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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
[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...
Unless you have a life of great importance, she said, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.
Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses. -Tassie Keltjin
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.
She had to learn not to be afraid of a man, the way, in your childhood, you learned not to be afraid of an earthworm or a bug. Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. A...
She had already—carefully, obediently—stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage.
She was not good on the phone. She needed the face, the pattern of eyes, nose, trembling mouth... People talking were meant to look at a face, the disastrous cupcake of it, the hide-and-seek of the he...
I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fa...
For driving, a January thaw was always preferable to actual ice, but when it was over things froze more treacherously than before. And in its melting and condensing the roadside snow turned to clumps...
Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he'd watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teac...
What I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feeli...
It was like the classic scene in the movies where one lover is on the train and one is on the platform and the train starts to pull away, and the lover on the platform begins to trot along and then jo...
He had never been involved with the mentally ill before, but he now felt more than ever that there should be strong international laws against them being too good-looking.
That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or val...
Showing 1 to 20 of 325 results
