He stops to wait for her, but she has a sudden burst of energy, passing him. On and on she sprints, unobstructed, kicking up her heels at the water’s edge. Dark hair to her chin, rearranged by the win...
He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they...
Even though I now speak the language fairly well, the spoken language doesn’t help me. A conversation involves a sort of collaboration and, often, an act of forgiveness. When I speak I can make mistak...
But when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain. The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air, they flow like water between my fingers. Because the bas...
Assured by his grades and his apparent indifference to girls, his parents don't suspect Gogol of being, in his own fumbling way, an American teenager.
I don't know why, but the older I get the more interested I get in my parents' marriage. And it's interesting to be married yourself, too, because there is an inevitable comparison.
There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it...
Knowledge,
You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regre...
Without a single grandparent or parent or uncle or aunt at her side, the baby’s birth, like most everything else in America, feels somehow haphazard, only half true. As she strokes and suckles and stu...
Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he can not conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I ha...
When the language one identifies with is far away, one does everything possible to keep it alive. Because words bring back everything: the place, the people, the life, the streets, the life, the sky,...
What was stored in memory was distinct from what was deliberately remembered,
There were times Ruma felt closer to her mother in death than she had in life, an intimacy born simply of thinking of her so often, of missing her. But she knew that this was an illusion, a mirage, an...
The sunlight on her hair.
The nickname had irritated and pleased her at the same time. It made her feel foolish, but she was aware that in renaming her he had claimed her somehow, already made her his own.
The future haunted but kept her alive; it remained her sustenance and also her predator.
The fact that the yellow chintz armchair in the living room clashed with the blue-and-maroon Turkish carpet no longer bothered her.
That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to th...
She watched his lips forming the words, at the same time she heard them under her skin, under her winter coat, so near and full of warmth that she felt herself go hot.