If a piano fell from the sky, my first reaction would be, Oh my God! I hope it didn’t crush my bag of chips I left lying on the ground.
I have been stabbed, poisoned, shot, beaten, possibly raped, subjected to hypothermia, and drowned, but still I dress up as Rasputin every Halloween for the Orthodox orgy.
I know her note said she was leaving me, but there is some positive in it. At least she cared enough to tell me she didn’t care.
I think I’ll hang myself under the tree that Agatha and I had our first picnic under. I’ll just have to reschedule my dentist appointment.
Being sociable is a skill you can learn. It’s like throwing a spiral, riding a bicycle, or murdering your clone’s lover, who also happens to be your girlfriend.
If you would have asked me a year ago if I believed in aliens, I’d have laughed and said no. But that was before the abduction. I don’t laugh as much anymore, mainly due to severe rectal bleeding.
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 The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge.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....
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...
