The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
The television replaced the sound of conversation that was missing from my grandparents' lives.
The sonogram didn't exist at the time; the spoon was the next best thing.
The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
Tessie allowed Milton to press his clarinet to her skin and fill her body with music. At first it only tickled her. But after a while the notes spread deeper into her body. She felt the vibrations pen...
Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.
She used a line from Trollope's Barchester Towers as an epigraph:There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer...
My goal in life is to become an adjective, Leonard said. People would go around saying, 'That was so Bankheadian.' Or, 'A little too Bankheadian for my taste.
Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life.
Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.
It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock,...
It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents?
In the first few days after the funeral, our interest in the Lisbon girls only increased. Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness bene...
If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn't feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I'm comfortable with. Just the two of us, here in...
I went to church. It didn’t help. In those days that was the best place to meet a girlfriend. In church! All of us praying to be different.
I don’t know what you’re feeling. I won’t even pretend.
I don't want to ruin your life, Leonard said in a gentler tone.You're not ruining it.The drugs just slow the process down. But the end's inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off? He jab...