One detaches oneself. One describes.
Once in a while, Jimmy would make up a word but he never once got caught out. ... He should have been pleased by his success with these verbal fabrications, but instead he was depressed by it. The mem...
On the other hand, she had an uncanny resistance to physical pain: if she burnt her mouth or cut herself, as a rule she didn't cry. It was ill will, the ill will of the universe, that distressed her.
Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a center object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Insi...
No mother is ever, completely, a child's idea of what a mother should be, and I suppose it works the other way around as well. But despite everything, we didn't do too badly by one another, we did as...
My letters! All dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string.… —ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING,Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850.
Most of us will. We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive: love or grief...
Maybe night falls because it's heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.
Mary: Some call this Eve's curse, but I think that is stupid because the real curse of Eve was having to put up with the nonsense of Adam.
Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just tools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I'd never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Ro...
Just what the doctor ordered, he says. A bottle of lemonade, a hard-boiled egg, and Thou.
It's possible to go so far in, so far down and back, they could never get you out.
It was as if they could read each other’s minds. No, not minds: each other’s mindlessness.
It isn't the sort of thing you ask questions about, because the answers are not usually answers you want to know.
In his student days, he used to argue that if a woman has no other course open to her but starvation, prostitution, or throwing herself from a bridge, then surely the prostitute, who has shown the mos...
I was stuck in Port Ticonderoga, proud bastion of the common-and-garden variety button and of lower-priced long johns for the budget-minded shoppers. I would stagnate here, nothing would ever happen t...
I wait, for the household to assemble. Household: that is what we are. The Commander is the head of the household. The house is what he holds. To have and to hold, till death do us part. The hold of a...
I try to conjure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won...
I see what he's after. He is a collector. He thinks all he has to do is give me an apple, and then he can collect me.
I remember the rules, rules that were never spelled out but every woman knew: Don't open your door to a stranger, even if he says he is the police. Make him slide his ID under the door. Don't stop on...