Get a Job, she shouted silently to God. Get a real Job.
Even his I love you's, she said, were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but is incapable of a passionate confession; of melting into a sob.
Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.
You live if you dance to the voice that ails you.
You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota.
Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert symphony, something about travel...
What was education for, if not to acquire contradictions? At least it looked like that to me.
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.
This was my modest dream come true: unambitious flight. The kind that never even got high enough for a view.
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
They had, finally, the only thing anyone really wants in life: someone to hold your hand when you die.
The situation was not easy for her, they knew. Once, at the start of last semester, she had skipped into her lecture hall singing Getting to Know You - both verses. At the request of the dean the chai...
One of the problems with people in Chicago, she remembered, was that they were never lonely at the same time.
Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.
His eyes were caught in the headlights of something - foreign policy?
Everyone these days was defensive about their lives. Everyone had settled.
Every family is a family of alligators.
But I believed in starting over. There was finally, I knew, only rupture and hurt and falling short between all persons, but, Shirley, the best revenge was to turn your life into a small gathering of...
Before he wrote about them, said Quilty, pretending to read the guidebook out loud, Hemingway shot his characters. It was considered an unusual but not unheard-of creative method. Still, even within l...
A smile, a weird one, nestled in his mouth like an egg.