A veteran of the gender wars.
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...
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 had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
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...
There were about thirty-five people, all of them middle-aged, with the academic’s strange mixed expression of merriment and weariness. A cross between flirtation and a fender bender, Martin had descri...
There is something comforting, thinks Mack, in embracing someone the same size as you.
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 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 catalog showed a man sleeping peacefully while his model-wife read a book in soft but focused light. In real life, however, the light was so intense that the same man would have had to wear sungla...
Surrealism could not be made up. It was the very electricity of the real.
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...
Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready.
Oh, she said. I wasn't going to ask, but then you never said anything about it, so I thought I'd ask.How about you?Not me, said Odette. She had a poem about marriage. It began, Marriage is the death y...
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 want to pretend there's such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
I had seen this exact same expression and movement before - where? In the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love - the death of a man's trying. It read as Haughty Fa...
Her parents had gone from a couple who would be different, who would be better than anyone, who were determined to be better than most, to a couple who would be different because they were worse.