It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.
There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you.
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.
Tessio Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of 22. Their engagement,which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff...
A changeableness, too, as if beneath my visible face there was another, having second thoughts.
in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was no less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution.
The last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we're chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.
Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.
It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.
Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.
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 so design had given way to expediency.
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.
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 it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid ...
According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 240 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed that the cocoon had begun to unravel in...
Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.
Historical fact: people stopped being human 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 quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to t...
