The state fair was all very well, but it shouldn’t be the last thing you saw in your life. At first you thought of people like Eloise and Frank and Lillian as runaways, and then, after a bit, you knew...
The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.
She didn't relate this memory to Janet, but she did think right then that all golden ages are discovered within. No one would ever know that her father, Carl, the endless Iowa horizon, a pan of shortb...
Seeing him somewhere was always a pleasure, like taking a drink of water.
It was not that he felt that the world would damage or hurt Frankie in any way, it was much more that there were plenty of things out in the world that Frankie would learn about, and that he would the...
I dream about standing in the lunch line naked. It's always the lunch line in ninth grade.Nakedness dreams are very common.I suppose they are.
When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best frien...
War is inevitable when the world is fallen. If you stop one, another will start. Redemption is the only path away from war.
Those Latin American and Eastern European novelists aren’t any help here. They live inside the mansion of female desire as if it is their right. Their own desire is a nice healthy dog on a string, rea...
Margret saw that this is how it is that folk are made to desire what they know they should not have, they are made to wait for it, so that when it comes, no matter how dark and full of sin and repelle...
It was imperative that the growing discord in our family be made to appear minor. The indication that my father truly was beside himself was the way he had carried his argument with us to others. But...
I always feel a little guilty when I break bad news to someone, because that energy, of knowing something others don’t, sort of puffs you up.
All those cows with the same pattern of black and white, all turning their heads at the same time, all mooing in unison (his first love was still cloning) and all feeling pregnant when they were not,...
So all I have is the knowledge that I saw! That I saw without being afraid and without turning away, and that I didn't forgive the unforgivable. Forgiveness is a reflex for when you can't stand what y...
There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
In December 1998, I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship, one that had grown more slowly than I had wished, but once it flowered it was much more stimulating th...
Respect and fear are two different things.
She had a cloth in her hands. She said, Frankie hungry?
Not to borrow trouble by worrying about it.
You know when we came out of the clinic, and we saw those flower beds that we hadn’t seen when we were walking in? That was so unexpected, I think it made me delirious somehow. And then it seemed like...