Though surely to avoid attachments for fear of loss is to avoid life.
Funny how the nature of a normal day is the first memory to fade.
I have no end of failings as a mother, but I have always followed the rules.
...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.
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.
But the one thing he could not have imagined is that we were withholding nothing. That there was nothing on the other side of our silly rules; nothing.
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 bound over but thrash through, leaving me in flayed pieces and on the other side ...
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 to, 'I'm not oblivious to you - that is, you can still hurt my feelings - b...
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 poor substitute for the sort of passion we like to extol perhaps,...
You were patient, but I worried that your very patience tempted Kevin to try it.
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 volte è un'inutile scappa...
My mind is huge with little stories that I never told you.
...whenever a woman describes a man as sweet, the dalliance is doomed.
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.
I glory in the emotionally commonplace
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.
He wasn't mad, he was sad.
The secret is that there is no secret.