I'm intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.
Someone ... tell us what's important, because we no longer know.
She said that it was a mistake to have made as few superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated only on the few things I have concentrated on--her, for one. My children, for...
He needed me to do what sons do for their fathers: bear witness that they’re substantial, that they’re not hollow, not ringing absences. That they count for something when little else seems to.
First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later.
It was as if they'd discovered something that had once been there but had gotten hidden or misunderstood or forgotten over time, and they were charmed by it once more, and by one another. Which seems...
I'm a verb, Frank. Verbs don't answer questions.
He was like my father. They each wanted me to be their audience, to hear the things they needed to express.
For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples' worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at ni...
You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.
Our sympathies are most required when they seem least due.
It's odd how our fears, the ones we didn't know we had, alter our sight line and make us see things that never were.
To encounter me now at age sixty-six is to be unable to imagine me at fifteen...
Happiness for me is getting to write about the most important things I know.
And closed
She ordered a martini and encouraged me to, but said she couldn't drink it with her medication. She just liked seeing it in front of her, like the old days, all set to do its little magic.
My parents...were people running from the past, who didn't look back at much if they could help it, and whose whole life always lay somewhere in the offing.
It was if we all sensed we'd be gone someday soon in a sudden instant--often it happened in the middle of the night--and didn't want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anyb...
I know you can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up, which is what I almost did.
What’s friendship’s realest measure? I’ll tell you. The amount of precious time you’ll squander on someone else’s calamities and fuck-ups.