Afterwards—because it turned out that there was to be an afterwards for Teddy—he resolved that he would try always to be kind. It was the best he could do. It was all that he could do. And it might be...
But how could you spoil a child—by neglect, yes, but not by love. You had to give them all the love you could, even though giving that much love could cause you pain and anguish and horror and, in the...
War is Man’s greatest fall from grace, of course, especially perhaps when we feel a moral imperative to fight it and find ourselves twisted into ethical knots. We can never doubt (ever) the courage of...
Ursula found herself dwelling on Hugh's death, his absence more than his death.
It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.
I'm a shadow of my former self, she announces. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she's a shadow of a shadow.
I think I would rather just live my life, Teddy said, not make an artifice of it.
Her soft soul had crystallized. (Just as well, she thought.) She was a sword tempered in the fire.
He noticed that Ursula’s ox-eye daisies, wrapped in damp newspaper, were drooping, almost dead. Nothing could be kept, he thought, everything ran through one’s fingers like sand or water. Or time. Per...
Fat people weren’t supposed to eat anything, but they were especially not supposed to eat confectionery,
Doing nothing was much more productive than people thought; Jackson often had his most profound insights when he appeared to be entirely idle. He didn't get bored, he just went into a nothing kind of...
Dear God. When did language and meaning divorce each other and decide to go their separate ways?
Chivalry requireth that youth should be trained to perform the most laborious and humble offices with cheerfulness and grace.
By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of qu...
Butter was plastered on to the roll with no regard for the hard labor of the cow
Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neithe...
It was funny because she thought of herself as a good team player, although sometimes she suspected that no one else on her team did.
I can't help but think that it's an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn't bode well for the poor things. There are...
Don’t let your imagination run away with you... But why would you not when the reality was so awful?
It was the war, Juliet thought, remembering the photograph of the flamingo’s creased wife, it has made refugees of us all.