I've always had this American-pie face that would get work in commercials... I'd say things like, 'Hi, Marge, how's your laundry?' and 'Hi, I'm a real nice Georgia peach.' Sometimes this work is one step above being a cocktail waitress.
Deleting 200 spams a day is a drag. And I was checking my email constantly, rather than getting on with my real work, which is reading and writing. Email was becoming a distraction, a burden rather than a liberation.
After the baby, I got bigger, and I like it. I like me better now than when I was young and skinny. I don't understand this extreme fashion for being anorexic-skinny. We forgot about women with curves - real women. We're not embracing that anymore.
We know what happens to little black boys that have no dads; we've heard that, we get it. But no one is really saying that young women who are born without fathers have real serious issues especially when their mother had no father and the mother has...
I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, Bri...
Few Americans born after the Civil War know much about war. Real war. War that seeks you out. War that arrives on your doorstep - not once in a blue moon, but once a month or a week or a day.
Cliches about supporting the troops are designed to distract from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war, anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons the war in Iraq will not end anytime...
And he waited. He felt like he was going to throw up. What the fuck was he doing? Hadn’t he learned anything? It was one thing to flirt about sex, but this wasn’t flirting. This was pulling your heart out of your chest and giving it to someone wh...
One reason that the task of inventing manners is so difficult is that etiquette is folk custom, and people have emotional ties to the forms of their youth. That is why there is such hostility between generations in times of rapid change; their manner...
When this reality, the one and only power that checks and disciplines man from within, vanishes because belief in it is slackening, the social domain falls prey to passions. The ensuing vacuum is filled by the gas of emotion. Everyone proclaims what ...
My sister stood up, trembling, and I must admit that I expected her familiar sneer to have taken its usual place on her face. But all I could find there was unhappiness and fear. Fear of my reaction, perhaps. But when a person has lived a life like h...
I considered him and felt the now familiar crush of emotions weighing on me, begging me to cave in and fall into his strong arms. I pushed back with every ounce of energy I had left. Every time I trusted someone, I got hurt. Every time I let go, I wa...
At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (repre...
It’s actually quite the contrary. It’s time to freak the fuck out, and that’s not just acceptable, it’s obligatory. The rug has just been pulled out from beneath your feet, and everything you thought you knew with absolute certainty has vanis...
He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for ...
The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that ...
With emotional abuse, the insults, insinuations, criticism, and accusations slowly eat away at the victim’s self-esteem until he or she is incapable of judging a situation realistically. He or she may begin to believe that there is something wrong ...
I long for your embrace, your warmth, and your gentleness. I crave your touch. Your body, your mind, your words move me. I fear I am not capable of expressing the depth of my emotion, for I have never known such a feeling and never will again. As muc...
Any human companionship, even the dearest and most perfect, would have been alien to her then. She was sufficient unto herself, needing not love nor comradeship nor any human emotion to round out her felicity. Such moments come rarely in any life, bu...
Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal / financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheaval. (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely: "Nobody ever died from splitting up furniture.") It's the emotional reco...
The obsession was gone. We liked each other, even loved each other. And our sex was still good, but the hunger was gone. Either it just wore out or we wore each other out. A passion like that pushes everything else out of its path. You can't be marri...
