There was sex where you were looked in the eye and beautiful things were said to you, and then there was what Ira used to think of as yoo-hoo sex: where the other person seemed spirited away, not quit...
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...
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...
Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter Jesus Christ! and shake their heads.
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Amber was past tense. We were covering her inanimate face in the white sheet of was.
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...
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!
John had dreamed so long and hard of this place that he had hoped it right out of existence. Probably no place in the world could withstand such an assault of human wishing.
If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.