Tessie and I lay in our chairs, listening to wax being violently removed. 'Oh my!' cried the large lady. 'Is nothing,' belittled Helga. 'I do it perfect.' 'Oweee!' yelped a bikini-liner. And Helga, ta...
Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becom...
Sixty trillion years ago a god-scientist dug a hole through the earth, filled it with dynamite and blew the earth in two. The smaller of these two pieces became the moon.
She wasn't all that interested, as a reader, in the reader. She was still partial to that increasingly eclipsed entity: the writer. Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopu...
She was always saying, 'Fuck this school,' or 'I can't wait until I get out of here.' But so did lots of kids.
She understood that her heart operated on its own instructions, that she had no control over it or, indeed, anything else.
She leaned toward him and said in a quiet voice, Are you Christian?Mitchell hesitated to answer. The worst thing about religion was religious people.
She didn't want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.
Remember that day you said you loved me? Remember that? See, you could do that because you're basically a sane person, who grew up in a loving, sane family. You could take a risk like that. But in my...
Pregnancy humbles husbands. After an initial rush of male pride they quickly recognise the minor role that nature had assigned them in the drama of reproduction.
One’s country was like one’s self. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.
Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.
Now I’ve given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don’t care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.
My mother pictured a daughter as a counterinsurgent: a fellow lover of lapdogs, a seconder of proposals to attend the Ice Capades. In
Mas talvez as Pulseiras de Pingentes soubessem mais da vida do que eu. Desde muito cedo compreendiam que o mundo dava pouco valor aos livros, e por isso não gastavam seu tempo com eles. Ao passo que e...
Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid ’s and ’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature,...
Les émotions, d’après mon expérience, ne sont pas recouvertes par de simples mots. Je ne crois pas en la « tristesse », la « joie », ou le « regret ». Peut-être la meilleure preuve de la nature patria...
Lefty and Desdemona’s cousin, Sourmelina, had gone to America and was living now in a place called Detroit. Built
Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.
Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them...People don't save other people. People save themselves.