An accident of brain development stacked the deck against children: the mother had three or four years to fuck with your head before your hippocampus began recording lasting memories. You’d been talki...
An odd thing about beauty, however, is that it's absence tends not to arouse our sympathy as much as other forms of privation do.
Because, no matter how he’d come to hate her, he was also, even now, trying to impress her and win her praise, bringing her his Bertrand Russell papers as mother-flattering evidence of his outsize int...
You on the floor in a fugue state, me not knowing what to do. It’s remarkable how high-functioning you are, for an insane person. I’m the only one who gets to see you on the floor.
Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it.
There's a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else's work in the morning; it's as if stillness experiences pain in being broken.
There were a thousand things she wanted from life, and since few were available at home [...], she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury c...
There was such a relative paucity of smells in California that the interconnectedness of all possible smells was not apparent. She
The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.
The only mainstream American household I know well is the one I grew up in, and I can report that my father, who was not a reader, nevertheless had some acquaintance with James Baldwin and John Cheeve...
The one thing everyone in the Republic had plenty of was time. Whatever you didn’t do today really could be put off until tomorrow.
The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.
The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building
The cabin was dark. Inside it was the sound of her childhood, the patter of rain on a roof that consisted only of shingle and bare boards, no insulation or ceiling. She associated the sound with her m...
That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.
Stevia does something funny to the chemistry of my mouth. There’s no fooling a taste bud, in my experience.
She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.
Robin turned and looked straight into her. What's life for?I don't know.I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.
Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take he...
My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author's story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, altho...