Their home was nice, the food was nice, the girls were nice – nice, nice, nice.I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate. […] These were good people and...

Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed.

Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn’t tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.

Casting my own eye down Fifth Avenue as my belly swelled, I would register with incredulity: Every one of these people came from a woman’s cunt.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him – because broken machines are easier to fix.

However gnawing a deficiency, satiety is worse… We are meant to be hungry.

He wasn’t mad, he was sad.

The Web, the great time-killer that had replaced conspicuously passive television with its seductive illusion of productivity.

The good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story.

Had I catalogued the downsides of parenthood, “son might turn out to be a killer” would never have turned up on the list. Rather, it might have looked something like this:1. Hassle.2. Less time just...

A lot of people get so hung up on what they can’t have that they don’t think for a second about whether they really want it.

Needing kindness myself, I am kinder now, and we get on amazingly well. [p. 110]

In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

Outside, she thought that there ought to be a word for it: the air temperature that was perfectly neither hot nor cold. One degree lower, and she might have felt a faint misgiving about not...

You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.

I’m pregnant.” I instinctively picture a sixteen-year-old at the dinner table- pale, unwell, with a scoundrel of a boyfriend- forcing herself to blurt out her mother’s deepest fear.) (27)

I am vain, or once was, and one of my vanities was to feign that I was not.

I thought at the time that I couldn’t be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

This pervasive craving to be recognized as special amounted to an abdication of power, an outsourcing of your core responsibilities. I spurned the fawning of strangers, but I did feel special to myself. I had...

Wasn’t there only one respectable memento of a man worth keeping, the kind that draws Valentines and learns to spell Mississippi?

In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting. Earthly countries and single malignant boys can go to hell; the idea of countries and the idea of sons...

turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story. And I believe that this terror is precisely what must have snagged me, the way a ledge...

Although the infertile are entitled to sour grapes, it’s against the rules, isn’t it, to actually have a baby and spend any time at all on that banished parallel life in which you didn’t.

I glory in the emotionally commonplace

The secret is that there is no secret.

It must be this overarching commitment to what is really an abstraction, to one’s children right or wrong, that can be even more fierce than the commitment to them as explicit, difficult people, and that...

My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.

at least they wouldn’t be our same old problems… ” (22)

Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.

I realize it’s commonplace for parents to say to their child sternly, ‘I love you, but I don’t always like you.’ But what kind of love is that? It seems to me that comes down...

You can call it innocence, or you can call it gullibility, but Celia made the most common mistake of the good-hearted: she assumed that everyone else was just like her.

Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.

Per quanto ammirevole, il tuo bisogno impellente di sacrificare l’esistenza per il bene di un’altra persona poteva dipendere dal fatto che quando avevi la vita interamente nelle tue mani, non sapevi che fartene. Immolarsi a...

At only ten a.m., Edgar found himself already eyeing the Doritos on the counter. One thing he hadn’t anticipated about the ‘home office’ was Snack Syndrome; lately his mental energies divided evenly between his new...

We all do it (or I used to-yes, once in a while, Franklin, what did you think?), we all know we all do it, but it isn’t customary to say, “Honey, could you keep an...

There is one province in which, sooner or later, virtually everyone gets dealt a leading role–hero, heroine, or villain…. Unlike the slight implications of quotidian dilemmas that confront the average citizen in other areas of...

We’d been assured it wouldn’t be painful, though she might experience ‘discomfort,’ a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn’t yours.

Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn’t the real problem, though it took him a long...

It isn’t very nice to admit, but domestic violence has its uses. So raw and unleashed, it tears away the veil of civilization that comes between us as much as it makes life possible. A...

A carpet of despair which lay underneath the levels of fury.

For that matter, all this, is there a God? Corlis — I don’t care!””Huh,” I considered. “I guess I don’t either”.”Most people don’t! All they care about,” he added grimly, “is being right”.

I can’t imagine that I’m supposed to get over it , like hopping a low stone wall; if Thursday was a barrier of some kind, it was made of razor wire, which I did not...

I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.

Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.

…trying to be a good mother may be as distant from being a good mother as trying to have a good time is from truly having one.

I still get plenty anxious. The weird thing, and the unpleasant surprise for me, of proceeding well into the middle, perhaps even post-prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier....

The existence of other people is essentially awkward.

But I was beginning to intuit that full-blown maturity was not so very different from childhood. Both states in their extreme were all about following the rules.

These were good people and they had been good to us and we had therefore had a good time. To conclude otherwise was frightening, raising the specter of some unnameable quantity without which we could...