Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch’s ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature—fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.
Now searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the tim...
Not long before, I had stayed up late with my mother and watched Citizen Kane, and I was very taken with the idea that a person might notice in passing some bewitching stranger and remember her for th...
Maybe not quite so simple. Because—all the way driving here, driving all night, Christmas lights on the motorway and I’m not ashamed to tell you, I got choked up—because I was thinking, couldn’t help...
Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days...
It's funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something ve...
It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.
It is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basical...
In my light-headedness and fatigue, which made me feel drastically cut off from myself and as if I were observing it all at a remove, I walked past candy shops and coffee shops and shops with antique...
I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological...
I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
I sometimes get the feeling that he was less pleased by kindness itself than by the elegance of the gesture.
I knew my mother’s feet, her clothes, her two-tone black and white shoes - and long after I was sure of it I made myself stand in their midst, folded deep inside myself like a sick pigeon with its eye...
I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a b...
I find myself fixing on that refusal to pull back. Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome,...
I felt rotten. Dead butterfly floating on the surface of the pool. Audible machine hum. Drowned crickets and beetles swirling in the plastic filter baskets. Above, the setting sun flared gaudy and inh...
I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from all humankind until the very end: no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment, lying in state upon the death barge and r...
I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—...
I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is catast...