is...
The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have acc...
Teaching you is like having a cesarean section every day of the week.
She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yiel...
Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.
My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very...
Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Sal...
It's safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America.
It's as though we had asked to have ice cubes in our wine, like, Ick, who are you?
In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.
In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, 'Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch betwee...
I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on Nove...
High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: Don't wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than ten feet away,...
Her, though! Once when I was in high school she caught me doing something or other, imitating my Spanish teacher, perhaps with a pair of tights on my head, and said, like someone at the end of her rop...
For that’s all Gatorade ever tastes like—its color. Over the period that I had my stomach virus, I tried them all: blue, red, green, yellow, orange, and a new opaque one that tasted opaque.
As I searched the atlas for somewhere to run to, Hugh made a case for his old stomping grounds. His first suggestion was Beirut, where he went to nursery school. His family left there in the midsixtie...
A wise man once said that in order to communicate, you have to be able to speak in someone else’s language.
A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. 'My bad,' for example, and 'I've got your back' and 'You go,...
I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met.