All this talk of lost love has made me hungry. I eat like a horse and stand tall and proud like a jockey.
I am a bowling alley celebrity. Women throw themselves at me. Sometimes other women (larger women) throw other women (smaller women) at me.
Exposing the truth almost always hurts some, but helps others. But if you don’t expose it, you’ll still be hurting some and helping others. Just the other others.
If Agatha had a twin, an exact duplicate, would I still feel she’s irreplaceable? And if I had a twin, would my value double, or be worth half as much?
Agatha had a face like an avocado, and a voice like guacamole. I know because I eat lime scented (and flavored) tortilla chips all the time (except at 4:44).
It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly ...
That was how it was, sometimes. You put yourself in front of the thing and waited for whatever was going to happen and that was all. It scared you and it didn't matter. You stood and faced it. There was no outwitting anything. When Almondine had been...
A person could stop a specific thing, but they couldn’t stop change in general. Rivers can’t run backward. Yet, he felt there must be an alternative, neither willfulness nor resignation. He couldn’t put words to it. All he knew was, neither of ...
Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was to...
She needed to recover. His father had died in January; it was only the end of May. They needed to stick to the routine they'd established during the intervening months. in that way, their life would return to its original shape, like a spring stretch...
Just when normal life felt almost possible--when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and the veil of optimism was torn aw...
Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows tha...
Acceptance. It sounds so gentle; you foolishly imagine you might try it. As if you could choose. You don’t choose. You plummet into acceptance, because the floor has collapsed beneath your feet.
When every hope is gone, 'when helpers fail and comforts flee,' I find that help arrives somehow, from I know not where. Supplication, worship, prayer are no superstition; they are acts more real than the acts of eating, drinking, sitting or walking....
My father was a doctor,' she says, 'a very kind man. He died in the early '70s, relatively young.' She taps the cigarette packet on the table. 'Of lung cancer.' 'Oh.' 'But the thing about that is,' she says as she exhales, 'it doesn't take very long ...
To read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true abo...
The sound of the blues, rhythm and blues, country music, is what we lived for, black and white alike. It gave you strength to sit on one of those throbbing Allis-Chalmers tractors all day if you knew you were gonna hear something on the radio or mayb...
Pilon complained, "It is not a good story. There are too many meanings and too many lessons in it. Some of those lessons are opposite. There is not a story to take into your head. It proves nothing." "I like it" said Pablo. "I like it because it hasn...
There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with. When the bombs stop dropping, and the camps fall back to the earth and decay, and we are done killing each other, that is what we must hold. We can never let the world take our memories o...
I'm not particularly in favor of doctrine or creed, ordination, the elevation of holy texts, the institution of church, or, for that matter, Christianity. Like most religions, it has irreconcilable shortcomings and an unforgivable history. What I do ...
Probably the wisest words that were ever uttered to me. Came from a therapist. I was sitting in her office, crying my eyes out. . . and she said, "So let me get this straight. You base your personal happiness on things entirely out of your control.
