She
In everyone's life there are people who stay and people who go and people who are taken 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.
Hathos, I offered finally and then thoughtfully provided the definition. The pleasure you get from hating something.
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...
Empathy is also a natural human behavior, and natural to chimps as well. When we see someone hurt, our brains respond to some extent as if we’d been hurt ourselves.
Because what could be more Casablanca? Suddenly Harlow saw that what she’d always wanted was a man of principle. A man of action. A domestic terrorist. Every girl’s dream, if she can’t have a vampire.
Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.
Threadbare, ravaged by love – as who amongst us is not.
There’s science and there’s science, is all I’m saying. When humans are the subjects, it’s mostly not science.)
There are moments in history that seem like a mist, as if what really happens matters less that what should have happened. The mists lift suddenly and there we are, my good parents and their good chil...
No one would have liked that. Maybe I liked it even less. Here we go again, I said to myself. I said this so distinctly in my head that I heard it as well as said it. As if I was quite used to finding...
It kept Mom on high alert and I worried sometimes that their marriage had become the sort Inspector Javert might have had with Jean Valjean.
I wonder sometimes if I'm the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that's simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin?
Fair warning, as it turned out—kindergarten is all about learning which parts of you are welcome at school and which are not.
Don’t side with assholes, she said. Her voice was very not chill.
A man at another table accused his breakfast partner of pulling rainbows and unicorns out of her ass.
You learn as much from failure as from success, Dad always says. Though no one admires you for it.
What have you learned? my father asked, and I didn’t have the words then, but, in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail.
Tryptophan: a chemical in turkey meat rumored to make you sleepy and careless. One of the many minefields in the landscape of the family Thanksgiving.