She didn’t want to be liberated from her emotions, but to have their importance confirmed.
I never know what I feel until it’s too late.
If they were going to kill you, would they knock?
Up until recently, Milton thought of Tessie as his prim cousin. Whenever one of his friends expressed interest in her, Milton told them to give up the idea. “That’s honey from the icebox,” he said, As Artie Shaw might have. “Cold sweets don’t spread.
But most often she watched the candles as if their outcome held her own, the flames almost extinguishing themselves, but, by some greed of oxygen, persisting.
He was like a statue being chiseled away from the inside, hollowed out. As more and more of his thoughts gave him pain, Milton had increasingly avoided them. Instead he concentrated on the few that made him feel better, the bromides about everything working out. Milton, quite simply, had ceased to think things through.
Her father was about to have a heart attack, and my memories of her are now tinged with a blue wash of misfortune that hadn’t quite befallen her at the time. She was standing bare-legged in the jungly weeds that grew up between our houses. Her skin was already beginning to react to the grass cuttings stuck to the ball, whose sogginess was suddenly explained by the overweight Labrador who now limped into view.
It was convenient to call them snipers, because if they weren’t snipers, then what were they? The governor didn’t say it; the newspapers didn’t say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution.
Figures. They let you in for free. Then you gotta pay for the rest of your life.
I’d never seen a creature with so many freckles before. A Big Bang had occurred, originating at the bridge of her nose, and the force of this explosion had sent galaxies of freckles hurtling and drifting to every end of her curved, warm-blooded universe.
On the floors above Delivery, in flowerless rooms, women lay recovering from hysterectomies and mastectomies. Teenage girls with burst ovarian cysts nodded out on morphine. It was all around me from the beginning, the weight of female suffering, with its biblical justification and vanishing acts.
Father Mike was popular with the church widows. They liked to crowd around him, offering him cookies and bathing in his beatific essence. Part of this essence came from Father Mike’s perfect contentment at being five foot four. His shortness had a charitable aspect to it, as though he had given away his height.
I’m not sure, with a grandmother like mine, if you can ever become a true American in the sense of believing that life is about the pursuit of happiness.
By cutting off my hair I was punishing myself for loving someone so much. I was trying to be stronger.
Cecilia had unleashed her blood in the bath, Amy Schraff said, because the ancient Romans had done that when life became unbearable, and she thought when Dominic heard about it, on the highway, amid the cactus, he would realize that it was she who loved him.
Her tragedy hadn’t made her more approachable, and in fact lent her the unknowable quality of a person who had suffered more than could be expressed.
Real life doesn’t live up to writing about it.
They had killed themselves over the failure to find a love that none of us could ever be.
And so a strange new possibility is arising. Compromised, indefinite, sketchy, but not entirely obliterated: free will is making a comeback. Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.
They lined you up in kindergarten, alphabetically. On fourth-grade field trips you took your partner’s hand to push past the musk ox or the steam turbine. School was a perpetual lineup, ending in this final one.