There was no point in telling my father. He’d never let me quit after only one day. He couldn’t help me and he’d make some terrible blunder if he tried. Parents are too innocent for...

I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not...

Apparently, all you needed to be considered normal was no evidence to the contrary.

Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.

I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)

Let the wild ruckus commence.

A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it.

When I run the world,librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I’m the only one who doesn’t suffer from it.

Without our listening, all the stories are the same story.

I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.

He envied the bark, which had been, in the course of one lifetime, both forest and fire. One endured; one destroyed.

Language does this to our memories— simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft -told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.

Out there is South Dakota,” Kitch had said, “Matt said they treated Fern like some kind of animal.

The Indians did not like to see anything odd — a white squirrel, for instance. . . . They thought such oddities were messages, were omens of evil. . . . And the Indians put...

Every girl’s dream, if she can’t have a vampire.

A nonhuman animal had better have a good lawyer. In 1508, Bartholomé Chassenée earned fame and fortune for his eloquent representation of the rats of his French province. These rats had been charged with destroying...

Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the...

But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see.

When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their small sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book.

who knows you better than your own brother?

I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting ruin?

Trees are as close to immortality as the rest of us ever come.

Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. He was...

The happening and telling are very different things. This doesn’t mean that the story isn’t true,only that I honestly don’t know anymore if I really remember it or only remember how to tell it. Language...

Arriving late was a way of saying that your own time was more valuable than the time of the person who waited for you.

Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with,...

An “attack on SeaWorld” might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn’t always seem to distinguish between the two.

Like they say, you never know a person till you’ve done time with them.

I want a normal girlfriend. Someone restful. You know anyone like that?””I’d volunteer if you were rich,” I told him. “Like hugely rich. I could be restful for massive sums of money.””Flattered. But no.

You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep has toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.

We are so excited that, in the strangely illuminating phrase my mother favours, we’re completely beside ourselves.

So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can’t tell you how much this offends me.

The idea of our own rationality…was convincing to us only because we so wished to be convinced. To any impartial observer, could such a thing exist, the sham was patent. Emotion and instinct were the...