Why I’m dolling myself up like this… You’re putting on armor. You want to be strong.
When the sex is persuasively rendered, it tends to read autobiographically, and there are limits to my desire for immersion in a stranger's biochemistry.
What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Sti...
We’d been little more than children when we fell in love. Now everything was ashes, ashes of ashes burned at temperatures where ash burns, but our full-fledged sex life had only just begun, and I woul...
Well, and that's what really counts, isn't it? I've become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I'll have the whole problem pretty...
His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her body; he was not undoglike...
Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it n...
For David Shenk, the most important of the windows onto meaning afforded by Alzheimer’s is its slowing down of death. Shenk likens the disease to a prism that refracts death into a spectrum of its oth...
Finally there came a crisp blue afternoon, a Sunday, the day after Daylight Saving ended, when they met at the park at three o’clock and hit for so long that the light began to fail. Pip was in an abs...
Filtering isn’t phoniness—it’s civilization.
Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he coul...
Don't talk to me about hatred if you haven't been married.
Can a better kind of fiction save the world? There’s always some tiny hope (strange things do happen), but the answer is almost certainly no, it can’t. There is some reasonable chance, however, that i...
Adolescence is best enjoyed without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness, unfortunately, is its leading symptom. Even when something important happens to you, even when your heart's getting crus...
He could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration, but as long as he stayed by himself in the woods he was able to remain true to his refusal. He came from a long line of...
Wow, thank you so much for the compliment! Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was so selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments ma...
At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost...
And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.
He was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies: To feel as if he couldn’t surviv...