Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body--Jesus, how the body!--took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn...
Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that...
Through college she had been a feminist—basically: she shaved her legs, but just not often enough, she liked to say.
To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their day...
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.
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...
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.
Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.
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...
We are lucky simply to be alive together; why get differentiating and judgemental about who is here among us? Thank God there is anyone at all.
We don't do that in New York, rasped Odette. She cleared her throat.No? Pinky smiled and put his hand on her thigh.No, it's, um, the cash machines. You just… you wait at them. Forever. Your whole life...
We got hard hearts, she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents.
We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
What is beautiful is seized, my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. It came to me in bu...
What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope fo...
What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.
When I was little, I didn’t understand that you could change a few sounds in a name or a phrase and have it mean something entirely different. When I told teachers my name was Benna and they said, Don...
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.
When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.
Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
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