It had been a conscious decision to pull free. It had taken everything I had to do it, like an animal gnawing a limb off to escape a trap.
It does not do to be frightened of things about which you know nothing.
It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and...
Is it easy to see things in retrospect. But I was ignorant then of everything but my own happiness.
IN THE NIGHT, I woke up wailing. The worst thing about the explosion was how I carried it in my body—the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it. In my dreams, there was always a light way out and a dark wa...
I've been thinking a lot about what Hobie said: about those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your wh...
I think we’re much more hypocritical about illness, and poverty, than were people in former ages, I remember Julian saying once. In America, the rich man tries to pretend that the poor man is his equa...
I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone's life when character is fixed forever; for me, it was that first fall term I spent at Hampden.
I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn’t allowed to turn around—it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were—but we could see each oth...
I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.
I honestly can't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching 'The Wonderful World of Disney' on Sunday n...
I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of retu...
I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always w...
I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.
I can’t believe you two, Henry said crossly. I reminded you of this last night. But we forgot, said the twins, in simultaneous despair. How could you? Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone...
I blinked at her. My shades were down and the hall was dark and to me, half-drugged and reeling, she seemed not at all her bright unattainable self but rather a hazy and ineffably tender apparition, a...
I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie—all the...
I am an alcoholic. I’m the first to admit that. I can’t drink at all. One drink is too many and a thousand’s not enough.
Hobie’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, a strong, comforting pressure, like an anchor letting me know that everything was okay. I hadn’t felt a touch like that since my mother died—friendly, steadying...
Hobie had an iron constitution. Whenever he came down with something himself, he drank a Fernet-Branca and kept going.