The ants are my friends- they're blowing in the wind
That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or val...
She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.
She recognized the panic at even a moment's boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time.
She had to learn not to be afraid of a man, the way, in your childhood, you learned not to be afraid of an earthworm or a bug. Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. A...
She gave him books of poetry: Wordsworth, Whitman, all the W's. When she'd ask him how he liked them, he would say, Fine. I'm on page… and then he would tell her what page he was on and how many pages...
Marriage, she felt, was a fine arrangement generally, except that one never got it generally. One got it very, very specifically.
Life was unendurable, and yet everywhere it was endured.
It is like having a book out from the library.It is like constantly having a book out from the library.
Irrigation sprinklers like the skeletons of brontosauruses. -Tassie Keltjin
I've come to realize that life, while being everything, is also strangely not much. Except when the light shines on it a different way and then you realize it's a lot after all!
I've accrued a kind of patience, I believe, loosely like change.
I wondered about the half-life of regret.
I said nothing. If she wasn't careful, everyone would rush out of her life, life out of a burning building.
I felt nothing like a horse, whose instincts I knew were to run and run. I had mostly in life tried to stand still like a glob of coral so as not to be spotted by sharks. But now I had crawled out ont...
But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.
And it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.
1976. The Bicentennial. In the laundromat, you want for the time on your coins to run out. Through the porthole of the dryer, you watch your bedeviled towels and sheets leap and fall. The radio statio...
[Her life] had taken on the shape of a terrible mistake. She hadn't been given the proper tools to make a real life with, she decided, that was it. She'd been given a can of gravy and a hair-brush and...
Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.