She sees where she is, she's here, by herself, she's stranded in the future. She doesn't know how to get back.
She rents herself a large, empty apartment on the top floor of a house. She has no long-term plans. At night she listens to the radio and cooks subsistence meals, and cries onto her plate.
She knows she's deceiving herself about that, but she prefers to deceive herself. She desperately needs to believe such pure joy is still possible.
She had no images of this love. She could offer no anecdotes. It was a belief rather than a memory.
She doesn’t have to stay locked into place, into this mournful, drawn-out, low-grade misery. She has all kinds of choices and possibilities, and the only thing that’s keeping her away from them is lac...
She did not believe he was a monster. He was not a monster, to her. Probably he had some endearing trait: he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog Liebchen and...
She breathes in the cold air; pellets of blown ice whip against her face. The wind’s getting up, as the TV said it would. Nonetheless there’s something brisk about being out in the storm, something en...
She began to fret about God's exact location. It was the Sunday-school teacher's fault: God is everywhere, she'd said, and Laura wanted to know: was God in the sun, was God in the moon, was God in the...
Sex is like a drink, it's bad to start brooding about it too early in the day.
Sanity is a valuable possession: I hoard it the way people once hoarded money.
Sanity is a valuable possesion; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.
Romantic people are not supposed to laugh, I know that much from looking at the pictures.
Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you’d call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble. Otherwise it...
People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also they never fart.
Part of what impelled him was stubbornness; resentment, even. The system had filed him among the rejects, and what he was studying was considered—at the decision-making levels, the levels of real powe...
Pain marks you, but too deep to see.
Our big mistake was teaching them to read. We won't make that mistake again.
One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page- meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown...
On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.
Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings. Then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the ge...