When you tossed pebbles down from the embankment, they believed in God. One
When my nose finally stops bleeding and I've disposed of the bloody paper towels, Teddy Barnes insists on driving me home in his ancient Honda Civic, a car that refuses to die and that Teddy, cheap as...
We do not want what's good for us.
They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,
There are a great many sins in this world, none of them original.
That she should so puzzled him that he even questioned his behavior, entertaining, albeit briefly, the idea that he might in some fashion be responsible for the apparition of his once loving wife, who...
That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.
Slow, tick decides. Thinks happen slow. she isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is. ...Take her parents- At the time, their separatio...
Protection was my strong suit. I needed something to be protected from. I
Not giving a shit, she decided, is like the defrost option on a car's heater that miraculously unfogs the windshield, allowing you to see where you're headed.
My mother has always been the sort of woman whose emotional state can be intuited from the volume at which she rattles kitchen utensils.
My afternoon comp class is not persuaded. In fact, they feel ill-treated...I've read three short essays aloud, anonymously, for the purpose of inspiring discussion or, failing discussion, private misg...
Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.
Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.
Lest it seem that I was neglected, I should point out that once I became known to the Mohawk Grill crowd, it was like having about two dozen more or less negligent fathers whose slender attentions and...
I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?
It’s not an easy time for any parent, this moment when the realization dawns that you’ve given birth to something that will never see things the way you do, despite the fact that it is your living leg...
It was my opinion (then and now) that two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares.
Is good fiction more likely to be about the air we breathe or the nose we breathe it through?
I hear you don't write any more, he says...Not true, I inform him. You should see the margins of my student papers.Not the same as writing a book though, right?Almost identical, I assure him. Both go...