Without the balancing setting of everyday life all you have is the news, and news by its nature is generally bad.
We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted.
To look back at all past work induces nausea [...] It's like taking a tour of a cell in which you were once incarcerated.
This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody's world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single fest...
They were touched by the same inheritance.
The mantra of the makeover junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation...
The happy ending is never universal. Someone is always left behind.
The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
The fate of the young man in his headphones, who faced a jail cell that very night, did not seem such a world away from his own predicament: an anniversary party full of academics.
That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.
Sometimes I wonder if people don't want freedom as much as they want meaning.
She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to...
She hopes for nothing except fine weather and a resolution. She wants to end properly, like a good sentence.
Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And
People were not people but merely an effect of language. You could conjure them up and kill them in a sentence
Only as an adult did I come to truly admire [my mother]...for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself
On BeautyNo, we could not itemize the listof sins they can't forgive us.The beautiful don't lack the wound.It is always beginning to snow.Of sins they can't forgive usspeech is beautifully useless.It...
Not even the Catholics would forgive them for it (and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate politicians give out promises and whores give out)
My evidence—such as it is—is almost always intimate. I feel this—do you? I’m struck by this thought—are you?
Mum, you just said it yourself: you can't save everybody.