When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they're absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. Louise Glück, Nostos
Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don’t use foreign expressions. It’s elitist.)
Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.
If you live in the dark a long time and the sun comes out, you do not cross into it whistling. There's an initial uprush of relief at first, then-for me, anyway- a profound dislocation. My old assumpt...
I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable because Lord knows they'...
What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.)
I think a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.
Sister was. But I couldn’t resist such a clear shot. So I said her
Our strange cynicism about truth as a possibility has permitted us to accept all manner of bullshit
Her parents roared around in the masks of monsters. Not
The trick in that town was getting through a night at all without stalling in the sludge of your own thoughts.
The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
The fact that my house was Not Right metastasized into the notion that I myself was somehow Not Right, or that my survival in the world depended on my constant vigilance against various forms of Not-R...
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every
Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.
No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable,...
If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S Story will eventually rise into view.
I lock all my scaredness down in my stomach until the fear hardens into something I hardly notice. I myself harden into a person that I hardly notice.
For me, everything's too much and nothing's enough.