In my experience, it was hard to write without your preferred tools, but impossible to write without a cigarette.
The position was offered at the last minute, when the scheduled professor found a better-paying job delivering pizza.
While I know I can’t control it, what I ultimately hope to recall about my late-in-life father is not his nagging or his toes but, rather, his fingers, and the way he snaps them when listening to jazz. He’s done it forever, signifying, much as a cat does by purring, that you may approach. That all is right with the world. “Man, oh man,” he’ll say in my memory, lifting his glass and taking us all in, “isn’t this just fantastic.
I’ve been around for nearly half a century, yet still I’m afraid of everything and everyone. A child sits beside me on a plane and I make conversation, thinking how stupid I must sound. The downstairs neighbors invite me to a party and, after claiming that I have a previous engagement, I spend the entire evening confined to my bed, afraid to walk around because they might hear my footsteps.
Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab.
He told me that his sister is clinically depressed and read Naked during a month-long visit to a psychiatric hospital. According to him, once she’d finished, she loaned it to a fellow patient, who, in turn, loaned it to someone else. The book seemed to lift people’s spirits, and as a result, the hospital has made it recommended reading. I’m not sure whether I believe this, but it’s extremely flattering to think my book is being passed around a German asylum.
Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.
That’s the problem with wishes, they ensnare you. In fairy tales they’re nothing but trouble, magnifying the greed and vanity of the person for whom they are granted.
For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it – isn’t that what we’ve all been waiting for?
When it’s my turn, I’ll open my mouth, unable to speak, and feel a little tap on my wrist. Time to stand up, my watch will whisper. Then, before killing myself, I’ll say one last time, “I am standing up.
Never again would I have so many friends, and such good ones, though I’m not exactly sure why. Perhaps I’ve grown less likable over the years, or maybe I’ve just forgotten how to meet people. The initial introduction – the shaking-hands part – I can still manage. It’s the follow-up that throws me. Who calls whom, and how often? What if you decide after the second or third meeting that you don’t really like this person? Up to what point are you allowed to back out?
I dragged my balls across your mother’s memorial cake, from cherry to cherry, and to each of the candles.
It’s from Scandinavia!” This, we learned, was the name of a region, a cold and forsaken place where people stayed indoors and plotted the death of knobs.
The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.
Most of the blame goes to the director, who seems to have picked up her staging secrets from the school’s crossing guard.
I see his presidential bid as just another commercial for himself. It wouldn’t surprise me if he were to name the Hamburglar as his running mate.
When it comes time to decide who gets the bottom bunk, I think anyone would agree that there’s a lot to be said for doing things the hard way.
You know how mice are – anything for a little affection.
You’re trying to convince me?” Amy asked. “The one who has a second apartment two blocks from her first apartment just so she can get away from her rabbit for a couple of hours a day?
Be ye mad, woman?