There was no point in telling my father. He'd never let me quit after only one day. He couldn't help me and he'd make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for the Boschian lands...
There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened.
The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you've gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I'd come to see that it...
The secret to a good life, he told me once, is to bring your A game to everything you do. Even if all you're doing is taking out the garbage, you do that with excellence.
No one with real integrity tries to sell their integrity to you. People with real integrity hardly notice they have it.
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 red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through suspicious, slitted eyes.
If stupid were fuel, we would never run out.
Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everything we valued, the way we saw the world. Reason and rationality were a thin coat of paint on a ragged surface.
Don’t side with assholes, she said. Her voice was very not chill.
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)
The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff.
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...
Please assume that I am talking continuously in all the scenes that follow until I tell you that I’m not.
IN EVERYONE’S LIFE there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken away against their will.
I appreciated her vigor. I admired her choices though I wouldn’t have made them. Freak or fake, I’d been asking myself ever since I arrived at college, and here was someone bold enough to be both.
Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat wit...
You've done so many things and read so many books. Do you still believe in happy endings? Oh my Lord, yes. Bernadette's hands were pressed against each other like a book, like a prayer. I guess I woul...