I felt sorry for Mary-Emma and all she was going through, every day waking up to something new. Though maybe that was what childhood was. But I couldn't quite recall that being the case for me. And pe...
I just don't want you to feel uncomfortable about this, he says.Say: Hey. I am a very cool person. I am tough. Show him your bicep.
We used awesome the way the British used brilliant: for anything at all. Perhaps . . . it was a kind of antidepressant: inflated rhetoric to keep the sorry truth at bay.
I remember thinking that once there had been a time when women died of brain fevers caught from the prick of their hat pins, and that still, after all this time, it was hard being a girl, lugging arou...
So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time
I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it's the body's reaching, bringing air to itself. I tell them that it's the heart's triumph, the victory s...
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 hairbrush and told, There you go. She’d stood there for years, blinking...
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 want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
She recognized the panic at even a moment's boredom that all these piles contained, as well as the unreasonable hopefulness regarding time.
Pleasantness was the machismo of the Midwest. There was something athletic about it. You flexed your face into a smile and let it hover there like the dare of a cat.
I would be a genius now, Quilty has said three times already, if only I’d memorized Shakespeare instead of Lulu. If only, says Mack. Mack himself would be a genius now if only he had been born a compl...
I would look out upon the wildflowers, the mulch of swamps and leaves, the spring mosses greening on the rocks, or the boulderous mountains of street-black snow, whatever season it happened to be- my...
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!
It's bad enough when they refer to medical science as 'an inexact science,' says the Mother. But when they start referring to it as 'an art,' I get extremely nervous.
When misfortune accumulated, I could feel now, it strafed you to the thinness of a nightgown, sheared you to the sheerness of a slip.
There were moments bristling with deadness, when she looked out at her life and went, Or worse, feeling interrupted and tired, Wha—?
It broke her heart that they had come to this: if one knew the future, all the unexpected glimpses of the beloved, one might have trouble finding the courage to go on. This was probably the reason nin...
Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body--Jesus, how the body!--took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn...
It is unacceptable, all the stunned and anxious missing a person is asked to endure in life. It is not to be endured, not really.
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