I nodded, trying to imagine the very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yogurt now found only in France. It was a very special sort of sadness, individual, and in its inability to induce sympathy,...

Why do you haunt me? You, like a tattoo on my tongue, like the bay leaf at the bottom of every pan. You who sprawled out beside me and sang my horoscope to a Schubert...

Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter...

Bummer,’ said Ira, his new word for “I must remain as neutral as possible” and “Your mother’s a whore.

Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain…

This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic.

She was afraid, and the afraid, she realized, sought opportunities for bravery in love.

She hated money! though she knew it was like blood and you needed it. Still, it was also like blood in that she often couldn’t stand the sight of it.

Observing others go through them, he used to admire midlife crises, the courage and shamelessness and existential daring of them, but after he’d watched his own wife, a respectable nursery school teacher, produce and star...

I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.

Though she would have preferred long ago to have died, fled, gotten it all over with, the body–Jesus, how the body!–took its time. It possessed its own wishes and nostalgias. You could not just turn...

Surely that was why faith had been invented: to raise teenagers without dying. Although of course it was also why death was invented: to escape teenagers altogether.

Well, not really fall apart.

I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it.

The passive voice could always be used to obscure blame.

A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.

Every family is a family of alligators.

She knew there were only small joys in life–the big ones were too complicated to be joys when you got all through–and once you realized that, it took a lot of the pressure off.

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to...

Life is sad. Here is someone.

I don’t go back and look at my early work, because the last time I did, many years ago, it left me cringing. If one publishes, then one is creating a public record of Learning...

I looked in vain for LaRoue, my cruelty toward her now in me like a splinter, where it would sit for years in my helpless memory, the skin growing around; what else can memory do?...

They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and...

Let’s make our own way,’ says the Mother, ‘and not in this boat.

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she’d noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

though what bird in the best of circumstances does not look a little stricken?

What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies...

My new apartment might be a place where there are lots of children. They might gather on my porch to play, and when I step out for groceries, they will ask me, “Hi, do you...

I don’t have a love life. I have a like life.’Mamie smiled. She thought how nice that might be, to be peacefully free from love…

Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world...

If you had forgotten, it would quickly come back to you. Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind...

But it would be like going to Heaven and not finding any of your friends there. Her life would go all beatific and empty in the eyes.

I watched my friend Eleanor give birth,” she said. “Once you’ve seen a child born, you realize a baby’s not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you...

It was strange, this toxic little vein, strange to stand above it, looking down at night, in a dangerous neighborhood, as if they were in love and entitled to such adventures.

Tell me something wonderful,” he said to Dane. “Tell me that we are going to die dreamfully and loved in our sleep.””You’re always writing one of your plays on the phone,” said Dane.”I said, something...

Aloneness was like riding a bike. At gunpoint. With the gun in your own hand. Aloneness was the air in your tires, the wind in your hair. You didn’t have to go looking for it...

I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed...

So much urgent and lifelike love went rumbling around underground and died there, never got expressed at all, so let some errant inconvenient attraction have its way. There was so little time

It reminded me of how children always thought too big; how the world tackled and chiseled them to keep them safe.

Anyone who’s read all of Proust plus The Man withour Qualities is bound t be missing out on a few other titles.

I’ll go see her tonight,’ I said. I felt I was a person of my word, and by saying something I could make it so. It was less like integrity perhaps and more like magic.

Mave believed that not being able to see your life clearly, to scrutinize it intelligently, meant that probably you were at the dead center of it, and that couldn’t possibly be a bad thing.

He began to prefer talking on the phone to actually getting together with someone, preferred the bodilessness of it, and started to turn down social engagements. He didn’t want to actually sit across from someone...

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed.

Guns, she was reminded then, were not for girls. They were for boys. They were invented by boys. They were invented by boys who had never gotten over their disappointment that accompanying their own orgasm...

Her rage flopped awkwardly away like a duck. She felt as she had when her cold, fierce parents had at last grown sick and old, stick-boned and saggy, protected by infirmity the way cuteness protected...

Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was...

Later I would come to believe that erotic ties were all a spell, a temporary psychosis, even a kind of violence, or at least they coexisted with these states. I noted that criminals as well...