He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn't want to actually sit across...
Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own o...
Tell me something wonderful, he said to Dane. Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.You're always writing one of your plays on the phone, said Dane.I said, something wonde...
She knew there were only small joys in life--the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through--and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.
Anyone who's read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.
Back at home, days later, feel cranky and tired. Sit on the couch and tell him he's stupid. That you bet he doesn't know who Coriolanus is. That since you moved in you've noticed he rarely reads. He w...
In the Dictionary 'lumpy jaw' comes just before 'lunacy,' but in life there are no such clues. Suddenly, for no reason, you might start to dribble from the mouth, to howl peevishly at the moon. You mi...
No, we’re not getting married, I told my mother on the phone when she asked. He’s going to California and I’m staying here. Usually she doesn't phone. Usually she just does things like send me notes w...
I once murdered someone and American Express covered everything.
[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want...
I watched my friend Eleanor give birth, she said. Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what...
But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.
So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time
You know, I'm just a very boring, not very funny person in person. I don't feel pressured to be otherwise.
I'll go see her tonight,' I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I could make it so. It was less like integrity perhaps and more like magic.
I've never been to a dinner party where everyone at the dinner table didn't say something funny.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.
Humor comes from the surprise release of some buried tension.
I don't have a love life. I have a like life.'Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...
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