My father was himself a college professor and a pedant to the bone. Every exchange contained a lesson, like the pit in a cherry. To this day, the Socratic method makes me want to bite someone.
I’ve read that no loss compares to the loss of a twin, that survivors describe themselves as feeling less like singles and more like the crippled remainder of something once whole. Even when the loss...
I’m unclear on the definition of person the courts have been using. Something that sieves out dolphins but lets corporations slide on through. A
It was always her failure for not being able to talk to us, never ours for not being able to understand her.
IN EVERYONE’S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.
Intended as a dig at my father, the enterprise being another of science’s excesses, like cloning or whisking up a bunch of genes to make your own animal. Antagonism in my family comes
WHERE YOU SUCCEED will never matter so much as where you fail, I said.
There's no data to suggest that I can make you love me whatever I do.
The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff.
The rest of the night was an endless dream sequence directed by David Lynch
The men responsible were charged with grand theft. Their original defense, that dolphins are persons (humans in dolphin suits, one defendant said), was quickly thrown out by the judge. I’m unclear on...
The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Langua...
Nor did I respond with the obvious, that my brother might very well go to jail, probably would someday, but he would never ever call. Three words were scratched in ballpoint blue on the wall above the...
My old kindergarten behaviors, so appalling when I was a kindergartner myself, are apparently quite acceptable in a teacher.
My husbands weren't any of them bad men, I was the problem. Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I liked the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to...
Life is all arrivals and departures.
It's true that, as my brother grew larger, he also grew dangerous, same as my sister. But they're still ours and we want them back. They're needed here at home.
I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)
They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I’d left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love—as who amongst us is not)
There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author’s back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up...