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....
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...
If you were alone when you were born, alone when you were dying, really absolutely alone when you were dead, why learn to be alone in between? If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you....
I steal back into dreams of you, your unmade bed a huge open-faced sandwich.
I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are tr...
I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending...
I am thinking of the dancing body's magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life's done so far down...
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
Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.
Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or even if there is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than ten minutes a day; like sit-ups, they...
Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six to and thirty-seven known as . It's when you don't know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, a...
And all love that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.
All the way out I listen to the car AM radio, bad lyrics of trailer park love, gin and tonic love, strobe light love, lost and found love, lost and found and lost love, lost and lost and lost love—som...
Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.
It all remained unreadable for him, though reading, he felt, was not a natural thing and should not be done to people. In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They...
You were never to say you weren't fine, thank you — and yourself? You were supposed to be Heidi. You were supposed to lug goat milk up the hills and not think twice. Heidi did not complain. Heidi did...
Which is it, she asked. Is it CLIToris or clotORis? I didn't know. Why didn't I know? It may depend on which you have, I said.
Wake up one morning with a man you had thought you'd spend your life with, and realize, a rock in your gut, that you don't even like him. Spend a weepy afternoon in his bathroom, not coming out when h...
Tone was all. Gift wrap was all. Perfect the wrap, and you could put whatever you wanted in the box. You could put firecrackers. You could put dog shit.
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in the people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. They played around and lied to their spouses. But they re...