There’s a hurricane coming to Florida, and there will be high winds. I should probably turn off my ceiling fans, to try to mitigate the billions of dollars in damages the storm will incur.
Some people say dying alone is a fate worse than death itself. Well, they should try being alone during the living part sometimes. There's no quicker way to make you wonder why the hell you ever thought you'd want to return.
There are high places that don’t invite us, sharp shapes, glacier-scraped faces, whole ranges whose given names slip off. Any such relation as we try to make refuses to take…I’m giddy with thinking where thinking can’t stick. No Names
In times of grief and sorrow I will hold you and rock you and take your grief and make it my own. When you cry I cry and when you hurt I hurt. And together we will try to hold back the floods to tears and despair and make it through the potholed stre...
Waiting is one of the things that human beings cannot do well, though it is one of the essential things we must do successfully if we are to know happiness. We are impatient for the future and try to craft it with our own powers, but hte future will ...
She moved her hands like crane claws as she spoke, trying to dig at the essence of what she was saying. It was the dirtiest I love you I’ve ever heard.
Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in t...
Don’t spoil kids by trying to buy them off, to buy their time. Kids aren’t stupid. They know a bribe when they see one. They want a parent not a payoff.
You're tough when you need to be, and you can charm the pants off men who have three times your experience. Well, yes. Although I try not to take advantage of that too often. Very awkward negotiating with people who are sitting around in their underw...
Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, fa...
Let me tell you something, honey. Fifty percent of life is others trying to push their own agenda on you—their belief system, their views, their convictions. The other fifty percent is you deciding whether or not you’re going to let them. Or if y...
Love is a bronze statue sinking in quicksand. But if I hand you a lasso, will you try to save the statue—or use the lasso to hang yourself? If you need me, I’ll be here to kick the chair out from under your feet.
When you have cat stealers over for tea, you clean the house, buy bagels and cream cheese, and try to figure out how to trap your guests in a lie.
I even felt a vicarious guilt, like a German meeting Jewish people in Poland who had never heard of the Holocaust, or that there were Jews in America, and trying to explain it to them. Ashea, I wished I could say. Ashea.
The central issue in the marriage is not well-being or happiness. It is, as this book has tried to demonstrate, salvation. Marriage involves not only a man and a woman who happily love each other and raise offspring together, but rather two people wh...
Many marriages dry up and miss the path to individuation because the couples try to ease their situations through excluding and representing their most essential characteristics, whether these be peculiar sexual wishes, neurotic traits, or whatever. ...
January took a breath, realizing it had been a cause from her holding it in, trying to work through the puzzle she faced. If he’s a Ghost, why was she sent on a mission to kill him?
You were trying to impress her with a story about getting mauled by a thresher?” “It made sense at the time.” “Ah, youth.” He sighed. “Do you know what I would give to be young again?” “No, what?” “Nothing. In fact, you’d have t...
The more I resist [Christ] and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call 'Myself' becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events wh...
You do not understand -- no accomplishment overcomes the stigma of being different. [...] I try not to think about it and cannot eat my supper or nothing. I didn't understand it at first. But now I do. You are not different in the way difference is a...
Five German soldiers and a police dog on a leash were looking down into the bed of the creek. The soldiers' blue eyes were filled with a bleary civilian curiosity as to why one American would try to murder another one so far from home, and why the vi...
