The fact is that the same sequence of days can arrange themselves into a number of different stories.
THE TWINS WERE eighteen months old now, walking (and standing and staring and screaming and sitting) just like other children more or less their age, and Andy found herself increasingly preoccupied wi...
We came to the corner, waited for the light, and crossed. I had no idea where we were going. I said, I didn’t realize you were so depressed. I was depressed, but that was a side issue. This was more l...
She looked out the window of her office, feeling that she had passed through a doorway that she had never realized was there.
There were no toys under the bed--that wasn't why he liked it. Why he liked it was that there wasn't anything under the bed--no chickens, no Joey, no Eloise, no sheep, no "no"s. He could lie under the...
Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex.
When I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn't believe them. I agreed in order to be polite, but in my heart I knew that those men were imposto...
Mary had nice clothes, too, ones she had worked hard for over the summer,
This is true, at the least, that no veil of beauty hides the evils from our sight.
Still others reflected on how quickly the food could be snatched from a man's table, or the child from a woman's breast, or the wife from a man's bedcloset, that no strength of grasp could hold these...
Ron Paul, who, as someone said, wouldn’t have regulated a sewer pipe running through his child’s playroom.
If living is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.
Upstairs, in the cupboard, he had a box of things he had saved as a boy and a young man. He hadn't looked into it in twenty years or more. Nothing fancy or valuable, but things that had meant somethin...
My mom was paranoid about my safety.
They throw themselves on the waters of the world, and they know they will be borne up.
Laura's gossip was redeemed by its lack of spite. She was warmly objective about every event, taking endless delight in action and complexity, as if she had been bed-ridden in a small windowless room...
In her minds eye she sat there, in the domesticated golden sunlight on the velvet sofa, lapped around by carpets and books and mahogany, solitary and content, as if, in fact, cloistered.
Everyone starved. Starvation is a potent weapon, and the Bolsheviks are happy to wield it. The cheapest way to get rid of the opposition is to starve them. Lenin did it the expensive way, shooting the...
So it was with Vigdis’ neighbors. Folk recalled how fat she was, how proud, though only the daughter of a cowman, and how niggardly. Serving boys had been beaten for taking a bit of honey, and neighbo...
My mind is like a room where the door swings free in the breeze, and many visitors come and go and stay and vanish as they will.