To this day, she’s still sad. Because there’s not some finite amount of pain inside us. Our bodies and minds just keep manufacturing more of it. I’m just saying that I took the pain that...

Sooner or later we all lose our loved ones. We all have to suffer, every last one of us.

It just took some people a little longer than others to realize how few words they needed to get by, how much of life they could negotiate in silence.

They both seemed to understand that describing it was beyond their powers, the gratitude that spreads through your body when a burden gets lifted, and the sense of homecoming that follows, when you suddenly remember...

Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she discovered that she’d booked passage on a sinking ship. There aren’t any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession’s glutted with tenured...

That’s why we get involved with other people, right? Not just for their bodies, but for everything else, too – their dreams and their scars and their stories.

She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two,...

I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from...

I’ve matured. I have a much higher tolerance for boredom.

Things change all the time – abruptly, unpredictably, and often for no good reason. But knowing that didn’t do you that much good, apparently.

At a certain point, that’s all you have left.

I’m only human, she told herself. There’s not enough room in my heart for everyone.

He knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling.

Back then, when everybody thought the world would last forever, nobody had time for anything.

Nora had been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them – not at all – but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For...

These days he was like a zombie, all grim business, just another jerk with an erection.

Apparently even the most awful tragedies, and the people they’d ruined, got a little stale after a while.

After all, what was adult life but one moment of weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected of them at any...

Next time she’d have to ask him to keep the light on while he did it, so she could watch his face. That was the best part of the whole thing as far as she...