I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It's a slippery slope, and it's best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep...
I hated my job, but I liked that I could do it
A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.
It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing....
But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this—caring for this bo...
And together we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little.
The singer was lifted up and illuminated with gratitude, not for any one thing, but for the whole of his life, even for the agony. Even in Latin you could tell he was thanking God for the agony in par...
The funny thing about my procrastination was that I was almost done with the screenplay. I was like a person who had fought dragons and lost limbs and crawled through swamps and now, finally, the cast...
Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer th...
Sometimes I lie in bed trying to decide which of my friends I truly care about, and I always come to the same conclusion: none of them.
Show us life, now
One reason Helena and I would never be close friends is that I am about half as tall as she. People tend to stick to their own size group because it’s easier on the neck. Unless they are romantically...
It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.
It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
It must happen all the time, a fleeting passion overwhelms someone's true course and there's nothing to be done about it.
It is terrible to have to ask for anything ever. We wish we were something that needed nothing, like paint. But even paint needs repainting.
It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed.
If you are sad, ask yourself why you are sad. Then pick up the phone and call someone and tell him the answer to the question. If you don't know anyone, call the operator and tell him. Most people don...
I was still feeling the old loss, just in a new way.
I walked to the car and wished that I could walk toward the car forever, with this confidence about where I was headed.