Thinking back, we decided the girls had been trying to talk to us all along, to elicit our help, but we’d been too infatuated to listen. Our surveillance had been so focused we missed nothing but a si...
There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.
The Statue of Liberty's gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.
She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.
Semiotic was the form Zipperstein`s midlife crisis had taken... Instead of buying sports car, he'd bought deconstrution.
Olivia lit a cigarette and said, God, if I worried about running into old boyfriends, I couldn't go anywhere!
None of us went to church, so we had a lot of time to watch them, the two parents leached of color, like photographic negatives, and then the five glittering daughters in their homemade dresses, all l...
Next to it were five potted photographs of the Lisbon girls, pinned with rusty tacks. We didn't remember putting them up, but there they were, dim from time and weather so that all we could make out w...
Mr. da Silva had a relevant quotation for everything that happened to him and in this way evaded real life.
Madeline began hearing people saying Derrida. She heard them saying Lyotard and Foucault and Deleuze and Baudrillard. That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middl...
Lefty, who'd been observing all the ways Greece had been handed down to America, arrived now at where the transmission stopped. In other words: the future. He stepped off to meet it. Desdemona, having...
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,...
In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
He remained heartbroken, which meant one of two things: either his love was pure and true and earthshakingly significant; or he was addicted to feeling forlorn, he liked being heartbroken.
Don't waste your time on life.
Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.
The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing - rare but profound - remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best day...
Within the substandard construction of the Charlevoix church, literally upon a shaky foundation, I was baptized into the Orthodox faith; a faith that had existed long before Protestantism had anything...
Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
What was interesting about being the needy one was how much in love you felt. It was almost worth it. This dependency was what Leonard had guarded himself against feeling all his life, but he couldn't...