I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they ...
There are random moments - tossing a salad, coming up the driveway to the house, ironing the seams flat on a quilt square, standing at the kitchen window and looking out at the delphiniums, hearing a burst of laughter from one of my children's rooms ...
The August 1 story had carried their joint byline; the day afterward, Woodward asked Sussman if Bernstein's name could appear with his on the follow-up story - though Bernstein was still in Miami and had not worked on it. From the on, any Watergate s...
How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those ...
They walked across 15th Street to the Madison Hotel's Montpelier Room, an opulent French restaurant. Bradlee asked for a corner table, and began the conversation. 'You'd better bring me up to date because...' He turned to order lunch in perfect Frenc...
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this ...
Just got to fnafflebrump caddwallame, all right?" Edie says, and no one pays attention. She learned at Lady Gravely's that nonsense which can be misheard is a very good way to lie without getting caught. People just insert whatever they think you mus...
The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing....
Your eyes having a nervous breakdown? Do you not know what to do? Well-guess what!” He stomps to the left of the recruit, pushing the recruit’s head into his until their cheeks meld together. He points out in front of them both. “I don’t care...
Love creates a communion with life. Love expands us, connects us, sweetens us, ennobles us. Love springs up in tender concern, it blossoms into caring action. It makes beauty out of all we touch. In any moment we can step beyond our small self and em...
...the natures of solitary people are apt to have more unmapped country in them than worldly folk imagine. They see and think and do things peculiar to themselves, and one may turn up buried treasure in them at any moment. ("Absolute Evil")
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. . All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christ...
I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add...
It occurred to Susan that men were always waiting for something cataclysmic--love or war or a giant asteroid. Every man wanted to be a hot-headed Bruce Willis character, fighting against the evil foreign enemy while despising the domestic bureaucracy...
if everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world. If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the...
When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circu...
When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, of a family line, connection. All around him, men were walking silently with their thoughts, reforming their lives, making resolutions. If I ever g...
Do you think I would look good in leather?” His lips lifted in a half smile, “I’m sure they make a bikini top and thong that would be perfect.” Her laugh deepened, “But the hard part will be convincing me to wear it.” Savannah weighed her...
That was one of the inherent flaws of faith. Belief without knowing. But worse yet: belief without action. It could be good in its own right. Beautiful, even, when embraced, but that had to be measured. Checked. Too many surrendered themselves to it....
Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, and be the one who ended up in that accident, completely dead... but you know what? It wouldn't change anything. All I can do now that they're dead is to go through the actions of living without really living...
Leo backed me against the door frame, his demeanor turning all 'take-no-prisoners' as he pinned me in place with his hips. His hands traced up and down the curve of my body until they wound their way through the loose strands of my hair. He was in co...
