It’s a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you’re avoiding your progenitor’s defective character. I’m not like him becomes your mantra,
Coming to the lonely conclusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.
Apology. It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking that people are the sum total of what you see.
You swear you’ll never become your parents. You listen to edgy music, you dress young and hip, you have sex standing up and on kitchen tables, you say fuck and shit a lot, and then one day, without wa...
You realize that you don't understand yourself better than you understand anyone else.
Whatever the opposite of a plan is, that's what I've got.
Phillip, who is congenitally incapable of moderation,
Never marry a beautiful woman. Worship them if you must, go to bed with them if you can—by all means, everyone should have carnal knowledge of physical perfection at least once in their life—but when...
Loneliness doesn’t exist on any single plane of consciousness. It’s generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call...
Grief can be catered just like anything else.
Besides, I came from the eighties, a neon, hair-sprayed decade from which very little music made it out alive.
As far as rapprochements go, it's awkward and vague, but the advantage of being as emotionally inarticulate as we are is that it will do the trick.
This was his childhood, safe and warm and brightly lit, and being here now makes him feel like he died years ago and he's now a lost spirit, stuck between worlds with unfinished business.
The point is, people become possessive of their grief, almost proud of it. They want to believe it’s like no one else’s. But it is. It’s exactly like everybody else’s. Grief is like a shark. It’s been...
The future just isn't what it used to be
Movie directors often shoot funerals in the rain. The mourners stand in their dark suits under large black umbrellas, the kind you never have handy in real life, while the rain falls symbolically all...
Jen shakes her head sadly and I can see her lower lip trembling, the tear that's starting to form in the corner of her eye. I can't touch her, kiss her, love her, or even, as it turns out, have a conv...
I’m not a fan of country music, but there’s no better music to drive to. Turn the right song up loud enough on the Porsche’s sound system and it will swallow you whole. The past is prelude and the fut...
I've never been shot, but this probably what it feels like, that second of nothingness right before the pain catches up to the bullet.
Shudders and seems to sink a bit further. And the contractor is running two other jobs in the neighborhood. The Jacobsons, he’s redoing their pool house, and he’s doing