Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times...
It’s a terrible thing, to lie. It’s a field you keep seeding and watering and plowing, but nothing will ever grow on it. She
It was the cause of many of Dad's outrages too, when people elected themselves his personal oracle of Delphi... They'd made the mistake of abridging Dad, putting Dad in a nutshell, telling Dad How It...
It felt as if we'd been to war together. Deep in a jungle, alone, I had relied on them, these strangers. They'd held me up in ways only people could. When it was over, an ending never felt like an end...
I'd have to, if on Sunday I wanted to runoff with some slack-jawed Suzy, some invertebrate, a post-pubescentwasteoid who imagines the Khmer Rouge to be makeup and Guerrilla Warfareto be that rivalry w...
His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerge charred doves.
Grab the work when it comes, my man. Your competition is now a fourteen-year-old in pajamas with the username Truth-ninja-12 who believes fact-checking a story is reading his subject’s Twitter feed. B...
Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
Dad's Theory of Arrogance--that everyone always assumes they're the Principal Character of Desire and/or Loathing in everybody else's Broadway Play.
Dad always warned that it was misleading when one imagined people, when one sas them in the Mind's Eye, because one never remembered them as they really were, with as many inconsistencies as there wer...
But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else's story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwi...
And so fleas look up at the sky and wonder .
America's greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which s...
Watching a midforties Wonder Woman stumble backward into Hannah's net stack of Traveler magazines made me wonder if the very idea of Growing Up was a sham, the bus out of town you're so busy waiting f...
The boring relative everyone ignores—no one calls, no one writes—until they need a serious .
The territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan’s tribal region.
What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life— not the whole thing, God no— simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorg...
Today dies a crooked and gluttonus man' - it was true, at least literally; McCullough allegedly weighed three hundred pounds and suffered from scoliosis.
The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844-1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist, and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments, 1890-1901 (1902), When one travels abroad, one d...
The bad things that happen to you don’t have to mean anything at all. -Nora Halliday