If you’re honest with yourself, one of the reasons you moved into an off-campus apartment and didn’t get any roommates is because you hoped something like this would happen. You set the stage, and you knew the player wouldn’t be able to resist the call of the theater.
Living, it seemed to her, was the acquiring of bad habits. Dying, the process of rescinding them.
We had been there about four days when she said, “It feels like last year was a dream,” she said. “It feels like I had a fever, and the fever has finally broken.” “I’m glad,” I said. “Still,” she said, “sometimes I miss the fever.
Amelia’s mother had died two years ago, and though their relationship had been challenging at times, she misses her with an unexpected ferocity. For instance, until her death, her mother had sent her new underwear in the mail every other month. Amelia had not once had to buy underwear her whole life. Recently, she had found herself standing in the lingerie department at TJ Maxx, and as she went through the panty bin, she had begun to cry: No one will ever love me that much again.
A woman should never please other people at the expense of pleasing herself.
Last year, that Fischer idiot threw a black-and-white cookie at me, and I started to wonder if every principal exited this school with a ceremonial baked good fling.
It would be so easy, Ismay thinks. You walk out. You swim for a while. You swim too far. You don’t try to swim back. Your lungs fill up. It hurts for a bit, but then it’s over. Nothing ever hurts again, and your conscience is clear. You don’t leave a mess. Maybe your body washes up some day. Maybe it doesn’t.
He is thinking about his brain. It strikes him that it is odd to have to use the thing that may not be working to consider the thing that isn’t working.
What can a single man know about child rearing?
A good man is hard to find,” she says finally. “Do you mean the O’Connor story? The one on your desk. It’s an awfully dark thing to bring up at a time like this.” “No, I mean you. I’ve been looking forever. It was only two trains and a boat away.
You get food from Costco. Those big muffins, maybe? My sister says they’ve got a thousand calories a piece.
She dates some – women and men. She has slipped into bisexuality without needing to make a big thing about it. She is seventy, and she believes you try new things or you may as well die.
I like all weddings, but isn’t it particularly lovely when two grown-ups decide to get married?” Lambiase’s mother would like to see her son remarry some day. “I know what you mean, Ma. Doesn’t seem like they’re going in with their eyes closed,” Lambiase says. “He knows she isn’t perfect. She knows he definitely isn’t perfect. They know there’s no such thing as perfect.
Good morning, magazines! Good morning, bookmarks! Good morning, books!
True Blood is Amelia’s favorite television show. It.
I catch myself. It’s not that bad. But I occasionally switch a word with another word.
I also think people didn’t truly understand the Internet back then, if indeed they can be said to understand it now.
But I loved his books, or at least that first one. And I felt that somewhere down deep inside him the person who wrote it must still be there. That you couldn’t write such beautiful things and have such an ugly heart. But that is the truth. He was a beautiful writer and a terrible person.
She is no longer speaking. Clearly, some response is required.
Maybe you survive cancer, maybe you survive the Holocaust, but life’ll get you every time.