Una vida así requería una autoestima exagerada. Suponía tener cantidades excesivas de esperanza y desesperación, y ponerlas al tuntún, como países tercermundistas del continente de las emociones.
The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other, had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks--as if everything she said had already been said before......
The key to marriage, she concluded, was just not to take the thing too personally.
The later-afternoon air of our exhalations hung in brief clouds before us. The thought balloon of my own breath said, How have I found myself here? It was not a theological question. It was one of tra...
The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riv...
The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if ma...
The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, y...
The prospect of a war has seized his brain. It engages some old, ongoing terror in him. As a former soldier, he still believes in armies. But he believes in armies at rest, armies relaxing, armies sho...
The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing Getting to Know You - both verses. At the request of the dean the chai...
The thing to remember about love affairs, says Simone, is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney....
You always say that, said Evan, but then you go on your trips and vacations and then you settle back into things and then you're quiet for a while and then you say you're fine, you're busy, and then a...
The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.
The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist — it had to do the food work on its own. There. We talked about death. That's talking about death?
Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a p...
There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.
There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.
There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quit...
There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
They looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.
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