Olive trees are intimate creatures, eloquent in their twistedness. It’s easy to understand why the ancients believed human spirits could be trapped inside them.

This whole country’s stolen.

Desdemona, mourning her parents, was still imprisoned by the past. And so she stood on the mountain, looking down at the emancipated city, and felt cheated by her ability to feel happy by everybody else.

She’d become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

I mean, in the end it wasn’t up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to use before we’re born.

In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they...

Mr. Lisbon had the feeling that he didn’t know who she was, that children were only strangers you agreed to live with.

The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn’t just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It...

He had the feeling that there was something physically behind his eyes, blocking the light.

But what humans forget, cells remember. The body, that elephant

The Statue of Liberty’s gender changed nothing. It was the same here as anywhere: men and their wars.

The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.

I understood at those times what I was leaving behind: the solidarity of a shared biology. Women know what it means to have a body. They understand its difficulties and frailties, its glories and pleasures....

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

The lover`s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn`t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme...

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so...

A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going...

We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.

But as I peeked at my brother’s inert body….I was aware only of what a strange thing it was to be male. Society discriminated against women, no question. But what about the discrimination of being...

Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and...

Given the choice, a yeast cell’s ideal state is to be diploid. But if it’s in an environment with a lack of nutrients, you know what happens?The diploids break into haploids again. Solitary little haploids....

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the...

We knew the pain of winter rushing up your skirt, and the ache of keeping your knees together in class, and how drab and infuriating it was to jump rope while the boys played baseball....

O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes;Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching Earth;Lie close around her; leave no room for mirthWith its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs.She hath no questions, she hath...

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and...

For the first time ever we sympathized with the President because we saw how wildly our sphere of influence was misrepresented by those in no position to know what was going on.

They didn’t exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen....

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together.

We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in…

College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were...

Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They...

During a warm winter rain … the basins of her collarbones collected water.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words.I don’t believe in “sadness”, “joy”, or “regret”.Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my...

in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising.The Second American Revolution.

A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims–these are lucky eventualites but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal...

As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in...

He knew a lot about his grandparents – and perhaps he feels he’s been endowed with abilities to go into people’s heads who are long dead – but, to a certain extent, he’s making it...

Virgin suicideWhat was that she cried?No use in stayin’On this holocaust rideShe gave me her cherryShe’s my virgin suicide

We Greeks are a moody people. Suicide makes sense to us. Putting up Christmas lights after your own daughter does it—that makes no sense. What my yia yia could never understand about America was why...

Mr. Lisbon knew his parental and neighborly duty entailed putting the retainer in a Ziploc bag, calling the Kriegers, and telling them their expensive orthodontal device was in safe keeping. Acts like theses — simple,...

[…] and the love he felt at that moment, truer than all subsequent loves because it never had to survive.

Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.

She lost much of her appetite. At night, an invisible hand kept shaking her awake every few hours. Grief was physiological, a disturbance of the blood. Sometimes a whole minute would pass in nameless dread...

It wasn’t conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it...

The essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back to where you begin.

When we asked him to sum up his impression of the girls’ emotional state at that point, he said, “Buffeted but not broken.

They thought depression was like bieng ‘depressed’. They thought it was like being in a bad mood, only worse. Therefore, they tried to get him to snap out of it.

Even our parents seemed to agree more and more with the television version of things, listening to the reporters’ inanities as though they could tell us the truth about our own lives.