Phoebe realized how very wrong she’d been about this house, this family. It was far darker, more dangerous than the places she’d grown up in. In the dingy little apartments her mother rented, everything was out in the open. Their lives were dirty...
It’s impossible to park on Tremont or even idle there for more than thirty seconds. A platoon of meter maids, imported from the female Hitler Youth shortly after the fall of Berlin, roam the street, at least two to a block, pit bull faces on top of...
He's like six hundred years younger than you are. I refuse to be the moral compass of our cell! Most weekends I have an intoxispell bong attached to my mouth like a respirator. I love scatological humor, and I list 'pranks involving nuclear waste' an...
I’ve never cheated on a lover. I’m faithful, always. But the war comes before anyone’s feelings. Every time.” Wow. Battle before love. Without a doubt, he was the most unromantic male she’d ever met. Even more so than her great-grandfather,...
Your core, lying deep within you, is what makes you what you are. Some call it the soul, the Higher Self, the true self, the being and so on. The name is unimportant once you realize that you are more than your looks and outward appearance.
They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the “blaze of passion” often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under th...
History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than ...
Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself & in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying, & human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life justifies itself only if its effort to per...
If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family member was cleared for takeoff or landing. Even my fat...
Why can't you just lie and cheat like the others?" Dan snapped. "Can't you just see that's better than being nice one minute and then turning around and selling us out? It may be very Cahill, but it ! Grace had a saying: Fool me once, shame on you; f...
It’s not like love at first sight, really. It’s more like… gravity moves. When you see her, suddenly it’s not the earth holding you here anymore. She does. And nothing matters more than her. And you would do anything for her, be anything for ...
A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he think...
ECONOMICS IS HAUNTED by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, sa...
And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing - maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and...
I learned to separate the story from the writing, probably the most important thing that any storyteller has to learn— that there are a thousand right ways to tell a story, and ten million wrong ones, and you’re a lot more likely to find one of t...
It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence: this, I think, is not so...
I think people over the age of 6’2” look great. Just look at me! I was born in less than 19.82 inches.
I realized that with Chance and me, there were no secrets. Or at least none that I could otherwise explain. I said, "I trust you more than I trust my own family, you know that?" "Well, they don't set the bar real high." He smiled at me, a silly, play...
I’m not good at talking. Can’t I just nod my way through a conversation? It’s better than nodding off.
I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhap...
When I got married, I could not have chosen a more gorgeous, loving, or perfect woman to crush than the one I broke up with to be with my wife.
