Please, she says. Tell me what you’re thinking. It’s an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for...
Once, when I was old enough to ponder these things and young enough to think there might be credible answers, I whispered to Dad during Rosh Hashanah services, Do you believe in God? Not really, he sa...
It's true. somewhere inside us we are all the ages we have ever been. We're the 3 year old who got bit by the dog. We're the 6 year old our mother lost track of at the mall. We're the 10 year old who...
It's just hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically fucked.
It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.
It must be tough, I said sincerely. Having no clear line between your reality and your bullshit. There’s a line, Jack said. It just moves around a lot.
He gives her a look. She gives it right back. We couldn't have really had something good, he thinks, regret filling his lungs like water.Sometimes I think that too, Casey says, and he realizes that, o...
For the record, there are other visitors, a handful of pleasant-faced, middle-aged women, long-standing friends of my mother, attractive women in the early stages of disrepair, fighting to keep age at...
Few things are more pathetic than an unemployed man with a business card.P.15
Fate already warned us to pack it in. We just didn’t hear it in time.
Everyone in the room looks at him, horrified by the sight of unfettered glee in a shiva house, but in a minute or so he’ll be done laughing, and then, to anyone who sees him, his tear-streaked face an...
Bllod will separate, if need be, but its call is primordial, and it won't be refused.
Being an official divorce brought late-night channel-surfing up to a staggering new level of depressing. I just wanted to belong to someone already.
As soon as he saw her face, he knew what it would look like when she ended it.
As far as rapprochements go, it’s awkward and vague, but the advantage to being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.
And the violence of the coupling itself, primitive and elemental, reminding us that we’re all just dumb animals clinging to our spot on the food chain, eating, sleeping, and fucking as much as possibl...
An old girlfriend is a gun in your belly. It's no longer loaded, so when you see her, all you feel is the hollow mechanical click in your gut, and possibly the ghost of an echo, sense memory from when...
A problem is something to solve, Phillip says. If there’s no solution, it’s not a problem, so stop treating it like one.
The first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shel...
Even when someone is deserving of your anger, they’re still deserving of compassion. It’s hard to pull off, believe me—no one knows that more than me. And if you’re only going to pull it off a handful...