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......
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 thing to remember about love affairs, says Simone, is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney....
The whiskey was going down sweet. That was what happened after a while, with no meal to assist — it had to do the food work on its own. There. We talked about death. That's talking about death?
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.
This danish is too sweetish to finish.
This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with thei...
This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!
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.
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...
Una vida así requería una autoestima exagerada. Suponía tener cantidades excesivas de esperanza y desesperación, y ponerlas al tuntún, como países tercermundistas del continente de las emociones.
We had put almost all of our possessions in storage, which was a metaphor for being twenty, as were so many things.
What is beautiful is seized, my mother said a final time, speaking of my father, whom she said had been destroyed by too many women, a heart picked over, scratched at, taken, lost. It came to me in bu...
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...
When you find out who you are, you will no longer be innocent. That will be sad for others to see. All that knowledge will show on your face and change it. But sad only for others, not for yourself. Y...
You can exclude the excluded middle, but when you ride through, on your way to a lonely and more certain place, out the window you'll see everyone you've ever known living there.
Zoe tried to sound like an older sister.
[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...
He had had some eye work done: a lift to remove the puff and bloat; he would rather look startled and insane than look fifty-six.
Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart.
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