What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope fo...
We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
To the right, the clouds have more shape and against the blue look like the figures of a Wedgwood dish. What a fine fucking bowl beneath which they have all been caught and asked to swim out their day...
Through all the muck of themselves, the times they had unobligated each other, the anger, the permitted absences, the loneliness grown dangerous, she had always returned to him. He'd had faith in that...
This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite, she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall.well, even presidents get shot, I said.
This danish is too sweetish to finish.
This ceremony of approval was a charade - everything had been decided before we got here - and as with all charades it was wanly ebullient, necessary, and thin.
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.
They were in performance. They were performing their marriage at me.
These were the sorts of notions that had been raised in all my classes, and we had chased them round and round like dogs maddened by their tails.
There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.
There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.
The thing to remember about love affairs, says Simone, is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney....
The problem with a beautiful woman is that she makes everyone around her feel hopelessly masculine, which if you’re already male to begin with poses no particular problem. But if you’re anyone else, y...
The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful equation, and then not: if x = y, if ma...
The functional disenchantment, the sweet habit of each other, had begun to put lines around her mouth, lines that looked like quotation marks--as if everything she said had already been said before......
She tried to smile warmly but wondered if she looked fakey, something Ariel sometimes accused her of. Ariel had said. It's like you're trying to be happy out of a book. Millie owned several books abou...
She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how cou...
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...
She had bought several plain pine chests to use as love seats or boot boxes, but they came to look to her more and more like children's coffins, so she returned them.