Want like a small dirty creature, waiting all the years of her marriage for a sign. Patrick was not the sign; she herself was, her own blue dress, her tiny waist, her small, round breasts. And her wan...
Where were all the people I loved? I could feel them, flung about, the distance between us a crushing weight that I myself had put there.
He was so appealing, standing there, so useful and solid and familiar, I wanted to fall into him and demand to be forgiven.
Emme. Like the letter. Like an eclipse. A force of nature that keeps coming around, taking out the lights.
I carried on drinking excessively as long as I could—right up to the moment I decided to become a mother. It was not so difficult, then, to stop. The stakes changed, and you grew inside me, and the mu...
How lucky I am that he turned up across the dance floor all those years ago and believed, then as now, that we were meant to build a life together.
Perhaps it was the same cocktail of self-indulgence and abandon and want—and an unaccountable wish to be free, if only for a little while—I discovered in myself last summer. I
He did not often listen when I talked, so I ended up telling him things more than once, after a while not bothering to tell him much at all.
First sight of him at the bar, the shock of him under my ribs.
I suppose unrequited love is the hardest kind to shed because it is not really love at all. It is a half-love, and we are forever stomping around trying to get hold of the other half. W
Of course it is upon the rubble of ancient history that the present stands. L
Let’s all throw unhappiness overboard.
A moment’s friction for a life in which I would never again be free of my own body.
How can I be certain I’m not manufacturing a memory to match the evidence? You can’t rely on memory. You can’t rely on ancient artifacts, either, to tell you a story you can live with. You can rely on...
Most never know the condition exists, because the single kidney grows large enough to accommodate
Such a terrible word, terminate. A word from a brave new world in which only the flawless are allowed to be born.
It was so undignified and unnecessary, the way married people behaved. The indiscriminate airing of grievances, the incessant flinging of blame and complaint. Of course, I had no idea back then what a...
To LAY. To lie. A lay. A lie. It's a versatile but tricky word, isn't it? To get the lay of the land. To lay down the law. To lay blame. To lie low. To lie down on the job. To let it lie. To lie down...
But also because the London I paint is colored by the pencil I hold, and the pencil I hold wants a picture with an ending we can all bear. Malcolm
But this time it was her other self I saw, not the dark fairy of want but a middle-aged woman, like the woman I am now, plain, chastened, mortal. The
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