It had helped to keep her sane, that writing. Then, when time had begun again and real people had entered it, she'd abandoned it here. Now it's a whisper from the past. Is that what writing amounts to...
Is that what writing amounts to? The voice your ghost would have, if it had a voice?
Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These...
If you don't like it, change it, we said, to each other and to ourselves. And so we would change for the man, for another one. Change, we were sure, was for the better always. We were revisionists; wh...
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
I've heard the long sigh go up, from around me, the sigh like air coming out of an air mattress, I've seen Aunt Lydia place her hand over the mike, to stifle the other sounds coming from behind her, I...
I wonder why trying to transcend time never even succeeds in stopping it...
I still have it in me to feel sorry for him. Moira is right, I am a wimp.
I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumors of the future.
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...
He's coming to hate the gratitude of women. It is like being fawned on by rabbits, or like being covered with syrup: you can't get it off.
He hated being dumped, even though he himself had manoeuvred the event into place.
He drowned his sorrows, though like other drowned things they had a habit of floating to the surface when least expected.
He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets.
Had he been a lunatic or an intellectually honourable man who'd thought things through to their logical conclusion? And was there any difference?
God be with you is not an unmixed blessing.
For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be — or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body...
Florida’s not the hick town you keep saying it is, says Reynolds. Times have changed; they’ve got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!
Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love...
Every night when I go to bed I think, In the morning I will wake up in my own house and things will be back the way they were.It hasn’t happened this morning, either.