Having already funneled its students to their respective classrooms, the school's front hall was empty, its glass showcase in the same neglected spot outside the front office. ... She looked at it bri...
She has often felt that her outsides were too dull for her insides, that deep within her there was something better than what everyone else could see.
Don’t want to make photographs. The way you described it with Capa’s work is exactly right: I want to make windows.
[O]nce you can read, you can no longer open a book and see a jumble of letters; after you get to know someone's face, you can't see her as a stranger.
While she eventually adjusts to the faded motivational posters featuring long-dead baby animals and the fifties-era reading books whose soporific effects have intensified with each decade of use she c...
What struck Celia most about young children was the intensity of their passions, life too new to be modulated, perspective a possession not yet acquired.
We are, because we remember. As each new present blinks out, its heart is weighed and then judged, preserved in mental amber or consumed.
They WERE walking alongside the road, they WERE hit by a car, and now they ARE dead. It doesn't work. Are is present tense. Dead is -- well, dead is past, isn't it? Present tense modifying past; being...
The two bond over their mutual lack of family ties: Saul from his disownment, Miriam from the car accident that orphaned her as a college junior. Both want children. Miriam has inherited her parents'...
The day's dashed hopes had temporarily reduced her to the childish presumption that someone she loved should, in return for that love, be able to read her mind.
At this time on a weekday morning, the library was refuge to the retired, the unemployed, and the unemployable. ... 'I'm not always this gabby,' the librarian said. 'It's just so nice to talk to someo...
Rushing toward her are all the letters of the alphabet. Each one moves in its own way, X cartwheeling over and over, C hopping forward, M and N marching stiff-legged and resolute.
Picture or no picture, people will keep killing each other using methods old and new—day after day, year after year, centuries of killing—until one way or another we’re all dead, and all the guns and...
Miriam will never know what kind of dog attacked her, will imagine a Doberman or a German shepherd with snarling, angry teeth despite the fact she bears neither bite marks nor broken skin. It will nev...
Miriam came to consider Eliza a gosling born into a family of ducks, loved and accepted, but always and forever a goose.
Equity, they came to realize, was not the same thing as equivalence, as evidenced by beside tables and snowflakes the world over.
Eliza wonders if death is not a sleep you can’t wake up from but life reduced to one inescapable moment.