All this wandering that you do, he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair...
Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana?No.I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Cha...
Blank is to heartache as forest is to bench.
Blasts from the past were like the rooms one entered and re-entered in dreams: they would not stay nailed down. When you returned to them, they had changed - they suddenly had more space or a tilt or...
By about the sixth week the smallness of the class, and whatever makeshift intimacy had sprung up there, became suddenly oppressive to me… suddenly I wanted the anonymity of a large class, where class...
Denial, when one was accused, was a life force, and would trump any desire to confess. Perhaps this was the animal strength of the psychopathic brain. Or the psychopathy of the animal brain. An admiss...
Do not resent her. Think about the situation, for instance, when you take the last trash bag from its box: you must throw out the box by putting it in that very trash bag. What was once contained, now...
Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.
Ever since Albert was denied promotion to full-professor rank, his articles on Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Really Is Hard to Find, Everything That Rises Must Indeed Converge, and The Totemic South:...
Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself.
From Charades: when she was younger she was a frustrated mother, so she is pleased when her children act as is they don't remember
He started not to mind it, to feel he was suited in some ways to solitude, to the near weightlessness of no one but himself holding things down. He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually get...
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...
I missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.
I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich.
I'm going to marry you till you puke.
It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nin...
Jane gave Heffie an anxious look. It said Please forgive me. It also said What is your problem? and Have a nice day Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it....
Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter Jesus Christ! and shake their heads.
Love is art, not truth. It's like painting a scenery.' These are the things one takes from mothers. Once they die, of course, you get the strand of pearls, the blue quilt, some of the original wedding...
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