My friends have hated Asa, first for monopolizing my mind, then for the endless discussions of him they were subjected to, finally, for making me unhappy.
Life was hellish, she knew that. But, her smile hinted, she’d burned all that out of her.
I’ve gone back to the Frick since then to look at her and at the two other Vermeers. Vermeers, after all, are hard to come by, and the one in Boston has been stolen. The other two are self-contained p...
It's one of the reasons I became a writer, to be able to smoke in peace.
I was trying to explain my situation to myself. My situation was that I was in pain and nobody knew it, even I had trouble knowing it. So I told myself, over and over, You are in pain. It was the only...
I can't come up with reassuring answers to the terrible questions they raise. Don't ask me those questions! Don't ask me what life means or how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelati...
I always got irritated when he told me he wasn't a doctor. Technically, he was a doctor. Being a doctor is like being a Jew; you can't get away from it.
He would take refuge in a homey understanding of Faroese ways only to be slapped back to an uncomfortable position as an American by some terrible smell: uncomfortable because he could no more now ima...
Girl, interrupted.
For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands...
Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression.
Emptiness and boredom: what a complete understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair and boredom.
Asa’s smell (the fragrance of a beautiful man) is what I miss the most.[…] Like a virus his smell entered me and changed my cells,slowly, over years, until they craved only that smell, which was their...
You could also request to be locked into the seclusion room. Not many people made that request. You had to request to get out too. A nurse would look through the chicken wire and decide if you were re...
When digital watches were invented years later they reminded me of five-minute checks. They murdered time in the same way -slowly- chopping off pieces of it and lobbing them into the dustbin with a li...
Translation: I need to know the particulars of craziness so I can assure myself that I’m not crazy.
This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted.
The question was, What could we do?Could we get up every morning and take showers and put on clothes and go to work? Could we think straight? Could we not say crazy things when they occurred to us?Som...
The meat was bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping. And, though I had a six-month respite from thinking about it, so was I.
That’s because the analysts are writing about a country they call Mind and the neuroscientists are reporting from a country they call Brain.