Before, they had never found themselves broken together. Usually, it was one needing the other but not both needing each other, and so there had been a way, by touching, to borrow from the stronger one’s strength.
If I shut my eyes, I believed, I would disappear. To make it through, I had to be present the whole time.
Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.
I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture.
No one on the street thought anything of the downtown girl dressed in black who had paused in the middle of midtown foot traffic. In her art student camouflage she could walk the entire length of Manhattan and, if not blend in, be classified and therefore ignored.
I watched my brother and my father. The truth was very different from what we learned in school. The truth was the line between the living and the dead could be, it seemed, murky and blurred.
Out loud I said I had two children. Silently I said three. I always felt like apologizing to her for that.
I think that if you’re somebody who’s a control freak, the process would make you crazy, but I’m kind of a process freak, so I’m excited to see what he does with it. I know it’s not going to be my book, so just starting with that knowledge frees me from having to get all freaked out about it.
You’re not supposed to look back, you’re supposed to keep going.
People grow up by living.
I was trying to prove to them and to myself that I was still who I had always been. I was beautiful, if fat. I was smart, if loud. I was good, if ruined.
I would like to tell you that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe.
It’s very weird to succeed at thirty-nine years old and realize that in the midst of your failure, you were slowly building the life that you wanted anyway.
Stones and bones; snow and frost; seeds and beans and polliwogs. Paths and twigs, assorted kisses, We all know who Daddy misses! His two little frogs of girls, that’s who. They know where they are, do you, do you?
I wanted to be the moron of the family, because morons seemed to have more fun, more freedom and more personality.
Murder had a blood red door on the other side of which was everything unimaginable to everyone.
As she stood in the darkened room and watched my sister and father, I knew one of things that heaven meant. I had a choice, and it was not to divide my family in my heart.
He was beginning to understand: You were treated special and, later, something horrible would be told to you.
But also I wanted him to go away and leave me be. I was granted one weak grace. Back in the room where the green chair was still warm from his body, I blew that lonely, flickering candle out.
I tried to take solace in Holiday, our dog. I missed him in a way I hadn’t yet let myself miss my mother and father, my sister and brother. That way of missing would mean that I had accepted that I would never be with them again; it might sound silly but I didn’t believe it, would not believe it.