Sarah'nın gülmek yerine, Komik, ya da gülümsemek yerine, İlginç, ya da Aptal zırva geri zekâlının tekisin, demek yerine, Şey, sanırım bu ondan biraz daha karmaşık, diyen kadınlardan olmasından korktum...
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.
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...
Often, when she spoke to men at parties, she rushed things in her mind. As the man politely blathered on, she would fall in love, marry, then find herself in a bitter custody battle with him for the k...
My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, Hi, do you have any kids? and then, Why...
My grandmother, who, when I visited, stared at me with the staggering, arrogant stare of the dying, the wise vapidity of the already gone; she refused to occupy the features of her face.
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.
It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.
If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You d...
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 was already becoming a woman who sized up another one fast—I was becoming typical.
I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now....
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...
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...
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 feel his lack of love for me.
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.
Her body was a mix of thin and plump, her skin lined and unlined, in that rounding-the-corner-to-fifty way. , he chanted silently, .
Good God, cries the Mother. Everything inside her suddenly begins to cower and shrink, a thinning of bones. Perhaps this is a soldier's readiness, but it has the whiff of death and defeat. It feels li...