I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management
I couldn't imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric.
He talked and talked, the kind of talking you do to stave off the inevitable physical desire, the kind of talking that only increases it.
Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.
Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts;... Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.
For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt—something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends—Merlin, Wan-Si, et al.—clapped her on the back and congratulate...
But it's hard, when you're at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others.
But equally you can’t fight for a freedom you’ve forgotten how to identify.
Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say.
Big words. But how fragile is Clara’s atheism! Like one of those tiny glass doves Hortense keeps in the lounge cabinet – a breath would knock it over.
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass.
And drunk men take dares like they take breaths.
A clear and unified voice. In that context, this business of being biracial, of being half black and half white, is awkward.
This new delicacy, this suggestions of mortal time working on her just as it works on everybody, spoke to me more loudly than any of the old accusations of daughterly neglect ever had.
…) hrůza se ze všech emocí, co jich na světě je, nejvíc vzpírá tomu, aby si ji člověk dokázal udržet déle než okamžik.
Things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our
Free-form conversations that could eat up whole days.
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn’t feel this way?