It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it.
He also believed that loyalty was earned - sharing a bloodline didn't mean you had to be close.
This was a bargain she struck, a ritual to guarantee safety. Nothing truly bad could happen if she was expecting it.
A child had no choice but to forgive.
Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.
This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, de...
Kate was often preoccupied with how to do good in a corrupt world, where just by eating dinner or turning on a laptop each of us was complicit in someone else's suffering. She struggled with how to sp...
It’s a common enough mistake to believe that one’s own time is the most progressive, the most advanced. That human nature only improves upon itself. But in fact, things move in cycles—good to bad and...
You should call your brother and congratulate him on the new job, her father might say over the phone, and it would take Kate a moment to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Brother? She di...
It was so bitter and sad, looking for safety in the person least likely to give it to you. Like drinking salt water, she thought. The house felt eerily quiet.
Her mother… told Kate that after women got out of lousy marriages, they generally had the good sense to stay away from the institution altogether. While men just kept trying to get it right because th...
Her faith that love was everything in the end, even if it was an imperfect love, a love that depended on memory, on some former version of who they
A kid thinks her mother is just that -- . A mother is also a woman, an independent being, who doesn't want to be reminded by anyone, child or otherwise, of her tree-trunk thighs. The world made women'...
You could sell crack on the street and go to jail for decades. Or you could sell a woman, and be back out by morning.
This was the dream: to have a house of your own, to fill it with furniture and paint the shutters whatever color you chose. But a fine-looking house could conceal so many horrors. It seemed they spent...
Sometimes April worried that she'd been built without some fundamental piece that everyone else had that just let them deal. Even her mother, who got involved in every lefty cause she could, seemed to...
She could come up with a hundred reasons why now wasn’t the time, why home was not a place one went for a visit.
No one can ever know the inner parts of anyone else’s marriage. It’s a strange business.
Bree knew this habit of hers rankled Lara more than any other--her ability to make a decision and announce that there would be no further discussion was, in Lara's opinion, 'Cruel and selfish behavior...
After all this time, she still had not grown accustomed to the American obsession with air-conditioning. Every store and subway car had it-an ecological disaster, but an apparent necessity for America...