My post-cruise sabbatical would spark the idea for my first book, Cheaper Than Therapy: How to Keep Life’s Small Problems from Becoming Big Ones – The Lesson of the Paper Clips. How? In my data entry job all I did for 20 hours a week was paper cl...
And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel...
Once— and most of the night definitely counts as once—you can write off as a mistake. But you do this again and he's going to start thinking he has rights over you.” She knew predatory changeling men. They liked control. They particularly liked...
People are so obsessed with that these days. As long as you're healthy, what difference do a few pounds make? Crazy diets. Thirteen-year-old girls on magazine covers who wind up in hospitals because they're so anorexic. Real women don't look like tha...
Do you remember the first time we made love?" He touched his lips to hers as he said it. "We rode up in the elevator like this and couldn't keep our hands off each other, couldn't get to each other quick enough. I was mad for you. I wanted you more t...
As soon as I open this door, I'll be free. FREE! No more goofy cats screaming in my face and eating my shoes. No more biting and scratching and chasing me down the street. Outside this door is a big, wonderful world where goofy cats don't turn into f...
The ruins stretch from the river to the base of that mountain over there, about half a kilometre.’ ‘How far is that in regular measurements?’ Percy asked. Frank rolled his eyes. ‘That is a regular measurement in Canada and the rest of the wor...
Dinah and I were raised to believe money taints ordinary people, obstructs virtue, and makes a fool out of you. So, the inheritance was like a tiger somebody’d left on the doorstep of my house, and I had to figure out something to do with it. Havin...
The Universe is very, very big. It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules. Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever. Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when s...
Although Geoffrey, Gilbert and I grew up in this small place in Africa, we did many of the same things children do all over the world, only with slightly different materials. And talking with friends I've met from America and Europe, I now know this ...
When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and ...
I am noticing a big difference in the way the hospital workers are looking at me as I approach Jess’s room. The look of sincere sympathy that used to be on their faces when they made eye contact with me is gone. It has been replaced by shear helple...
He knew everything about big Mike Ainsel in this moment, and he liked Mike Ainsel. Mike Ainsel had none of the problems that Shadow had. Ainsel had never been married. Mike Ainsel had never been interrogated on a freight train by Mr. Wood an Mr. Ston...
And I couldn't make fun of her for that dream. It was my dream, too. And Indian boys weren't supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren't supposed to dream big, either. We were supposed to be happy with our limitations. But t...
Men didn't understand that you couldn't let yourself be consumed with passion when there were so many people needing your attention, when there was so much work to do. Men didn't understand that there was nothing big enough to exempt you from your ob...
I have a secret. A big, fat, hairy secret. And I’m not talking minor-league stuff, like I once let Joseph Applebaum feel me up behind the seventh-grade stairwell or I got a Brazilian wax after work last Friday or I’m hiding a neon blue vibrator c...
You don't even know if she really likes you, Oberon said as we exited and I unlocked my bike. She could be doing her customer service routine and stringing you along in hopes of a big tip the next time you come in. With dogs you just go up and smell ...
But I thought she thought he was just a big pile of jobbies?” he said. “I seen her oout walkin’, an’ when he comes ridin’ past, she sticks her nose in th’ air and looks the other wa’. In fact, sometimes I seen her wait aroound a full fi...
I had a dream about you. The leaves were falling off the trees, and clothes were falling off the mannequins. Machines have been replacing manual laborers for years, so I shed my clothes and stood naked on the street corner picketing big department st...
I often say that I don't worry about the meaning life--I can't handle that big stuff. What concerns me is the meaning life--day by day, hour by hour, while I'm doing whatever it is that I do. What counts is not what I do, but how I think about myself...
New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order re...
