The shit is not the shit, he repeated solemnly, the pigeon is the shit.
The shit is *not* the shit (this was Mo's mantra,) the *pigeon* is the shit.
The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management of time—was beyond her. She measured time in pages.
The fear was respect, the respect, fear. If you didn't have the fear you had nothing.
The clarity disturbed me. She
The choice one makes between partners, between one man and another, stretches beyond romance. It is the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the wo...
The art of mid-life is surely always cloudier than the art of youth, as life itself gets cloudier.
The Noted Activist
Still, in the top left-hand corner, a huge button bought in New York's Union Square in the mid eighties: I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people...
Silence. Ah (...) Isn't that something? Did you know this is how other families are? They're quiet. Ask one of these people sitting here. They'll tell you. They've got famillies. This is how some fami...
She loved you in the morning because the day was new.
She let Howard reinvent, retouch. When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki h...
She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something.
Portnoy was not Roth and he was not real, but in him is enshrined a genuine Rothian freedom, created by Roth, once impossible, now fully realized, a freedom which anyone can now easily access. You don...
Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be.
Perhaps all this displacement of anxiety into the physical realm was a feminine way of simplifying a far deeper and more insoluble difference, for Natalie believed Tonya had a gift for living and Nata...
People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. Before the world existed, before it was...
Pain by itself is just Pain. But Pain + Distance can = entertainment, voyeurism, human interest, cinéma vérité, a good belly chuckle, a sympathetic smile, a raised eyebrow, disguised contempt.
Overnight everyone has grown up. While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.
Our mothers served as our balance, as our foot-rests.