I did not pity her at all. In a way I admired her. I admired her lack of compunction, the courage of her bad manners, the energy of simple rage. Throwing a bag of spaghetti had a simplicity to it, a r...
I consider these things idly. Each one of them seems the same size as all the others. Not one seems preferable. Fatigue is here, in my body, in my legs and eyes. That is what gets you in the end. Fait...
I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it’s shameful or immodest but because I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to look at something that determines me so completely.
I admired my mother in some ways, although things between us were never easy. She expected too much from me, I felt. She expected me to vindicate her life for her, and the choices she'd made. I didn't...
Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.
Human society, they claimed, was a sort of monster, its main byproducts being corpses and rubble. It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over, trading short-term gain for long-...
How old do you have to get before wisdom descends like a plastic bag over your head and you learn to keep your big mouth shut? Maybe never. Maybe you get more frivolous with age.
How long were you supposed to mourn, and what did they say? Make your life a tribute to the loved one.
How furious she must be, now that she's been taken at her word.
How easy it is, treachery. You just slide into it.
Home is where the heart is, I thought now, gathering myself together in Betty's Luncheonette. I had no heart any more, it had been broken; or not broken, it simply wasn't there any more. It had been s...
His mother said that all children were arsonists at heart, and if not for the lighter he’d have used matches.
His generation believed that if there was trouble all you’d have to do was shoot someone and then it would be okay.
Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.
Her metaphors for her children included barnacles encrusting a ship and limpets clinging to a rock.
He was not a monster, to her ... How easy to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
He told me that everyone had a hidden door, which was the way into the heart, and that it was a point of honour with him to be able to find the handles to those doors. For the heart was both key and l...
He thought of it as a contest, like the children at school who would twist your arm and say Give in? Give in? until you did; then they would let go. He didn't love me, it was an idea of himself he lov...
He slides off into half-sleep and dreams of Oryx, floating on her back in a swimming pool, wearing an outfit that appears to be made of delicate white tissue-paper petals. They spread out around her,...
He needs to be listened to, he needs to be heard. He needs at least the illusion of being understood.