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 missed him. Love, I realized, was something your spine memorized. There was nothing you could do about that.
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...
He calls you occasionally at the office to ask how you are. You doodle numbers and curlicues on the corners of Rolodex cards. Fiddle with your Phi Beta Kappa key. Stare out the window. You always, alw...
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
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:...
But I was not especially skilled at minding children for long spells; I grew bored, perhaps like my own mother. After I spent too much time playing their games, my mind grew peckish and longed to lose...
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...
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...
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.
A veteran of the gender wars.
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...
Tragedies, I was coming to realize through my daily studies in humanities both in and out of the classroom, were a luxury. They were constructions of an affluent society, full of sorrow and truth but...
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...
Things between us were dissolving like an ice cub in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared.
She had expected a pistol to seem light and natural-a seamless extension of her angry feral self.
Okay, I’ll just go on to the next card. He picks one up, pretending to read. It says here, ‘Darling, is there life on Mars? Yes or no.’ Mack has gone back to thinking about the paintings. I say no, he...