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...
Also, he had the kind of mustache a college roommate of hers used to say looked like it had crawled up to find a warm spot to die.
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...
A healthy death, like anything — job promotions or looking younger — was simply a matter of feeling good about yourself. Which is where the sedatives came in. Sedate as a mint, a woman could place a h...
You only live at once. Which seemed to her all the more reason to be careful, to take it easy, to have an ordinary life.
You emptied the top rack of the dishwasher but not the bottom, so the clean dishes have gotten all mixed up with the dirty ones - and now you want to have sex?
Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.
Why not admit history's power to divide and destroy? Why attach ourselves to the age-old stories in the belief that they are truer than the new ones? By living in the past, you always know what comes...
Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.
This is Quilty's audition ritual: whenever he feels it is time for it, he calls upon himself to audition for love. He has no script, no reliable sense of stage, just a faceful of his heart's own greas...
Things, I know, stiffen and shift in memory, become what they never were before. As when an army takes over a country. Or a summer yard goes scarlet with fall and its venous leaves. One summons the ye...
Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
That was also back in the days when I thought the ice-cream man lived in his truck
Tell him not to smoke in your apartment. Tell him to get out. At first he protests. But slowly, slowly, he leaves, pulling up the collar on his expensive beige raincoat, like an old and haggard Robert...
She looked pink and beseeching, though essentially she looked the same, as people do despite the fact they have begun to turn into monsters and are about to tell you something that should require horn...
She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them — she didn't trust things written in the morning only — so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day — its moods, its...
On-yez, where are you from, dear?' asked a black-slacked, frosted-haired woman whose skin was papery and melanomic with suntan. 'Originally.' She eyed Agnes's outfit as if it might be what in fact it...
No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce—winds, seas—a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit.
Love is a fever, she said. And when you come out of it you'll discover whether you've been lucky - or not.
Like everyone he knew, he could discern the hollowness in people’s charm only when it was directed at someone other than himself.