Pulling through is what people do around here. There is a kind of bravery in their lives that isn’t bravery at all. It is automatic, unflinching, a mix of man and machine, consuming and unquestionable...
It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.
I don't have a love life. I have a like life.'Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love...
I don't sit down to write a funny story. Every single thing I sit down to write is meant to be sad.
But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and quee...
Let's make our own way,' says the Mother, 'and not in this boat.
How quickly bodies came to love each other, promise themselves to each other always, without asking permission. From the mind! If only she could give up her mind, let her heart swell, inflamed, her br...
Divorce, she could see, would be like marriage - a power grab, as in who would be the dog, and who would be the owner of the dog.
One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.
One should never turn one's back on a vivid imagination.
A match made in heaven - where do you get those? That's what I want to know!
But there was in the air that kind of distortion that bent you a little; it caused your usual self to grow slippery, to wander off and shop, to get blurry, bleed, bevel with possibility.
Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.
Nothing is a joke with me. It just all comes out like one.
How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses h...
It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures.
Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well as the ins...
There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.