My mother had more than once remarked that my father was one of the war's casualties, that the Sam Hall who came back wasn't the one who left, the one she'd fallen in love with. I didn't doubt that sh...
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...
I'm about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don't have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I'm going to a...
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...
He'd discovered that his memories of that summer were like bad movie montages - young lovers tossing a Frisbee in the park, sharing a melting ice-cream cone, bicycling along the river, laughing, talki...
He looks like he sucked the bottle dry about three in the morning and then stayed awake another hour or two to whistle into it.
Aware, as always, that the truth isn't much of substitute for a good answer.
If my career continues along its current arc, people will probably look at me and see a writer who is obsessed with the relationship between rich and poor and with how the rich somehow or other always...
You can't possibly judge your ability to control something until you've experienced the extremes of its capabilities.
Though here his voice faltered, because he knew as well as she did what came next, what words came next. If he could speak them, he might even convince her they were true, as his father had convinced...
They stayed, many of them, because staying was easier and less scary than leaving,
These are not men of great imagination, but one can hardly blame them for not being prepared for this particular contingency, the sight of a tweet-jacketed, tenured, middle-aged, senior professor and...
The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year's infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they'd settle for th...
The cutthroat savagery of high school romance inspired in nearly all adults a collective amnesia. Having survived it themselves, they locked those memories far away in some dark chamber of their subco...
One of the unfortunate side effects of teaching for forty years was that the task was so monumental, even in recollection, that it sometimes seemed you’d tried to teach everyone on the planet. What Mi...
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...
My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over. That, very simply, was what adulthood...
Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.
Miss Beryl: Doesn't it bother you that you haven't done more with the life God gave you?Sully: Not often. Now and then.