She hadn’t been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She’d been given a can of gravy and a hairbrush and told, There you go. She’d stood there for years, blinking...
She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them.
She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, Fine. I'm on page… and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages...
Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.
Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. As the man politely blathered on, she would fall in love, marry, then find herself in a bitter custody battle with him for the k...
My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, Hi, do you have any kids? and then, Why...
My grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face.
It's bad enough when they refer to medical science as 'an inexact science,' says the Mother. But when they start referring to it as 'an art,' I get extremely nervous.
It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.
If dolphins tasted good, he said, we wouldn’t even know about their language.
I would be a genius now, Quilty has said three times already, if only I’d memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu. If only, says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a compl...
I was already becoming a woman who sized up another one fast—I was becoming typical.
I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now....
I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I c...
I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this, he says.Say: Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough. Show him your bicep.
I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And pe...
I am thinking not only of my own body here, that unbeguilable, broken basket, that stiff meringue. I am not, Patrick, thinking only of myself, my lost troupe, my empty bed. I am thinking of the dancin...
Good God, cries the Mother. Everything inside her suddenly begins to cower and shrink, a thinning of bones. Perhaps this is a soldier's readiness, but it has the whiff of death and defeat. It feels li...
But this is the kind of thing that fiction is: it's the unlivable life, the strange room tacked onto the house, the extra moon that is circling the earth unbeknownst to science.
After four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums, you sleep with him. It seems the right number of cultural events.