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...
Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for I must remain as neutral as possible and Your mother's a whore.
At all the funerals for love, love had its neat trick of making you mourn it so much, it reappeared. Popped right up from the casket. Or, if it didn't reappear itself, it sent a relative of startling...
Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. N...
It would be a combination of comfort and surprise an audience might appreciate.
He had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six.
You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.
You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota.
When affection fell on its ass, politeness could step up.
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 I really felt was this: chopped down like a tree, a new feeling, and I was realizing that all new feelings from here on in would probably be bad ones. Surprises would no longer be good. And feeli...
We got hard hearts, she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents.
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.
Unless you have a life of great importance, she said, regrets are stupid, crumpled-up tickets to a circus that has already left town.
They looked like frogs who’d been kissed and kissed roughly, yet stayed frogs.
There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?
Then, when it didn't crash, when you succeeded in keeping it aloft with your own worthlessness, all you had to do was stagger off, locate your luggage, and, by the time a cab arrived, come up with a p...
The prospect of a war has seized his brain. It engages some old, ongoing terror in him. As a former soldier, he still believes in armies. But he believes in armies at rest, armies relaxing, armies sho...
The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riv...
The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.