Mirabelle knows, and she lets this be unspoken, that all free things require conversation. Sitting in a darkened movie theatre requires absolutely no conversation at all, whereas a free date, like a w...
Mirabelle is not affected by a man’s failures to approach her, as her own self-depreciating attitude never allows the idea that he would in the first place.
Lacey was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized. Alone, she was self-contained, her tightly spinning magnetic energy oscillating arou...
I understood that as much as I had resisted the outside, as much as I had constricted my life, as much as I had closed and narrowed the channels into me, there were still many takers for the quiet hea...
I might not seem like the type who could sit at an outdoor cafe drinking a latte, but I am. Why? No motion required. It's just sitting. Sitting and sipping. I can't imagine a neurosis that would preve...
I have found that-- just as in real life--imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.
He doesn’t understand the subtleties of slights and pains, that it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow...
It is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
My father muttered something to me, and I responded with a mumbled What. He shouted, You heard me, thundered up from his chair, pulled his belt out of its loops, and inflicted a beating that seemed ne...
Thinking too much also creates the illusion of causal connections between unrelated events.
There’s a rumor that a recent Oscar host is going to play Catwoman. Waiting by my phone for the call.
No, no, I could never be a woman. I'd just stay at home and play with my breasts all day.
Next phase of weight loss program: Brazilian Butt Workout. I’ve looked at a hundred photos. So far, not working.
Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She do...
MY FATHER , GLENN VERNON MARTIN , died in 1997 at age eighty-three, and afterward his friends told me how much they had loved him. They told me how enjoyable he was, how outgoing he was, how funny and...
In psychoanalysis, you try to retain a discovery; in art, once the thing is made, you let it go.
He never complicates a desire by overthinking it, unlike Mirabelle, who spins a cocoon around an idea until it is immobile.
But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:1) Babies are illogical.2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.3) Illogical persons are despised.Therefore, babie...
At least Clarissa knows I'm benign. But that is not an adjective one wants to throw around about one's spouse: This is my husband. He's benign.
Pinching my swollen fingers in between. Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just...