I remembered what Dad said once, that some people have all of life's answers worked out the day they're born and there's no use trying to teach them anything new. 'They're closed for business even though, somewhat confusingly, their doors open at ele...
,' Dad said, 'has the sort of ellipsis ending most American audiences would rather undergo a root canal than be left with, not only because they loathe anything left to the imagination-we're talking about the country that invented spandex-but also be...
They saw me. Milton's smile curled off his face like unsticky tape. And I knew immediately, I was a boy band, a boondoggle, born fool. He was going to pull a Danny Zuko in when Sandy says hello to him in front of the T-Birds, a Mrs. Robinson when she...
Always live your life with your biography in mind.
Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.
How scary and sudden the shift from Living to Dead.
Well, it doesn't look good. Makes me look like one of those unloved latchkey children they make after-school specials about." "Don't sell yourself short. You're more Masterpiece Theatre.
No wonder so many adults long to return to university, to all those deadlines--ahhh, that structure! Scaffolding to which we may cling! Even if it arbitrary, without it, we're lost, wholly incapable of separating the Romantic from the Victorian in ou...
A deus ex machina will never appear in real life so you best make other arrangements.
I actually felt awed by the remote possibilities of the person liked ever liking you back a corresponding amount.
Dad's romances could last anywhere between a platypus egg incubation (19-21 days) and a squirrel pregnancy (24-45 days).
One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.
...I couldn't let go of the thought that it had, in fact, been he, restless and moody Heathcliff. Day after day, he floated through all the Wal-Marts in America, searching for me in a million lonely aisles.
Well, everyone and their grandmother knows she's still banging Charles after all these years —" "Like a screen in a tornado. Sure.
Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, des...
Sadly, American teenagers are to a weightless vacuum as seat cushions are to polyurethane foam -
