I told him the truth, that I loved him and didn't regret anything about our lives together. But do we ever 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God' as my father use...
Here was a wish from another lifetime, granted twenty-five years too late, as if God were in a place so distant that it took almost forever for wishes to travel there, like pale starlight from a dista...
Hell, at twenty, he’d been ready to junk everything and start over too. But now, at sixty, he was less willing to throw things away that could be patched together and kept running for a few more month...
He was an amiable man who believed in amiable solutions, who forgave easily and couldn’t understand that other people derived pleasure from withholding the very thing he always gave so freely.
Don't even the best and most fortunate of lives hint at other possibilities, at a different kind of sweetness and, yes, bitterness too? Isn't this why we can't help feeling cheated, even when we know...
But of course everything had conspired to spoil her entrance, which only went to prove what Janine already knew: that no matter how well you planned something, God always planned better. If He was fee...
Because—and don’t let anybody tell you different—novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.
Amazing, isn’t it, when you think about it, how the world keeps on turning, no matter how fucked up things get? In
They were dreamers who felt no urgency about bringing their dreams to fruition.
Most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt.
Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully—people still remarked—was nobody’s fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application—that at sixty, he w...
The nurse who came in to take her blood was the same one who’d taken her blood pressure earlier, and she slapped the flesh on Miss Beryl’s arm with some annoyance, as if she’d have preferred it to ass...
People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with au...
Late middle age, he was coming to understand, was a time of life when everything was predictable and yet somehow you failed to see any of it coming.
La forma más rápida de engendrar un nuevo deseo es satisfacer uno antiguo.
It always amazed me how little he understood what I was feeling. It meant, among other things, that my understanding of him probably wasn’t much better.
If she wanted to go back to Boston so damn bad, she should just do it. He said this knowing full well she wouldn’t, for it was the particular curse of the Whiting men that their wives remained loyal t...
I must be losing patience with my fellow humans, Miss Beryl went on. Anymore I'm all for executing people who are mean to children. I used to favor just cutting off their feet. Now I want to rid the w...
He clearly regarded finding the glove compartment locked now as a disappointing development. Like arriving someplace for dinner, assuming you'd be welcome, and finding your place setting in the cupboa...
For people who dealt largely in dreams, his father was fond of observing, realtors were a surprisingly unromantic bunch, like card counters in a Vegas casino.