We’re all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there’s too much thought and not enough heart.

I wanted to bathe in plum juice, rediscover my body and adorn it in kiwi circles.

Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows....

And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it’s better than smoking, that’s what I say. It’s the new, lung-safe cigarette.

In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen...

With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these...

You can ruin anything if you focus at it.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.

She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones.

My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of...

Though loss did not pass from one person to another liker a baton; it just formed a bigger and bigger pool of carriers. And, she thought, scratching the coarseness of the horse’s mane, it did...

It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what’s happened.

We’re like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.

Don’t smile,” he said.

I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform...

Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me – I felt the wash of her love every day, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and...

You can’t predict the outcome. You can’t raise a child and then tell them what to think.

It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.

That’s the thing with handmade items. They still have the person’s mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone.

The world can ask you to participate, but it’s a day-today decision if you want to agree to that proposal.

…after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing...

Most teenage girls don’t give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long...

It is all about numbers. It is all about sequence. It’s the mathematical logic of being alive. If everything kept to its normal progression, we would live with the sadness–cry and then walk–but what really...

That,” she said, “is a little closer to how I imagine it works. Whether or not you pray has absolutely nothing to do with the person to your left. It’s like saying you shouldn’t get...

Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn’t appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

I give boring people something to discuss over corn.

When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.

An old man with overalls walked by; I don’t think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers.

No one needed to say it, but the room overflowed with that sort of blessing. The combination of loss and abundance. The abundance that has no guilt. The loss that has no fix. The simple...

YOU’RE IN MY MOUTH, I said. GET OUT OF MY MOUTH.

He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken...

I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me — like a message in a bottle sent in each...

[…]when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.

He said, I always thought the woman I’d marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain.

Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It’s so obvious at that point.

And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too...

It was ridiculous, at times, how many tears one body could produce.

Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.

Twice I’d come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one’s roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound,...

He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look.This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light...

Sherrie would be there, and the last time I’d seen her at a social event she burst into tears when she saw me and ran out of the room. You’re upset, I’d yelled after her,...

There are students that are scattered, who need to see something through to the finish, but I would say there are possibly more who do not entertain the leaps of the mind that need to...

We end up kissing her for an hour, and her lips are so soft they are almost like a joke.

At lunch you order steamed vegetables because you’re remembering that you have a heart too. You feel humbled by your heart, it works so hard. You want to thank it. You give your heart a...

and I get refill number three or four and the wine is making my bones loose and it’s giving my hair a red sheen and my breasts are blooming and my eyes feel sultry and...

I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.

The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It’s no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones....