The adaptation [to assembly lines] has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into the joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.
Tessio Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of 22. Their engagement,which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the wa...
It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
It was always embarrassing when professors assigned their own books. Even Madeleine, who found all the reading hard going, could tell that Zipperstein’s contribution to the field was reformulative and...
I am living through days as happy as those God keeps for his chosen people; and whatever becomes of me, I can never say that I have not tasted the purest joys of life.
Every letter was a love letter. Of course, as love letters went, this one could have been better. It was not very promising, for instance, that Madeleine claimed not to want to see him for the next ha...
Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters' inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.
This whole country's stolen.
I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so—he leaned toward us—their tits bleed.
Their hearts were wrung with anguish, the anguish of having children, a vulnerability as astonishing as the capacity for love that parenthood brings ... [426]
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like...
I do not think the patient truly meant to end her life. Her act was a cry for help.
Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope.
He hadn't suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn't know the heart rush of hearing that incomparable voice suddenly linked with his own, the sense it gave of being too close to e...
He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.
Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words.I don't believe in sadness, joy, or regret.Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like...
Whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was - already an American, in other words.
Hogy az emberek miért pont ahhoz kötik az életüket, akikhez aztán kötik, azt többnyire épp az érintettek értik a legkevésbé.