As a straight, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, first-world, middle-class white woman, she struggled to maintain a constant awareness of her privilege, and to avoid using it to silence or ignore...
Found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking far enough down into the early chapters
When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.
Things change all the time - abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn't do you that much good, apparently.
Taylor Swift wasn’t actually one of them—she was just pretending, the same way Jesus had pretended to be a man. That was why she stood in front of the line, ahead of the others rather than among them....
She wanted to read and think and reconnect with her collegiate self, which had been so much more open and fluid and hopeful than the versions that had succeeded it.
I was supposed to have a son.
Abstinence is perfectly reasonable in theory, Gregory said, It just doesn't work in practice. It's like dieting. You can go a day or two, maybe even a week. But eventually that pizza just smells too g...
I've been a little bit obsessed with religion, without being a religious person, for about a decade.
Us, Will had invited his camp counselor buddy, Dylan, and Dylan had brought along his roommate, this annoying kid named Sanjay. I mean, it wasn’t like there was anything wrong with Sanjay, and no, I’m...
Thinking how good it was to be free, away from the baby and from Tom, too, the two people who couldn’t help reminding her of everything that had gone wrong, and what a fool she’d been.
We’re agnostics, she used to tell her kids, back when they were little and needed a way to define themselves to their Catholic and Jewish and Unitarian friends. We don’t know if there’s a God, and nob...
We all basically live in a world that we define by the people who have disappeared.
They were good listeners, worldly yet easily shocked, hungry for details, curious and nonjudgmental at the same time, always happy to give advice, but only if it was requested.
Stan and Rudy are grown men. It's too late to shape their minds, to teach them values and a sense of compassion. You have to do that when kids are young, before their personalities harden and they com...
She had a slightly dizzying sense of being overtaken by time, the future becoming the present before she was ready.
Not that they would, but if any of the other mothers had asked how it was that Sarah, of all people, had ended up married, living in the suburbs, and caring full-time for a small child, she would have...
Kissing her just then felt perfectly normal and completely self-explanatory, the only possible course of action.
Just a dead kid in the park, one more sign that the world had lost its mind.
It's a bad dream: my English teacher is standing naked at the foot of this slightly lumpy bed, clutching a pair of not-quite-white underpants in his hand, studying me with this creepy look on his face...