Oh, the beautiful smiles of the insane. Soon, he was sure, there would be a study that showed that the mentally ill were actually more attractive than other people. Dating proved it!
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...
It's a fast but wimpy tumor, he explains. It typically metastasizes to the lung. He rattles off some numbers, time frames, risk statistics. Fast but wimpy: the Mother tries to imagine this combination...
I tried to live cautiously - or eventually learned to try to live - in a spirit of regret prevention, and I could not see how Bonnie could accomplish such a thing in this situation. Regret - operatic,...
I tried not to think of my one excursion to Whole Foods, over a year ago, where I found myself paralyzed by all the special food for special people, whose special murmurings seemed to be saying, Out o...
I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. I am quasi ready to go, I would announce. Or, I'm feeling a bit quasi today. Murph called me Q...
I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the...
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...
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mout...
His fish smells fishier than the others- he is sure of it. Perhaps he has been poisoned.
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...
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.
Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness.
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...
Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.
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 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...
When they slept together, she almost cried. He was a kisser, and he kissed and kissed. It seemed the kindest thing that had ever happened to her. He kissed and whispered and brought her a large glass...
When she packed up to leave, she knew that she was saying goodbye to something important, which was not that bad, in a way, because it meant that at least you had said hello to it to begin with...
Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said o...