Your numbness is something perhaps you cannot help. It is what the world has done to you. But your coldness. That is what you do to the world.
We got hard hearts, she said with an accent that wasn't really any particular accent at all. She wasn't good at accents.
Things, however, rarely happened the way you understood them. Mostly they just sort of drove up alongside what you thought was the case and then moved randomly down some other way.
There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?
The night before, a whole day could have shape and design. But when it was upon you, it could vanish tragically to air.
Philosophize: you are a mistress, part of a great hysterical you mean historical tradition.
Pek çok eski Fransız tüccarı doğayla, özellikle de suyla öyle düşmanca ilişkiler içindeymiş ki isim verdikleri her şey kasvetlerini taşıyordu: bütün hoş tatil yerlerinin adları Fransızcadan Ölümün Kap...
No, I'm not Jewish, she said archly, staring him down, to teach him, to teach him this: Are you?Yes, he said. He studied her eyes.Oh, she said.Not many of us in this part of the world, so I thought I'...
No matter that you anticipate a thing; you get so used to it as part of the future that its actuality, its arrival, its force and presence, startles you, takes you by surprise, as would a ghost sudden...
Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.
I used to think that those essentially happy and romantic novels that ended with a wedding were all wrong, that they had left out the most interesting part of the story.
I tried not to think about my life. I did not have any good solid plans for it long-term - no bad plans either, no plans at all - and the lostness of that, compared with the clear ambitions of my frie...
Her voice was husky, vibrating, slightly flat, coming in just under each note like a saucer under a cup.
Bummer,' said Ira, his new word for I must remain as neutral as possible and Your mother's a whore.
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...
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.
Years later, when they were killed in a car crash on the Farm to Market Road, and the Nell-that-never-lived died with them, Olena, numbly rearranging the letters of her own name on the envelopes of th...
Win them with your beauty, but catch them off guard with your soul.
When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.
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...